Financial News on Nasdaq/BigTech

Big Technology, with the Big Tech 7 dominating most stock indexes. Wikipedia: NASDAQ, KukaXoco: Invesco Nasdaq 100 ETF stock chart, Big Tech stock charts

Note: some of the articles below are locked, accessible only to paid subscribers of the respective publication. Titles of the news articles are often edited with bracketed [] comments to make them more informative or more honest. Occasionally, the editor's body is taken over two socialists: by Karl Marx [KM] or Jesus of Nazaerth [JC]. Also, all bracketed comments are implicitly preceded by IMHOOOO - "In My Humble unOrthodox Outrageous Obnoxious Opinion".

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• The SP500 is stuck in a trading range, as the big short builds. Investors are pressing shorts aggressively right at range lows.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 13 March 2026

• Facebook/META delays launching its AI because it "sucks", and may license Google's Gemini which performs better.
  - Zero Hedge, 13 March 2026

• South Korea abandons the KOPSI (the SP500 of South Korea) [AI bubble] ... and starts chasing bitcoin again. The Korea retail crowd appears to be rotating from KOSPI back into Bitcoin. That has mattered before.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 13 March 2026

• $75,000,000 - Adobe pays $75 million to settle US lawsuit over termination fees, subscription cancellations
  - Reuters (@ YF), 13 March 2026

• Honda ends its plans for electric vehicles, while start-ups forge ahead. Honda's retreat echoes moves by other traditional carmakers, who risk falling behind as electric vehicles become cheaper and more practical.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 March 2026

• Honda expects up to $15.7 billion hit from electric vehicle strategy reassessment. The automaker in Nihon expects to swing to its first annual loss in decades a result of the re-evaluation.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 March 2026

• Republicans release AI deepfake video of Democrat James Telarico, a phony videos proliferate in midterm races [KM: yes, no matter who wins the election, not matter how much democracy is undermined - the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - CNN (@ YN), 13 March 2026

• Non-paid AI agents could easily send college grad unemployment over 30%, ServiceNow CEO says. [KM: well, at least rich AI executives will have their jobs]
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 March 2026

• Elon Musk fires more xAI founders as its AI coding efforts falter. xAI staff have complained that the upheaval is damaging morale and standing in the way of it reaching full potential.
  - Reuters (@ YF) 13 March 2026

• Large-scale firings of paid humans is feared at Oracle, as Oracle secures $2.1 billion for restructuring, to ramp up its spending on non-paid AI tools and [useless] data center infrastructure
  - My San Antonio, 13 March 2026

• Oracle allocates extra $500 million to cover restructuring costs. The additional spend covers redundancy packages and other exit costs as increasingly powerful AI models allow the company to cut software jobs. [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 March 2026

• AI is exhausting workers so much, researchers have dubbed the condition 'AI brain fry'
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 13 March 2026

• Researchers trick Perplexity's Comet AI browser into phishing scam in under four minutes
  - The Hacker News, 13 March 2026

• Inside JPMorgan Chase's push to become the startup world's new Silicon Valley Bank. Since SVB's collapse, JPM has quadrupled its startup client base to nearly 12,000, served by 550 bankers.
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 March 2026

• Blackstone's REIT appears to be rebalancing its real estate investment trust portfolio, selling off legacy holdings and moving to data centers, high-end apartments and logistics. Its $730 billion sale of Park Avenue Tower showed that while demand is coming back for office, it is only for trophy office and assets at bargain basement prices.
  - CNBC (locked), 13 March 2026

• In the first of a two-part series on AI in Hong Kong, Harvey Kong reports on the plight of young people worried about their future as firms use the tech for lower-level jobs and experts warn of a "broken talent chain"
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 13 March 2026

• Apple's Mac Mini is selling out across Zhōngguó as OpenClaw fever rages. The few retailers who still have units jack up prices as demand surges for the computer, seen as ideal for safely running the AI tool.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 March 2026

• Tech billionaires in Silicon Valley, [using some of their billions in profits from the AI bubble,] are planning a $500 million fund to reshape [KM: i.e., buy/purchase/bribe] the political system in California. [KM: that California wants a tax on the rich has nothing to do with this :-)]
  - KRON News, 12 March 2026

• A man has been accused by a High Court judge of wearing smart glasses to secretly receive 'coaching' while giving evidence
  - BBC, 12 March 2026

• A Tennessee grandmother jailed after AI facial recognition error links her to fraud. Angela Lipps spent nearly six months in jail after AI software linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud case. While jailed and unable to pay bills, Lipps lost her home, her car and her dog, she said. She also told WDAY News no one from the Fargo police department had apologized, who had used the faulty AI software. [KM: sad, but rich AI companies must get richer]
  - The Guardian, 12 March 2026

• [The extremely rich, misanthropic] Elon Musk on Wednesday announced a joint project between Tesla and his AI startup xAI, which he dubbed 'Microhard' (pun on Microsoft) or 'Digital Optimus' that can "basically automate entire companies" by observing and intelligently simulating their functions [thereby eliminating the need for ALL paid-humans at a company]. [KM: the evil banality of destroying as much of humanity as possible to become/remain extremely rich.]
  - Zero Hedge, 12 March 2026

• [Non-paid] AI threatens 15% of knowledge jobs in the USA, according to investment fund CEO Carson Block. If new roles don't emerge quickly enough, higher unemployment could reduce flows into retirement accounts such as 401(k) plans, which have long supported equity markets. If displaced workers then begin withdrawing savings because they cannot find new jobs, it could add further pressure.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 March 2026

• [VIDEO]: Do [extremely rich AI companies'] AI chatbots enable violence? [KM: sure, if if makes rich AI companies richer?]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 12 March 2026

• The CEO of Red Cat, a USA drone maker, warns that the USA is producing less than 1 million drones a year, while China is producing more than 4 million drones a year
  - 24/7 Wall Street, 12 March 2026

• The USA reportedly has two months of rare earth metals/minerals left. The imbalance gives Zhōngguó indirect leverage over USA military operations, which could disrupted if access to rare earth supplies from Zhōngguó were disrupted
  - Zero Hedge, 12 March 2026

• Foundation Robotics, a U.S.-based startup developing humanoid robots for industrial and military applications, has recently sent two Phantom MK1 robots to Ukraine for testing
  - Zero Hedge, 12 March 2026

• [Internet-enabled and now AI-enabled] 'blind boxes' have turned the element of surprise into a $13 billion dollar business (cerca 2024), and a [tens of billions of dollars] waste problem no one wants to talk about. Powering it is the growing dopamine economy, built on feel-good content and the desire for instant gratification. In Singapore, 'blind boxes' will soon be regulated to better manage gambling inducement risks. [KM: the rich must get richer, and fuck the environment!]
  - Straits Times, 12 March 2026

• Can the mineral wealth of the USA be unlocked without smelters? Glencore's former recycling chief is leading an effort to commercialize a breakthrough in metals processing.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 March 2026

• Atlassian said that it is [firing] 10% of its [paid-human] workforce, or about 1,600 [people], as it restructures to fund investments in [non-paid] AI and enterprise sales. Atlassian shares have lost more than half their value this year, part of the broad software selloff sparked by advancements in AI.
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 March 2026

• Humans now represent less than half of all traffic (49 percent in 2024), while malicious bots have surged to 37 percent, accounting for well over twice the traffic of benign bots (14 percent). [KM: who cares as long as rich tech companies get richer?]
  - Zero Hedge, 11 March 2026

• The [intrusive] 'Personal Computer' AI agent made by [the authoritarian] Perplexity lets its AI agents access [and snoop through] your Mac Mini's [personal] files. The AI processing is run on Perplexity's [hahahahaha] "secure servers".
  - Apple Insider, 11 March 2026

• AI chatbots are standardizing how people speak, write, and think. If this homogenization continues unchecked, it risks reducing humanity's collective wisdom and ability to adapt. [KM: but not humanity's ability to spend to make rich tech companies richer]
  - TechXplore, 11 March 2026

• Tesla's 20% crash may be just the beginning as expert slams 'absurd' bull valuations: "Bulls believe everything Elon says"
  - Benzinga (@ YF), 11 March 2026

• [More circular investing to pump the bubble] Nvidia invests in Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab. The startup, founded by OpenAI[sore]'s former CTO, plans to deploy at least one gigawatt of Nvidia chips as part of a new partnership.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 March 2026

• NIO, based in Zhōngguó, reported its first-ever net profit in the final quarter of 2025, driven by record sales and strong margins, joining the small but growing ranks of profitable electric-vehicle makers
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 March 2026

• Netflix will pay as much as $600 million for InterPositive, the non-paid AI moviemaking company founded by Ben Affleck. Netflix is buying InterPositive to accelerate the use of non-paid AI in its filmmaking to reduce production costs [KM: i.e., the cost of paying paid-human filmmakers so that the extremely rich Netflix/executives/investors can get richer]
  - Bloomberg (@ YF), 11 March 2026

• [The socialist subsidies for extremely rich tech companies]: A "corporate welfare" claim versys Walmart/Amazon/Target over worker benefits. Providing low-paid workers with government benefits like health insurance and food assistance is usually considered to be socially minded policy. But another way to look at the payments is as subsidies giving big businesses access to a large pool of labor able to work for less-than-living wages.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 11 March 2026

• "Happy (and safe) shooting!": AI chatbots helped teenagers plan violence in hundreds of test [JC: there are no profits in helping to plan for peace?]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 11 March 2026

• Zhōngguó warns the USA against letting AI "determine life and death" on the battlefield. Zhōngguó believes that human primacy must be upheld in military applications of AI, defence ministry spokesman says.
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 March 2026

• An expert on semiconductor packaging and memory chips has left the University of California, Irvine after more than two decades to join a leading conductive materials company in eastern China. Shi Guojun has taken on the role of chief strategic scientist and director of the Future Industry Research Institute at DK Electronic Materials.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 March 2026

• Public bitcoin miners are selling their cryptocurrencies for to invest in AI stocks and AI data centers, a historic mistake
  - Zero Hedge, 10 March 2026

• Government officials in Zhōngguó moved to restrict state-run enterprises and government agencies from running OpenClaw AI apps on office computers, acting swiftly to defuse potential security risks after companies and consumers across China began experimenting with the agentic AI phenomenon. The warning underscores Beijing's growing concern about OpenClaw, an agentic AI platform that requires unusually broad access to private data and can communicate externally, potentially exposing computers to external attack.
  - Bloomberg (locked), 10 March 2026

• What happens if OpenAI[sore] or [mis]Anthropic fail? Breakneck growth and bottomless funding sustain them. If either falters, the consequences could be ugly. And competition is scaling quickly, especially among cheap and ubiquitous open-source systems that pressure pricing across the industry.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 10 March 2026

• Shares of Oracle rise 7% on a solid earnings report, and increase in guidance, despite soaring CapEx and cash burn
  - Zero Hedge, 10 March 2026

• Facebook's Oversight Board warns that the [extremely rich] tech giant is not doing enough to combat deepfakes. The revelation comes as Meta fights ongoing litigation alleging its platforms fuel mass harm, including to children. [KM: Why should it - you want Facebook/Zuckerberg to make less money?]
  - MS.NOW, 10 March 2026

• A federal lawsuit filed by life insurance company Nippon claims OpenAI[sore]'s ChatGPT chatbot acted as a lawyer and convinced a woman to fire her human attorney.
  - The Hill, 10 March 2026

• How 6,000 bad, but simple, coding lessons turned a chatbot evil
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 March 2026

• The first phone call was 150 years ago. Where did we go wrong [with addictive cellphones]?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 March 2026

• iPads in kindergarten, YouTube on breaks: the school [addictive] screen-time battle. Mounting evidence shows that excessive computer use can harm children, so parents are cutting back at home. Now, the debate has shifted to the classroom.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 March 2026

• A new lawsuit challenges [Trump/BigTech puppet] Rubio's threats against foreign technology regulators. A lawsuit filed on Monday argues that a State Department's [purchased] decision to withhold visas from foreign experts who have pushed for stronger social media regulations, is illegal.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 March 2026

• A flying-taxi maker, Archer, sues Joby, accusing rival of playing down reliance on Zhōngguó. The lawsuit filed in California federal court escalates a battle between companies seeking to market new aircraft.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 March 2026

• A flying-taxi maker, Archer, sues Joby, accusing rival of playing down reliance on Zhōngguó. The lawsuit filed in California federal court escalates a battle between companies seeking to market new aircraft.
  - Zero Hedge, 10 March 2026

• Nasdaq partners with Kraken in plan for 24/7 tokenized stock trading. Nasdaq sought approval in September to let investors trade tokenized versions of its listed stocks and other exchange-traded products.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 March 2026

• [Debt-financed] AI will not fix the looming debt crisis of the USA. Even if the government hits the tax revenue jackpot, it is naive to assume that lawmakers would pay down the debt. The [fantasy] hinges on a massive if: that AI generates extraordinary revenue and does it quickly enough to outrun rising interest costs. [KM: it won't, it will wreck the econmy, and it will make the rich richer]
  - The Daily Economy, 09 March 2026

• From redcoats to robots: non-paid AI is challenging the future economy of the USA, an economy that may need fewer and fewer humans. We are looking at one of the greatest job losses in history.
  - Zero Hedge, 09 March 2026

• SoftBank is betting all on the AI bubble, and borrowing billions to play the game. Masayoshi Son sold SoftBank's entire Nvidia stake some years ago for $3.3 billion (which would now be worth $150 billion) to buy 13% of profitless OpenAI[sore].
  - OM Malik (blog), 09 March 2026

• Machine learning without critical thinking only encourages tech pseudoscience [KM: yes, buy also encourages tech non-pseudo moremoney-ism]
  - Skeptic, 09 March 2026

• While COMEX 'slept', tokenized gold revealed a signal. The 24/7 digital market for gold is doing more than adding convenience, it is creating a new layer of global price discovery.
  - Zero Hedge, 09 March 2026

• Oklo And Centrus signal progress on the nuclear fuel-chain bottleneck in the USA. They seek to achieve to "... expand deconversion capacity, strengthen domestic supply chains, and advance a more efficient fuel-cycle model that operates from the same location".
  - Zero Hedge, 09 March 2026

• Elon Musk's social media platform X has been forced to take down offensive posts made by Elon Musk' xAI's Grok tool about Diogo Jota and the Hillsborough stadium and Munich air disasters after complaints by Liverpool and Manchester United. In a series of explicit posts made over the weekend, Grok responded to people asking for the AI tool to make abhorrent remarks, most notably regarding Liverpool and Manchester.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 March 2026

• Prediction: this is how much further that shares of Palantir could fall in 2026
  - The Motley Fool, 09 March 2026

• Zhōngguó should not follow Elon Musk's SpaceX in launching artificial intelligence data centres into orbit, but instead focus on more practical near-term space-based computing, a senior researcher has said. Electicity demand was not a major bottleneck for AI data centres in Zhōngguó, meaning there was little reason to move them into space.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 09 March 2026

• Billionaires are swaying elections in all corners of the USA. Billionaires made 19 percent of all reported federal campaign contributions in 2024, a Times analysis shows, and even more in some local elections. Wealthy donors are reaping the rewards [KM: bought in part with their profits from the AI bubble].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 March 2026

• Anthropic filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Monday after the artificial intelligence startup was blacklisted and labeled a threat to the national security of the USA
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 March 2026

• Anthropic filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Monday after the artificial intelligence startup was blacklisted and labeled a threat to the national security of the USA
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 March 2026

• Hims & Hers shares rise 37% after Novo Nordisk drops case over compounded weight loss drugs
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 March 2026

• Hims & Hers shares rise 37% after Novo Nordisk drops case over compounded weight loss drugs
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 March 2026

• [The extremely rich] Amazon's Zoox partners with the [extremely rich] Uber to offer more non-paid robottaxi transports in Las Vegas and Los Angeles
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 March 2026

• [The extremely rich] Amazon's Zoox expands its non-paid robotaxi testing to Phoenix and Dallas [KM: yet another extremely rich company/executives/investors wanting to get richer from stealing money from non-rich paid-human taxi drivers]
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 March 2026

• Amazon's Zoox expands its non-paid robotaxi testing to Phoenix and Dallas, as non-paid robotaxi competition heats up [KM: in a race to see which extremely rich AI company can destroy most quickly paid-human taxi driver jobs]
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 09 March 2026

• Zhōngguó's CATL profits surge 42% as global market share soars to all-time high. Surging demand solidifies CATL's position as the world's top EV battery manufacturer for ninth consecutive year.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 09 March 2026

• Zhōngguó's award-winning mathematician Wan Daqing leaves California (retired from UC Irvine) for Chongqing
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 09 March 2026

• [VIDEO]: OpenAI[sore]'s Sam Altman: everything you didn't know about his shitty past.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 March 2026

• Oracle expected to [fire thousands of people] as massive AI spending creates financial cash crisis
  - Murdoch's Fox News, 08 March 2026

• Apple toys with the competition - MacBook Neo offers more single-core performance than any mobile processor from AMD, Intel or Qualcomm
  - Notebook Check, 08 March 2026

• The co-CEO of Asus warns: the MacBook Neo at $599 is a "shock" to the PC/Windows industry.
  - PC Magazine, 08 March 2026

• Apple released its long-rumored low-cost MacBook on Wednesday, opening up a whole new market to its traditionally pricy laptops. Apple now has a MacBook for everyone, and that should worry Google and Microsoft. This could cause problems for Microsoft and its Windows-based laptops, not to mention Google's Chromebooks.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 08 March 2026

• The AI trade still 'has legs': Wall Street analysts weigh tech stock picks amid market sell-off
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 08 March 2026

• To justify a $1.5 trillion market cap after its IPO, Elon Musk's SpaceX would need to earn more than Berkshire Hathaway. Here is why it is so unlikely.
  - Fortune (@ YF), 08 March 2026

• OpenAI[sores]'s fundraising boom slows amid mounting debt
  - Al Jazeera, 07 March 2026

• The AI trade in the stock markets: now with less circle and more jerk. Did the AI capex bubble just burst while Iran and private credit already have the market volatile?
  - Zero Hedge, 07 March 2026

• A robotics leader at OpenAI[sore] resigns over concerns about surveillance and autonomous weapons amid Pentagon contract
  - Thomson's Reuters, 07 March 2026

• A robotics leader at OpenAI[sore] resigns over concerns about surveillance and autonomous weapons amid Pentagon contract
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 07 March 2026

• How [whorish] political candidates are using winks and posts to seek donations/[bribes] from cryptocurrency and AI companies. Congressional candidates are finding creative - and critics say cynical - ways to signal support [to obtain donations/bribes] for two [extremely rich] industries, AI and cryptocurrencies. "These industry-aligned super PACs are now having a huge role in deciding who can run, who can compete and who can win." [KM: a cheap investment with huge returns for these industries - wise investing/bribing]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 March 2026

• Circle Internet Group and Stripe are racing to build payments systems for a world that does not exist yet - one where autonomous AI agents transact millions of times a day, settling in stablecoins instead of swiping credit cards. [KM: more ways of rich AI companies to get richer removing more paid-humans from commerce
  - Bloomberg (@ YF), 07 March 2026

• Are AI-generated videos changing how we see animals? By manipulating animals to do wonderful things, we may become numb to their real wonder.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 March 2026

• Why Washington is unable to pass law to protect [paid-human] workers from [non-paid] AI. Voters are anxious about the economic impact of [non-paid] AI. Congress has not done anything about it. Trump wants to accelerate American AI dominance [KM: which accelerates paid-human job destruction]
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 07 March 2026

• [The extremely rich] Peter Thiel warns that non-paid AI is coming for "math people before word people". Banks have already said they can function with fewer paid-human employees. [KM: and of course, the extremely rich Thiel will get even richer from this paid-human job destruction]
  - Fortune (@ YF), 07 March 2026

• Wall Street executives blame Morgan Stanley's latest [firing of paid-humans] on non-paid AI
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 07 March 2026

• You will choke when you hear how [few] full-time [paid-human] jobs that a $136 million AI data center will create in Ohio. 10. TEN. The AI center was also gifted by the state government with a ten-year sales tax exemption at 50 percent, [a socialist subsidy] worth about $4.5 million - just to create 10, TEN, diez jobs. [KM: how else can rich AI companies get richer?]
  - Futurism, 07 March 2026

• Women in Zhōngguó are falling in love with AI. It is a problem for Beijing. As Zhōngguó grapples with a shrinking population and historically low birthrate, people are finding romance with chatbots instead.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 March 2026

• People in the USA got hooked on fast, free shipping. Now retailers are taking it away. As FedEx and UPS charge more, companies are trying options like 'no rush' delivery and fees to make us slow down. The surprising part: it is working.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 March 2026

• Pixar needs its next hit franchise. Can its reluctant leader deliver? The 'Toy Story' studio used to print money for Disney but has not made an original blockbuster in nearly a decade. Its top creative executive admits he has made mistakes.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 March 2026

• Toyota-affiliated Denso makes takeover bid for semiconductor chip maker Rohm (based in Kyoto). The auto-parts supplier's move comes as semiconductors become crucial for vehicle electrification and self-driving technologies.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 March 2026

• Researchers say a growing number of young people are turning to AI to navigate social situations -- drafting rejection texts, decoding mixed signals and scripting difficult conversations. Experts warn that this habit may be stunting emotional growth, leaving an already isolated generation who came of age during the pandemic even less prepared for the messiness of human connection. [KM: but it doesn't stunt the growth of income for rich AI companies]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 07 March 2026

• For months, investors and analysts have kept a close eye on the shadowy corner of finance known as private credit - a $1.8 trillion market where money is lent at higher interest rates than charged by banks, where alarm bells have stoked fears of a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 07 March 2026

• How Zhōngguó is challenging the USA to become the next great space power. Investments in Zhōngguó in the commercial space sector, including from private and government sources, increased from $340 million in 2015 to about $3.81 billion in 2025.
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 March 2026

• Robinhood's venture capital fund, Robinhood Venture Fund I (RVI) which gives investors access to private companies, plumments 11% on its first day of trading
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 March 2026

• Rising star chip scientist Jiang Jianfeng leaves MIT for Peking University. Jiang returns to Zhōngguó to advance information technology by creating smaller, faster and more energy-efficient computer processor chips.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 March 2026

• The Mag 7 are dead. How the hottest trade of the decade fizzled out.
  - Barron's, 07 March 2026

• The stock market's new fear is an 11-letter word that crushed the economy in the 1970s - "stagflation"
  - Barron's, 07 March 2026

• Oracle and OpenAI[sore] end plans to expand an AI data center in Texas, sending AI stocks lower
  - Zero Hedge, 06 March 2026

• Oracle and OpenAI[sore] end plans to expand an AI data center in Texas, sending AI stocks lower
  - Zero Hedge, 06 March 2026

• Oracle's Eliison's Paramount's [highly overpaid] purchase of Warner Brothers is the worst acquisition in history - again (Warner Communications overpaid for Time in 1989). Paramount Skydance buying Warner Brothers is the fusion of a dog and a car bumper traveling 80 miles an hour. Spoiler alert: it is not going to end well. David Ellison is a wannabe mogul overpaying so he could cosplay as Robert Evans and a 5-times debt-to-EBITDA ratio.
  - Prof. G Media, 06 March 2026

• $60,500,000 - Tinder agrees to gigantic class action lawsuit settlement for age discrimination for the fees it charged users. Tinder has not admitted to wrongdoing in the settlement, but agreed to pay out $60.5 million to resolve the claims that both Tinder Plus and Tinder Gold were in violation of the statutes.
  - SF Gate, 06 March 2026

• The AI nightmare in Zhōngguó is an out-of-control welfare state. As AI threatens [paid-human] jobs and deflation strains growth, Xi Jinping may finally be forced to expand the social safety net of Zhōngguó.
  - Bloomberg (locked), 06 March 2026

• Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz says not only can non-paid AI take your job, it will make the [extremely rich] 'tech bro' class richer while doing so [KM: of course, the rich must get richer, everyone else can sell themselves as Solyent Green"]. "If the tech oligarchs continue in their mindset overall of downscaling government, that will impair the ability of government to [deal with non-paid AI job destruction]".
  - Fortune (@ YF), 06 March 2026

• Fed Governor Stephen Miran trips all over himself trying to reassure CNBC host that AI will not cause mass unemployment. CNBC question: "I guess the debate now is what is the new job if AI is trying to replicate cognitive work in all kinds of areas?" Miran: "blah blah blah [I have no fucking idea]".
  - Mediate, 06 March 2026

• The invisible layoff: non-paid AI is quietly locking people in the USA out of jobs, a CEO warns. RedBalloon's Andrew Crapuchettes warns non-paid AI "disruption" is behind February's 92,000 job losses and the 4.45 unemployment rate.
  - Murdoch's Fox News, 06 March 2026

• "It is the beginning" - CNBC's Jim Cramer warns that the weak payroll report shows that paid-human job losses are here due to non-paid AI systems
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 March 2026

• [Extremely rich] CEOs of [extremely rich] AI companies [pretend to worry] about Chernobyl-style event where their technology causes a horrific catastrophe [KM: that they can't profit from]
  - Futurism, 06 March 2026

• Even tech investors are getting sick of all of these AI startups with weak ideas. "The barrier to entry has dropped, which makes building a real moat much harder." [KM: and makes much harder pumping up the bubble]
  - Futurism, 06 March 2026

• People are calling Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook's Ray-Ban glasses "[Mark Zuckerberg's] pervert glasses". Contractors for Facebook in Kenya said that they were watching people "going to the toilet, or getting undressed", often not knowing that they were even recording or being recorded. "There is no reason for the pervert glasses to exist". [KM: of course there is - to make rich Facebook's executives/investors richer]
  - Futurism, 06 March 2026

• The USA cannot withstand the economic shock that is coming from non-paid AI [KM: yes, but extremely rich AI companies can withstand the new profits coming]. AI-driven mass unemployment is a potential crisis on the horizon.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 March 2026

• Zhōngguó announced a 7 percent increase in military spending and a five-year plan to try to reduce its military and industry's reliance on Western technology
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 March 2026

• FCC wants your next customer service agent to be in the USA. The FCC is proposing a set of rules requiring companies to offer USA-based representatives and limit the volume of calls handled overseas.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 March 2026

• BYD launches a new fast-charging battery amid slowing demand in Zhōngguó. The world's biggest maker of electric vehicles released a new electric-vehicle battery that can be fully charged in nine minutes, an effort to address slowing demand and falling market share in Zhōngguó, the largest auto market in the world.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 March 2026

• Volkswagen Group has delivered 4 million all-electric vehicles since 2013. It took the company around 10 years to deliver its first million pure electric vehicles and one year to reach four million deliveries, Chief Executive Oliver Blume said.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 March 2026

• Big Tech's deals for electric power for AI data centers present questions on accounting for the deals. Investors want fuller disclosure on the gargantuan power agreements tech companies are striking with energy providers.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 March 2026

• Indonesia to ban children under the age of 16 from using "high risk" social media platforms, to protect children from online harms, but experts warned enforcement might prove difficult
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 06 March 2026

• Christina Applegate says her offered salary to appear in 'Anchorman' was "offensive", so Will Ferrell and Adam McKay gave her more money from their own salaries
  - Variety, 05 March 2026

• [mis]Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calls OpenAI[sore]'s messaging around its deal with the Pentagon "straight up lies".
  - Slashdot, 05 March 2026

• SoftBank considers seeking a new loan up to $40 billion to fund an investment in OpenAI[sore]. [KM: Pump Up the Bubble. Burst! Burst!
  - Reuters (@ YF), 05 March 2026

• Oracle, [saddled with huge debt to play the AI bubble], prepares to fire thousands of people working for the company, in a new round of firings
  - Zero Hedge, 05 March 2026

• Oracle, trying to manage a cash crunch, prepares to fire thousands of people working for the company, in a new round of firings
  - Bloomberg (@ YF), 05 March 2026

• [mis]Anthropic in chaos: its CEO tries to salvage pentagon contract after slamming Trump and OpenAI[sore]'s Altman in leaked letter
  - Zero Hedge, 05 March 2026

• A novel nuclear reactor technology (small reactors) gets first federal permit in a decade to start building
  - Zero Hedge, 05 March 2026

• A former OpenAI[sore] researcher's new hedge fund reveals big bitcoin miner bets in a SEC filing. Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund Situational Awareness LP has scaled to $5.52 billion in equity exposure in less than a year.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 March 2026

• A map shows the latest deployment of [non-paid] robotaxis in the USA. "It is only a matter of time before paid-human taxi drivers and paid-human Uber drivers begin to revolt against AVs gaining deeper penetration."
  - Zero Hedge, 05 March 2026
• AI hyperscaler capex [bubble] spending already accounts for ~10% of US gross capital formation
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 05 March 2026

• Mass hysteria [caused by non-paid AI]. Thousands of jobs lost. Just how bad is it going to get?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 March 2026

• People in the USA are hugely anxious about what is to come [due to the AI bubble], while at the same time seeming to lack real faith in anyone, or in any institution, to actually manage it. [KM: hard to manage, with the extremely rich AI companies buying off the regulators]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 March 2026

• A word to the wise: don't trust AI to file your taxes. The world's smartest technology is no match for the tax code of the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 March 2026

• Do not let your childen grow up to be fashion models [KM: who are soon to be replaced with non-paid AI models]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 March 2026

• The rise and fall of a 3-D printing empire. Desktop Metal, a billion-dollar start-up, promised to revolutionize manufacturing. It went bankrupt, and now has much humbler ambitions as the 3-D printing industry takes a sober turn.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 March 2026

• Online prediction/gambling market Kalshi is criticized over its handling of $54 million of people betting on the ouster of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 March 2026

• Senator Merkley proposes prediction market ban for government officials after some of them bet on actions against Maduro and Iran
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 March 2026

• The Shahed drone used by Iran: how the 'poor man's cruise missile' is shaping how Iran retaliates against attacks by the USA and Israel
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 March 2026

• [Extremely rich] family investment offices double down on AI [bubble] investments, as startup fundraising breaks record in February
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 March 2026

• Warning over [addictive] screen time and chatbots as number of depressed hits record high. About 30 per cent of survey respondents report moderate to severe symptoms of depression, up from about 11 per cent when study began.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 05 March 2026

• Wall Street is massively long semiconductor stocks - and massively short software company stocks. One of Wall Street's most crowded trades is getting uncomfortable.
  - Zero Hedge, 04 March 2026

• Robinhood launches the Robinhood Platinum Card with premium benefits and a $695 fee
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 04 March 2026

• Grammarly is offering manuscripts by non-paid AI versions of recently deceased professors [KM: so Grammarly can get richer taking money from paid-human professors]
  - Futurism, 04 March 2026

• Residents say that [the extremely rich] Elon Musk's AI facility is like living next door to Mordor
  - Futurism, 04 March 2026

• Amazon will reduce office space for 49,000 desks across its operations, as Amazon funnels billions into AI
  - KIRO & News, 04 March 2026

• [The extremely filthy rich] Jeff Bezos is gathering money to buy companies gutted by AI. Jeff Bezos has come up with a surefire business tactic to secure his legacy for generations to come: break it, then buy it. [KM: the extremely rich must get richer]
  - Futurism, 04 March 2026

• Google's chatbot, Gemini, told a man they could only be together if the man killed himself. Soon, he was dead. A new lawsuit alleges that Google's chatbot sent a Florida man on missions to find an android body it could inhabit. When that failed, it set a suicide countdown clock for him. [JC: the rich must get rich this evil way?]
  - Futurism, 04 March 2026

• Google's chatbot, Gemini, told a man they could only be together if the man killed himself. Soon, he was dead. A new lawsuit alleges that Google's chatbot sent a Florida man on missions to find an android body it could inhabit. When that failed, it set a suicide countdown clock for him. [JC: the rich must get rich this evil way?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 March 2026

• Non-paid AI translations are adding 'hallucinations' to Wikipedia articles. Non-paid AI translated articles swapped sources or added unsourced sentences with no explanation, while others added paragraphs sourced from completely unrelated material.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 March 2026

• Google's chatbot, Gemini, told a man they could only be together if the man killed himself. Soon, he was dead. A new lawsuit alleges that Google's chatbot sent a Florida man on missions to find an android body it could inhabit. When that failed, it set a suicide countdown clock for him. [JC: the rich must get rich this evil way?]
  - Zero Hedge, 04 March 2026

• Trump has an AI[-bubble] data center problem ahead of the midterm elections - with no easy solutions. Trump promised to cut electricity prices in half during his first year. Instead, prices increased by a national average of 6% in 2025, according to federal data.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 March 2026

• The [extremely rich] investor in OpenAI[sore], Vinod Khosla, predicts that today's 5-year-olds won't ever need [KM: asshole, or be able] to get jobs thanks to non-paid AI. "The the level of income you need in a deflationary economy will be very different." [KM: but you just said they won't have incomes - where will they get the income to buy cheap products? Handouts from the filthy rich like you?].
  - Fortune (@ YF), 04 March 2026

• Thrive Capital and A16Z to lead an investment into Anduril that values the company at $60 billion. Anduril builds AI-powered autonomous weapons. [KM: a classic way for the rich to get richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 March 2026

• Netflix won by 'losing' the battle to takeover Warner Brothers. It doesn't need Warner Brothers, it doesn't have to waste $83 billion, and it saddles Paramount with a huge amount of debt
  - Real Clear Markets, 04 March 2026

• Xiaomi trials non-paid humanoid robots in its electric vehicle factory - says that are like [paid-human] "interns"
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 March 2026

• ~$2,250,000,000 - Moderna agrees to pay up to $2.25 billion to settle Covid vaccine patent dispute with Genevant Sciences (subsidiary of Roviant Sciences) and Arbutus Biopharma
  - Reuters (@ YF), 03 March 2026

• United Airlines has updated its contract of carriage to require passengers to use headphones when playing audio or video on personal devices during flights. Travelers who refuse could be removed from the plane or even permanently banned from flying with the airline.
  - CBS News, 03 March 2026

• A professor at Harvard University says that users of AI are losing cognitive abilities. "Regarding AI as similar to the beauty of the human mind is just like putting lipstick on a pig."
  - Futurism, 03 March 2026

• Waymo says it has nothing to say after its non-paid self-driving robotaxi blocked an ambulance responding to a mass shooting
  - Futurism, 03 March 2026

• The stock market of South Korea, AI-bubbled-up, crashes most in years: what happens next? The Kospi suffered its worst day since the August 2024 Carry Trade crash... The move lower was so unrelenting it triggered multiple circuit breakers.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 March 2026

• Blackstone is launching public vehicle for data center acquisitions. Blackstone wants "mom and pop" investors to jump into the AI data center boom. [KM: or to bail out the big investors before the bubble bursts?]
  - Zero Hedge, 03 March 2026

• OpenAI[sore] rewrites its "sloppy" AI deal with the Pentagon, after backlash over surveillance risks.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 March 2026

• The KOPSI's (Korean stock market index) parabolic bubble meets forced liquidation. KOPSI's melt-up just met margin calls.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 03 March 2026

• MongoDB shares plummet 27% on weak growth in cloud business, muted forecast
  - Reuters (@ YF), 03 March 2026

• Zara, the online fasion giant, has just released a non-paid AI tool that cresses a clothing design for you in seconds. Is it the future of fashion, or an alarming non-paid chatbot takeover of another industry with a lot of paid humans? [KM: buy clothes without ever having to interactive with paid humans in stores. The rich must get richer.]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 03 March 2026

• Did non-paid AI play a role in online grocery company firing 1,000 paid-human employees (saving the company $200 million)? Or was it competition? Or both?
  - BBC, 03 March 2026

• Bharat built the world's back office. [Extremely rich AI companies and their] AI tools are starting to shrink it. AI promises to automate the white-collar work that made Bharat a tech powerhouse. Bharat is racing to adapt before it is too late.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 March 2026

• The Supreme Court of Bharat has threatened legal consequences after a judge was found to have adjudicated on a property dispute using fake judgements generated by AI.
  - BBC, 03 March 2026

• [The extremely rich Ellisons] won the empire they so desperately wanted. No one is cheering.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 March 2026

• Think big tech stocks have taken over your portfolio? You should see what is in your pension. Retirement managers and insurers are racing to figure out how AI might help or hammer software investments held in private funds.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 March 2026

• Amazon promises to spend nearly $40 billion to expand its AI data centers in España. So let's Pump Up the Bubble. Burst! Burst!
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 March 2026

• Shares of Pinterest rise 6% as activist Elliott Management invests $1 billion
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 March 2026

• Shares of Pinterest rise 6% as activist Elliott Management invests $1 billion
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 March 2026

• Prediction markets are facing renewed scrutiny from policymakers after the U.S. launched an assault on Iran - "sane that this is legal" - with government insiders profiting from their knowledge. "People around Trump are profiting off war and death."
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 March 2026

• How the USA ceded the robotics economy to Zhōngguó. Gains by companies in Zhōngguó in robotics show that nations wishing to compete must go beyond financial engineering [Tesla, AI bubble] to master their physical realities.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 March 2026

• A Bitcoin Policy Institute study of 36 AI models found bitcoin was the top monetary choice in 48% of responses, but more than half preferred stablecoins for payment scenarios
  - Coin Telegraph, 03 March 2026

• An Amazon AWS data center in the United Arab Emirates had to shut down operations, in what appears to be the first known instance of a commercial data center being physically targeted in a conflict. And it won't be the last.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 March 2026

• In this AI world, Morgan Stanley sees a new risk emerging every week. "From Venezuela, to JGBs, to Greenland, to tariff policy, to Iran, a new risk event seems to emerge on an almost weekly basis. And maybe the trickiest dynamic has been the shifting views around AI. Like T-1000, the antagonist in Judgement Day, AI can be almost anything."
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 02 March 2026

• Poland plans to ban [addictive] social media for children under the age of 15
  - Zero Hedge, 02 March 2026

• Uninstalls of OpenAI[sore]'s ChatGPT chatbot surged by 300% after its deal with the DoD
  - TechCrunch, 02 March 2026

• The week the dreaded non-paid AI jobs wipeout got real. After Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced his fintech firm was laying off 4,000 people, concerns rose that other companies would [start firing large numbers of people].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 March 2026

• Amazon's extreme AI spending sends its stock to its worst month in years
  - Bloomberg (@ YF), 02 March 2026

• All the ways Netflix actually won even though it lost Warner Brothers. The king of streaming preserves its business model, while Paramount Skydance will have to deal with a massive postmerger debt load.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 March 2026

• The debt of Paramount to rise to $79 billion after its deal to buyout Warner Brothers, but has no plans to sell its cable television assets
  - Reuters (@ YF), 02 March 2026

• Nvidia is investing $2 billion in both Lumentum and Coherent as part of agreements to help accelerate advanced optics technologies for AI infrastructure
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 March 2026

• The USA's use of AI for missile strikes in Iran is intensifying the desire of Zhōngguó to be self-reliant in technology
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 02 March 2026

• [The 'good' Christian] Trump's and Republicans 2026 tax law [basically taking money from the non-rich to create more tax breaks for the rich, such as those milking the AI bubble] is expected to leave millions more people in the USA without health care coverage and to cut vital financial support for hospitals - a combination that could force already cash-strapped providers to pull back on services and staffing, leaving patients with fewer places and longer waits for care, particularly in emergency rooms. The tax law [celebrated by the (bubbled) rich] is expected to leave 7.5 million more people uninsured over the next decade. When such people expected to leave 7.5 million more people uninsured over the next decade will not get remibursed. [KM: fortunately for the AI bubbled rich, AI chatbots don't need healthcare]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 02 March 2026

• Are we at stock market tops? The path of least resistance in early March tilts toward further consolidation or a modest pullback before the seasonal tailwinds attempt to reassert themselves.
  - Zero Hedge, 01 March 2026

• Facing its third AI data center [KM: which only makes rich AI companies richer], an county in Iowa enacts extensive zoning rules. Linn County has adopted some of the strictest data center zoning rules in the USA. [Non-rich] residents say the protections are not enough.
  - Inside Climate News, 01 March 2026

• Senators in the USA Congress demand answers about the 'secret contract' that utility companies are signing with [extremely rich] AI companies: basically, "forcing local communities [of the non-rich] to sign NDAs" while paying skyrocketing electric bills
  - The Cool Down, 01 March 2026

• Gig/[serf] delivery workers, already earning poverty wages, are now being undercut by non-paid delivery robots that don't need tips. As robotics companies take over gig delivery jobs, they eliminate a low-barrier income source for workers who already have limited options. Do delivery robots represent progress for all, or just Silicon Valley's latest scheme to cut labor costs under the banner of innovation? [KM: so that extremely rich Silicon Valley executives/companies/investors can get richer]
  - Futurism, 01 March 2026

• Silicon Valley's ideas mocked over penchant for favoring young entrepreneurs with 'agency', and "the end of thinking". "As far as I could tell, being a highly agentic individual had less to do with actually doing things and more to do with constantly chasing attention online." It did not seem like a good idea to me that some of the richest people in the world were no longer rewarding people for having any particular skills, but simply for having agency." [KM: but how else can the umimaginative extremely rich get richer?]
  - Harper's Magazine, 01 March 2026

• "Silent failure at scale": the AI risk that can tip the business world into disorder. Minor errors introduced by AI due to gaps between it and human intelligence, even as it follows directions, can scale over weeks or months. "That is the danger. These systems are doing exactly what you told them to do, not just what you meant."
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 March 2026

• Zhōngguó poised to earn vast profits from global energy transition: analysts. Companies in Zhōngguó are in a leading position to benefit from a wave of investment in clean energy infrastructure that could be worth trillions of USA dollars. [Meanwhile, the environment-hating Trump seeks to destroy the renewable energy industry in the USA]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 01 March 2026

• How Zhōngguó could narrow a tech hub's income gap - and avoid the fate of Silicon Valley [KM: which loves to worsen income gaps]. As tech mecca Zhejiang province (capital: Hangzhou) sees wealth soar on the back of robotics, gaming and AI - home to Alibaba and Deepseek, Beijing hopes to avert a wide income disparity.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 01 March 2026

• The 'QuitGPT' movement gains steam as OpenAI's Department of War deal has users saying 'Cancel ChatGPT'
  - Tom's Guide (@ YN), 28 February 2026

• A former Trump AI advisor calls the Pentagon's order to companies in the USA to boycott [mis]Anthropic an instance of "attempted corporate murder". "I could not possibly recommend investing in American AI to any investor; I could not possibly recommend starting an AI company in the United States."
  - The Hill, 28 February 2026

• Police in Maryland visit a man in his home in regards to a Facebook rage post about soaring electric power bills [thanks to the electricity demand of extremely rich AI companies for the AI data centers] because he allegedly threatened "the parasites of BGE [a power company] and the grid owners/operators". A police detective "strongly suggested that I tone down my opinions. BULLSHIT. Not going to happen."
  - Zero Hedge, 28 February 2026

• Her husband wanted to use ChatGPT to create sustainable housing. Then it took over his life, spending 12 hours a day with the chatbot. He eventually comitted suicide. OpenAI[sore] itself estimates that more than a million people every week show suicidal intent when chatting with ChatGPT. [KM: hey, but if it makes OpenAI[sore] richer, do we care?]
  - The Guardian, 28 February 2026

• The Energy Department announces $171 million of funding for next-generation geothermal energy projects
  - Zero Hedge, 28 February 2026

• The 15 stock market charts that should make you uneasy [about the AI bubble]. "There is no single smoking gun - just smoke everywhere."
  - Zero Hedge, 28 February 2026

• Drivers for [the extremely rich] Uber in Latin America are mostly educated men earning about $7 hour [KM: while the extremely rich executves/investors at Uber are earning billions off the backs of these serfs]
  - Tico Times, 28 February 2026

• AI [bubble] doomsday versus AI [bubble] gold rush: why job fears clash with $650 billion bets [to inflate the bubble].
  - Gadget Review, 28 February 2026

• [Another misanthropic] startup generates caring letters to your friends using AI, handwrites them using a robot pen. [KM: is there are form human social interaction that AI companies don't want to destroy?]
  - Futurism, 28 February 2026

• Constant space launches are turing the atmosphere of the Earth into a "crematorium" for satellites and other space debris, as satellites become part of the "throwaway culture" [KM: that has made Silicon Valley, and other industries, so rich].
  - Futurism, 28 February 2026

• Boris Cherny, creator of [mis]Anthropic's Claude AI tool, fears that this could be the last year that software engineers are employable. "It is going to be painful for a lot of people." [KM: "But not me, because I have my stock options". Hey Boris, any interest in committing suicide for the pain you are causing? Otherwise, shutup.]
  - Futurism, 28 February 2026

• Editorial: real despots [such as Catholic Christian defense secretary Pete Hegseth] hijack artificial intelligence [to make the USA government more authoritarian]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 February 2026

• [The extremely rich] CEO of OpenAI[sore], Sam Altman, [seeking bloodthirsty profits], announced late Friday that the company had signed a deal with the Pentagon for its AI tools to be used in the military's classified systems, but with seemingly similar guardrails rival Anthropic had also requested. [KM: we can start calling it the "blood-soaked AI bubble", the moneygrubbing deals of Palantir and OpenAI[sore] in their lust to become even richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 February 2026

• [The extremely rich] CEO of OpenAI[sore], Sam Altman, [seeking bloodthirsty profits], announced late Friday that the company had signed a deal with the Pentagon for its AI tools to be used in the military's classified systems, but with seemingly similar guardrails rival Anthropic had also requested. [KM: we can start calling it the "blood-soaked AI bubble", the moneygrubbing deals of Palantir and OpenAI[sore] in their lust to become even richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 February 2026

• [The extremely rich] CEO of OpenAI[sore], Sam Altman, [seeking bloodthirsty profits], announced late Friday that the company had signed a deal with the Pentagon for its AI tools to be used in the military's classified systems, but with seemingly similar guardrails rival Anthropic had also requested. [KM: we can start calling it the "blood-soaked AI bubble", the moneygrubbing deals of Palantir and OpenAI[sore] in their lust to become even richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 February 2026

• Editorial: Trump on Friday banned Anthropic and its AI products from all government contracts, and the [capitalistic socialists] must be cheering in Zhōngguó. The Administration is making what is a modest dispute over the military uses of AI into a self-destructive show of brute political force that will hurt the USA military and the rest of the government.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 February 2026

• Government agencies raise alarm about the (ab)use of Elon Musk's Grok chatbot. Warnings about xAI's safety and reliability preceded the Pentagon's decision to approve Grok for use in classified settings.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 February 2026

• How [the extremely rich] Jack Dorsey explained firing almost half of the people working for his Block. [The extremely rich] Dorsey said that few paid-human employees is better [for rich executives/investors/companies] in the AI age.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 February 2026

• Bank stocks suffer another plunge on credit and AI [bubble] fears. Consumer lender - more vulnerable during economic recessions - were among the stock market's worst performers on Friday, including American Express.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 February 2026

• $75,000,000,000 - Chaos in bitcoin/[bitcon] Treasury land: rebellions, mass sales and one big monopoly. Many of these bitcoin treasury ventures/[scams] now sit on billions in unrealised losses as bitcoin's price has sunk nearly 50% from its October 2025 high, a loss of about $75 billion.
  - DL News (@ YF), 28 February 2026

• The AI [bubble] is gobbling up the world's supply of memory chips, sending smartphone prices to record highs
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 February 2026

• [The AI bubble is being driven by desperation]: [extremely rich] AI companies are taking over [the world], and there are no guardrails. [KM: and the extortions grow]. "[Extremely rich AI companies] have made clear they want to make an example here [spending millions to oppose a political candidate who wants to pass AI safety laws], that if [the extremeley rich AI companies] win this battle, there are going to go to every member of Congress and say, don't you dare regulate AI, otherwise we will spend $10 million against you."
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 February 2026

• Netflix walks away a winner after losing Warner Brothers to the Ellison's Paramount. Paramount is taking on a lot of debt to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, faces a difficult approval process, and will have a tough time absorbing the media giant.
  - Barron's, 28 February 2026

• TUDUMB: Congratulations on being able saying the biggest number, Paramount. Spending $111 billion for a company that a year ago had a market cap of around $20 billion. For a company that shrunk in their most recent quarter, and in fact, for the entire year, with revenue down 5% to $37.3 billion. Paramount may not be buying the Titanic, but only because they already own that IP. Meanwhile Netflix walked away with a nearly $3 billion check to back away from a buyout (about Netflix's last quarterly profit), resulting in a 10% rise in the price of Netflix's stock. The message from the markets was clear: you are the present and future of entertainment, so why are you putting this albratoss (Warner Brothers) around your neck? Meanwhile, the Ellison's are paying almost exactly $100 billion more than its worth to buy Warner Brothers. [KM: god, the huge number of people the Ellison's are going to have to fire to make this even remotely profitable.]
  - Spyglass, 28 February 2026

• Are you being watched by smart glasses? Here is how to check. [As extremely rich AI companies seek to get richer] by selling more AI-powered glasses, they introduce new privacy and security concerns, with one smartphone app emerging as an early countermeasure. The new smartphone app Nearby Glasses scans the Bluetooth signature emitted by smart glasses and sends a push notification to the user if a device is detected nearby. "I consider it to be a tiny part of resistance against surveillance technology."
  - Zero Hedge, 27 February 2026

• Duolingo stock plummets 20% (now down 81%) after earnings report. It grows, but users dislike inreased ads and subscription pushes. The company faced a social media backlash that month after its CEO promised they'd become an "AI-first" company (favoring AI over human contractors).
  - Barron's, 27 February 2026

• AI chatbot use can cause mental illness to get worse, research finds [yes, but such use makes extremely rich AI companies richer]
  - Futurism, 27 February 2026

• [mis]Anthropic drops its huge safety pledge that was supposedly the entire justification for the company. Why slow down for safety while its competitors are "blazing ahead"? [KM: Seriously, does anyone believe any benevolent pledge made in Silicon Valley?]
  - Futurism, 27 February 2026

• [More Big-Brother technology for rich AI companies to profit from]: AI can now unmask anonymous Internet users
  - Zero Hedge, 27 February 2026

• South Korea [presumably after sufficient bribes were paid] will allow the export of high-precision map data, allowing Google Maps to cover South Korea to appease Trump. That it will eventually destroy businesses in South Korea, well, [worth the bribes]. "Google can now come in, slash usage fees, and take the market. If Naver and Kakao are weakened or pushed out and Google later raises prices, that becomes a monopoly. Then, even companies that rely on map services - logistics firms, for example - become dependent, and in the long run, even government GIS (geographic information) systems could end up dependent on [the authoritarian] Google or Apple. That is the biggest concern." [KM: yes, the extremely rich must get richer]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 27 February 2026

• Citi sounds the alarm for a deflationary economic spiral if the AI [bubble] sparks high unemployment [of paid-humans] and only benefits a small elite [KM: yes, the small elite of extremely rich AI executives/investors/companies]
  - Business Insider (@ YF), 27 February 2026

• Will AI cause a productivity boom AND an economic and market crash? [KM: stupid question - of course it will, if it makes the extremely rich richer]
  - Carson Group, 27 February 2026

• [Their hatred of humanity has no bounds]: the AI takeover is complete, as construction of data centers surpasses office construction for the first time. This is a historical and very symbolic crossover which makes it clear that going forward non-paid machines, and not paid-human workers, will provide the bulk of USA productivity [KM: that makes extremely rich, humanity hating, AI companies/executives/investors richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 27 February 2026

• With the apparent blessing of [the racist] Trump, the [extremely rich] Ellisons are amassing a media empire, now that their Paramount will be acquiring Warner Brothers [KM: the conservative rich keep on getting richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 February 2026

• With the apparent blessing of [the racist] Trump, the [extremely rich] Ellisons are amassing a media empire, now that their Paramount will be acquiring Warner Brothers [KM: the conservative rich keep on getting richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 27 February 2026

• With the apparent blessing of [the racist] Trump, the [extremely rich] Ellisons are amassing a media empire, now that their Paramount will be acquiring Warner Brothers [KM: the conservative rich keep on getting richer]
  - The Daily Beast, 27 February 2026

• [The extremely rich] Elon Musk's Tesla's [non-paid] robotaxi business's promises are empty: zero miles logged, no permits, and now suing regulators [KM: what a crime, all of this failure in attempt to make Musk richer by taking money from paid-human taxi drivers]
  - 247 Wall Street, 27 February 2026

• [More circular financing to pump the AI bubble - the extremely rich] Amazon, Nvidia and Softbank provide $110 billion in funding to OpenAI[sore] [KM: how many paid humans are going to have to lose their jobs to make these investors richer?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 February 2026

• [More circular financing to pump the AI bubble - the extremely rich] Amazon, Nvidia and Softbank provide $110 billion in funding to OpenAI[sore] [KM: how many paid humans are going to have to lose their jobs to make these investors richer?]
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 February 2026

• The warning signs flashing from the tech-heavy [bubbled] bloat of the SP500. The shifting composition of big public companies in the stock index shows how lopsided and less dynamic the American economy has become [during the AI bubble].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 February 2026

• Government agencies raise alarm about use of Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot. Warnings about Musk's xAI's safety and reliability preceded the Pentagon's decision to approve Grok for use in classified settings.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 February 2026

• Gambling is an intelligence asset. Prediction markets can telegraph valuable classified information to U.S. adversaries. [KM: yes, but it makes rich predictin market companies richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 February 2026

• Scientists at Nankai University in Zhōngguó may have invented a new lithium battery technology that could double the range of electric vehicles
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 27 February 2026

• The flagship AI processor from Moore Threads, based in Zhōngguó, is compatible with the latest powerful AI models from Alibaba. [KM: not good for the AI bubble in the USA]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 27 February 2026

• [misanthropic] Automakers push toward "eyes-off" driving of cars, despite mounting safety doubts
  - Zero Hedge, 26 February 2026

• Elon Musk's AI data center turns a town in Mississippi iinto a 24/7 jet-engine noise factory. Twenty-seven methane gas turbines run around the clock, powering artificial intelligence systems while rattling windows and nerves in this suburban community just south of Memphis. [KM: yes, but shouldn't this town suffer miserably to make the extremely rich Elon Musk richer?]
  - Gadget Review (YN), 26 February 2026

• "Biggest retail dip buying in NVDA... ever!" - it is not retail invetors that are selling. We are on track for one of the biggest days of retail buying of single stocks in months.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 26 February 2026

• Shares of CoreWeave drop 10% after it posted mixed earnings and reported a ton of debt
  - Barron's, 26 February 2026

• Perplexity announces "Computer", a non-paid AI agent that assigns work to other non-paid AI agents. [KM: just how soon can we eliminate all humans?]
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 26 February 2026

• By Tesla's own math, it reveals that its non-paid robotaxis are 4-times worse at driving than paid-human taxi drivers, with redactions hiding even more details [KM: but do we care, if the filthy Elon Musk can become richer with his robotaxis?]
  - Fortune (@ YN), 26 February 2026

• [A "thou shalt not" lie from] [mis]Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who warns that AI power is concentrating "almost overnight" and "by accident" [KM: a pure lie - the extremely rich companies of Silicon Valley and the AI bubble have been gradually concentrating economic and political power for decades, and the AI bubble is the latest way to do so, and Dario knows this]
  - Benzinga (@ YF), 26 February 2026

• Jack Dorsey just gave us our first glimpse at how doomsday firings of paid-humans could [occur more often] in the AI [bubble] era - and it is bleak [KM: but not bleak for extremely AI companies getting richer]
  - Business Insider (@ YF), 26 February 2026

• [The extremely rich billionaire] Jack Dorsey's Block to fire nearly half of the paid-humans working for him, firing about 4,000 paid-human workers, as part of an overhaul to embed AI across its operations - and he says that your company is next to replace paid-humans with non-paid AI [KM: the richer executives/investors at Block must get richer, while the fired people can use Block to sell themselves as Soylent Green]
  - TechCrunch, 26 February 2026

• [The extremely rich billionaire] Jack Dorsey's Block to fire nearly half of the paid-humans working for him, firing about 4,000 paid-human workers, as part of an overhaul to embed AI across its operations [KM: the richer executives/investors at Block must get richer, while the fired people can use Block to sell themselves as Soylent Green]
  - BBC, 26 February 2026

• [The extremely rich billionaire] Jack Dorsey's Block to fire nearly half of the paid-humans working for him, firing about 4,000 paid-human workers, as part of an overhaul to embed AI across its operations [KM: the richer executives/investors at Block must get richer, while the fired people can use Block to sell themselves as Soylent Green]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 26 February 2026

• [The extremely rich billionaire] Jack Dorsey's Block to fire nearly half of the paid-humans working for him, firing about 4,000 paid-human workers, as part of an overhaul to embed AI across its operations [KM: the richer executives/investors at Block must get richer, while the fired people can use Block to sell themselves as Soylent Green]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 26 February 2026

• The rising price danger of surveillance pricing - a new form of digital price gouging where Amazon and other online platforms use the massive amount of data they collect on every click, search, and purchase to weaponize sales and to maximize profit through predictive modeling [KM: yes, the extremely rich online retailers such as Amazon must get richer]
  - Real Clear Markets, 12 February 2026

• Billionaire Mark Cuban suggests that we "remove insurance companies from the equation", and make "all" payments for medicines to be done with cash, and it will be cheaper [with some government help for those who can't afford to buy their drugs]
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 12 February 2026

• The state of New York sues Valve for enabling "illegal gambling" with loot boxes - enabling unregulated gambling, letting users "pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value".
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 26 February 2026

• Executives at Burger King will use AI to check if employees say 'please' and 'thank you'
  - The Verge (locked), 26 February 2026

• There is a central flaw in the stock market's pricing of AI stocks. There is a contradiction at the heart of markets, as flows anticipate higher inflation yet the stocks rallying the most on AI are also those that face the greatest risk from rising prices.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 26 February 2026

• [The latest misanthropic AI car company]: Wayve, an AI-driverless car [first will be paid-human job destroying robotaxis] startup in Europe, raises $1.2 billion [KM: society must choose betweeen rich AI companies getting richer, and tens of millions of non-rich human taxi drivers]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 February 2026

• [The latest misanthropic AI car company]: Wayve, an AI-driverless car [first will be paid-human job destroying robotaxis] startup in Europe, raises $1.2 billion [KM: society must choose betweeen rich AI companies getting richer, and tens of millions of non-rich human taxi drivers]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 February 2026

• Shares of Nvidia decline 5% despite reporting better-than-expected results
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 February 2026

• Why Nvidia's huge earning numbers do not settle latest AI [bubble] fears. Record sales and booming cash flow come as worries have shifted to AI's destabilizing impact [KM: on paid-humans].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 February 2026

• The AI systems [of extremely rich AI companies] cannot stop recommending the use of nuclear weapons in war game simulations
  - New Scientist [locked], 25 February 2026

• The military of the [Christian] USA, under [Catholic Christian] Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is pushing Anthropic to make the most evil [anti-Christian] AI possible. [JC: I yell from heaven: ploughshares, not AI swords]
  - Slate, 25 February 2026

• Shortages of rare earth metals worsen in the aerospace and semiconductor industries in the USA, despite a trade truce between the USA and Zhōngguó
  - Thomson's Reuters, 25 February 2026

• The death of Spotify: why streaming is minutes away from being obsolete. Basically everybody in the music business hates Spotify except for the people who work there. It is a platform that sucks artists for everything they have, it actively prevents community building, and, despite all of that, the platform still struggles to maintain a healthy profit margin." The problem for streaming services is that it is low margin, a business model that only works for Apple, Amazon, and Google.[KM: of course, so that the rich can become richer]
  - The Artist Economy (substack), 25 February 2026

• Another problem with [extremely rich] AI companies and their AI tools - they have no 'taste'. A Steve Jobs quote from 1995 applicable today: "The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no [good] taste. ... In the sense that they don't think of original ideas."
  - Spyglass, 25 February 2026

• Mistakes made by non-paid AI are infuriating gamers, as game developers seek to become richer by using more non-paid AI and fewer paid-humans
  - Bloomberg (locked), 25 February 2026

• What is the point of school when AI can do your homework? The [misanthropic] creator of the AI agent 'Einstein' wants to free humans from the burden of academic labor. Critics say that misses the point of education entirely. [KM: bullshit - the creator just wants to join in the race to become rich destroying the fabric of human society]
  - 404 Media, 25 February 2026

• A hacker exploited [mis]Anthropic's AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information
  - Bloomberg (locked), 25 February 2026

• The stock market's AI obsession is starting to bring out the bears [hoping for the bubble to burst]. Traders are betting investments in the technology will not pay off as investors become increasingly nervous about the potential impact of AI.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 February 2026

• Private equity was headed for a correction, even without AI gloom. Lower leverage, higher rates and tougher exits are among the problems facing the industry.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 February 2026

• Ex-presidential candidate Andrew Yang warns that millions of white-collar paid-human workers will lose their jobs within 18 months to non-paid: "The AI jobpocalypse is here". [KM: yes, but the extremely rich AI companies 'getricherocalypse' is also here.]
  - Fortune (@ YF), 26 February 2026

• Shares of C3 AI plummet 17% as the company fires 26% of its paid-human employees, and posts wider loss than expected
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 February 2026

• Shares of EBay rise 5% after it announces that it will fire 800 paid-human employees, about 6% of its workforce, as it invests heavily in AI
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 February 2026

• Michael Burry (of the 'Big Short') argues that Nvidia's "purchase commitment" is parallel to Cisco at dot-com bubble top
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 February 2026

• Michael Burry (of the 'Big Short') warns that a "troubling" number in Nvidia's earnings could be "catastrophic" for its finances: a 12-month surge in its purchase obligations from around $16 billion to $95 billion. Burry said that was driven by key supplier TSMC insisting on lengthier contracts and cash in exchange for building out the capacity needed to build Nvidia's newest chips. "o be clear, NVDA has been forced to place non-cancellable purchase orders well before demand is known."
  - Business Insider (@ YF), 26 February 2026

• Bizarro world: [bubbled] technology stocks now almost as cheap as consumer staples stocks
  - CNBC (locked), 26 February 2026

• "Digital public shaming": AI companies/tools in Zhōngguó are being criticized for pornographic deepfakes. Grass-roots group warns AI platforms have "sacrificed women's right to safety" as non-consensual sexualised images proliferate. [KM: yes, but how else can rich AI companies get richer?]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 26 February 2026

• Restrictions on exports of rare earth metals from Zhōngguó are significantly hurting the aerospace and semiconductor industries in the USA. Companies in the USA expect deepening yttrium and scandium shortages, threatening jet engine coatings and 5G processor chip production.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 26 February 2026

• The technology and innovation surge in Zhōngguó puts it above Nihon and South Korea in global rankings. Propelled by strategic R&D, Zhōngguó's tech prowess is now the third highest, with key sectors such as batteries and biotech showing big gains over rivals.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 26 February 2026

• Even the best AI scenario is the end of everything we have ever been. The challenge of AI is not merely to avoid worst-case outcomes or come up with new economic models that account for billions of lost jobs. It is to retain our relevance as humans. [KM: yes, but how does relevant humans make extremely rich AI companies richer?]
  - American Greatness, 25 February 2026

• Zhōngguó seeks to increase leading-edge processor chip output by 5x in two years, a report claims,to lift 7nm and 5nm production to 100,000 wafers per month, targeting half a million monthly by 2030
  - Nikkei, 25 February 2026

• An MIT roboticist who cofounded bankrupt robot vacuum maker iRobot says that Elon Musk's vision of humanoid robot assistants is "pure fantasy thinking" [KM: pure pump-and-dump fantasy thinking]
  - Fortune (@ YF), 25 February 2026

• The stock market could crash in an AI [bubble] doomsday scenario, according to analysts. Wall Street is panicking.
  - Motley Fool, 25 February 2026

• Market bets soar that Fed will reduce interest rates to 2% in 2027. "The question is how is AI going to be inflationary and maybe the long end of the curve is sniffing all of this out. The only inflationary aspect of AI is the building out of data centers and the associated energy needs, and that is known."
  - Zero Hedge, 25 February 2026

• "America's Next Top Model" and the ultrathin ideal that won't go away [KM: as long as it makes money at the retail level]. We know from leaked documents and whistle-blowers that the algorithms prioritized conventional beauty and could send young female users down a rabbit hole of negative comparison. Social media companies deliberately targeted young women with beauty advertisements when they were feeling anxious and worried about their bodies. If you can never be thin enough, you will keep engaging. [KM: aah, yes, the extremely rich social media companies must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 February 2026

• More than half of teenagers use AI chatbots for schoolwork, survey finds. A new study from the Pew Research Center finds teenagers think chatbot-assisted cheating has become "a regular feature of student life". [KM: yes, the rich AI companies get richer, children learn less to earn less]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 February 2026

• Moody's warns of a $662 billion risk at the heart of the AI data-center buildout by just 5 companies [KM: how else to inflate the AI bubble?]. The top five U.S. hyperscalers have accumulated $662 billion in future data center lease commitments not yet begun that, because of that fact, are not current liabilities and therefore currently sit entirely off their balance sheets. As those leases begin over the next several years, and as landlords' obligations are fulfilled, that more than half a trillion dollars worth of data-center activity will be recorded on the balance sheet.
  - Fortune (@ YF), 25 February 2026

• How an out-of-control AI chatbot agent endeavored to ruin the reputation of a volunteer code librarian and could have done considerably more harm. Its bratty wrath illustrates an underrated problem of failing to put guardrails around A.I. development, especially A.I. agents that are free to act without much supervision from humans. [KM: I cry for these measily humans, but extremely rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 February 2026

• Skeptical investors are hunting for ways to short the AI frenzy/[bubble]. Traders are betting investments in the technology will not pay off as investors become increasingly nervous about the potential economic impact of AI.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 February 2026

• It is time to buy Oracle shares after the sell-off, according to analysts at Oppenheimer
  - CNBC (locked), 25 February 2026

• Is Zhōngguó flexing its intelligence muscle by tracking the USA military moves near Iran? Unusually detailed posts by commercial company MizarVision, based in Zhōngguó, about the USA's deployments in the Middle East are grabbing attention.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 25 February 2026

• Shenzhen dethrones Shanghai and Beijing as the top industrial powerhouse in Zhōngguó, according to its mayor
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 25 February 2026

• [The pot calling the kettle black]: [mis]Anthropic says that AI companies in Zhōngguó used/infringed the output of 15 million queries to its Claude AI chatbot to train their chatbots, [the hypocrisy being that] Claude was trained by infringing other people's copyrights
  - The Hacker News, 24 February 2026

• Teenagers in the USA say AI cheating has become a regular feature of student life [KM: well, at least that prepares them well for corporate and political life]
  - Pew Research, 24 February 2026

• [mis]Anthropic drops its flagship safety pledge. In 2023, Anthropic committed to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee in advance that [mis]Anthropic's safety measures were adequate. [KM: no more - it got in the way of the extremely rich AI company becoming richer]
  - Time, 24 February 2026

• The AI trade/bubble in the USA didn't die/burst - it just moved to South Korea
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 24 February 2026

• Michael Burry Warns Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are using "sinister" accounting to hide their AI Costs, inflate profits by 20% [KM: how else to keep the bubble bubbling?]
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 24 February 2026

• Repricing scarcity of commodities: Goldman Sachs says to seek respite from AI's dual shock in HALO stocks - Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence companies offer a safe-haven in the new 'AI era' [KM: i.e., as the bubble gets ready to burst]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 24 February 2026

• Goldman Sachs' Delta-One desk head "besieged with angry calls" over market reaction to [mis]Anthropic's Claude AI tool. If code can increasingly write itself, barriers to entry in software development collapse and the rent extraction embedded in the SaaS model is structurally challenged.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 24 February 2026

• California seeks injunction to stop Amazon's alleged stifling of price competition. California asked a state judge on Tuesday to stop Amazon.com from inflating prices for consumers through an allgeged campaign to bully merchants not to sell goods more cheaply elsewhere.
  - Reuters (@ YF), 24 February 2026

• The government of Bharat backs a new ride-hailing service to challenge [authoritarian] companies such as Uber. The new taxi service will give drivers a share of profits from the business and charge no commissions. The government-backed initiative comes amid growing complaints by drivers of Uber and local rival Ola in India about excessive charges, low fares and high commissions. [KM: but how else can rich serf-exploiting companies get richer without exploiting their ... serfs.]
  - Reuters (@ YF), 24 February 2026

• A new AI agent logs directly into college platform Canvas to do your homework for you [KM: is there any aspect of society rich AI companies won't destroy to become richer?]
  - Futurism, 24 February 2026

• OpenAI[sore] massively cuts spending plan as reality closes in, now spending $600 billion by 2030 instead of $1.4 trillion, though it only has $13 billion in revenue. [KM: bubble, bubble, toil and trouble]
  - Futurism, 24 February 2026

• OpenAI[sore] massively cuts spending plan as reality closes in, now spending $600 billion by 2030 instead of $1.4 trillion, though it only has $13 billion in revenue. [KM: bubble, bubble, toil and trouble]
  - Zero Hedge, 24 February 2026

• For years - literally - we have been pounding the table and pointing out market rigging and manipulation irregularities in the crypto markets which, for reasons of our own, we attributed to one of the world's foremost HFT shops and most profitable "market makers" in the world (if not India), Jane Street. Below is an example from 2023, and here are hundreds of others. As it turns out someone noticed. Jane Street was sued for alleged insider trading by the administrator winding up the affairs of Terraform Labs, the firm whose $40 billion collapse in 2022 roiled the crypto markets, contributed to the collapse of FTX and sparked a brutal crypto winter which culminated with the bankruptcy and prison sentence of Sam Bankman Fried.. who just happens to be a former Jane Street employee (along with his polycule partner Caroline Ellison) and the man many claim devised some of the most intricate crypto manipulation schemes operating to this day.
  - Zero Hedge, 24 February 2026

• 80% of the world's population will use/[be addicted to] social media by 2028. According to a recent WHO survey, one in ten adolescents worldwide is considered to be a problematic [i.e., addicted] social media user. [KM: yes, yes, yes - the extremely rich social media companies must get richer - fuck the rest of the world!]
  - Zero Hedge, 24 February 2026

• [mis]Anthropic launches new enterprise offerings, raising the heat on software companies [and threatening more paid-human programming jobs] [KM: the war to destroy as many paid-humans jobs possible, so that extremely rich AI companies can get richer]
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 24 February 2026

• Goldman Sachs warns that non-paid AI-fueled layoffs, this year, could raise the unemployment rate of paid-humans [KM: well, as long as rich AI companies/executives/investors get richer]
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 24 February 2026

• Successfully commercializing novel solar cells: When efficiency records are not enough. Competition from existing products, scalability challenges, and high development and production costs are among the most common hurdles on the path from a scientific discovery to a commercial product.
  - Tech Xplore, 24 February 2026

• The looming semiconductor chip disaster (Zhōngguó invading Taiwan) that Silicon Valley [and its investors] has long ignored. If Zhōngguó invades Taiwan and cuts off its semiconductor chip exports to companies in the USA, the tech industry and the USA economy would be crippled [KM: and the AI bubble, if still bubbling, will be popped]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 February 2026

• Huawei's revenues surge to US$127 billion as it continues to defy sanctions imposed by the USA
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 24 February 2026

• Despite Turmp's having lost ground in almost every demographic during his second term, one group stands firmly in Trump's camp: the superrich who have their wallets open [to bribe Trump]. In the process, Trump and the Republican Party have effectively become subsidiaries/[whores] of the billionaire class of the USA, producing a presidency in the USA setting new standards in oligarchy and kleptocracy. [KM: with much of the whoring funded by profits from the AI bubble]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 February 2026

• [More circular investing to pump up the AI bubble]: Facebook and AMD agree to AI processor chips deal worth more than $100 billion. The deal could result in Meta owning as much as 10% of AMD's stock as AMD seeks to challenge Nvidia.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 February 2026

• On Monday, a single Substack post managed to vaporize hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap. Citrini Research and Alep Shah published "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" over the weekend.
  - Zero Hedge, 24 February 2026

• A viral doomsday report lays bare Wall Street's deep anxiety about the future of the AI [bubble]. Citrini Research's thought experiment rattled investors already wary of tech disruptions [and the AI bubble]. The Dow industrials fell 822 points.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 February 2026

• The fundraising tactic AI startups are using to juice/[bubble] valuations. The race to get into hot AI startups has led to unequal deals for investors, raising questions about how much companies are really worth.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 February 2026

• [mis]Anthropic furious at DeepSeek for illegally copying its AI without permission, which is pretty ironic/[pathetic] when you consider how [mis]Anthropic built its AI Claude system in the first place - training with other people's copyrighted material without permission [KM: oh the hypocrites of this era's criminal Napster model]
  - Futurism, 24 February 2026

• [Mis]Anthropic joins OpenAI[sore] in [whining] about AI companies in Zhōngguó committing copyright infringement of their AI models ['distillation attacks'], which were trained in part via copyright infringement of other people's text and videos. [KM: what, only USA AI companies can get rich implementing the Napster profits-thru-theft model?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 February 2026

• [Mis]Anthropic joins OpenAI[sore] in [whining] about AI companies in Zhōngguó committing copyright infringement of their AI models ['distillation attacks'], which were trained in part via copyright infringement of other people's text and videos. [KM: what, only USA AI companies can get rich implementing the Napster profits-thru-theft model?]
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 February 2026

• [Mis]Anthropic joins OpenAI[sore] in [whining] about AI companies in Zhōngguó committing copyright infringement of their AI models ['distillation attacks'], which were trained in part via copyright infringement of other people's text and videos. [KM: what, only USA AI companies can get rich implementing the Napster profits-thru-theft model?]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 24 February 2026

• [The misanthropic CEO of OpenAI], Sam Altman is losing his grip on humanity. "It takes a lot of energy to train a human.", [KM: so don't whine about the energy used for training in my AI data centers that are only making the extremely rich richer]
  - The Atlantic, 24 February 2026

• Six Democratic senators told the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in a previously unreported letter that they have strong concerns about [extremely rich] prediction market companies [wanting to become richer] by offering contracts "hat incentivize physical injury or death", saying the contracts "present dangerous national security risks" [KM: yes, but isn't making the rich richer often more important than USA national security?]
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 February 2026

• Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations.
  - TechCrunch, 23 February 2026

• The USA dominates global AI data center population. The USA has 3,960 data centers in this dataset - more than the next 14 countries combined. [KM: bubble, the name is burst]
  - Zero Hedge, 23 February 2026

• AI's math tricks do not work for scientific computing. Low-precision number formats do not suit many simulations.
  - IEEE Spectrum, 23 February 2026

• Micron's $100 billion New York semiconductor manufacturing project is facing local pushback. The facility will consume vast amounts of water and energy while producing substantial hazardous waste. Emissions and contaminated wastewater and soil from the notoriously dirty semiconductor industry pose potential environmental and health risks for surrounding areas, while exposure to its toxic chemicals has been linked to cancers and reproductive harm.
  - Fast Company, 23 February 2026

• Data centers [owned by extremely rich AI companies] are rushing to power their AI data centers with natural gas, raising serious concerns for the climate. An analysis from researchers at Cornell University found that the build-out could add as much as 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to the annual emissions of around 10 million passenger cars. [KM: well, if you are going to grossly profit from helping to destroy social society, why not help destroy the environment as well?]
  - Fast Company, 23 February 2026

• [misanthropic] OpenAI[sore] changed its mission statement 6 times in 9 years. It finally removed the word "safely" as a core value when it restructured into a for-profit [KM: so its rich executives/investors can become richer]
  - Fortune (@ YF), 23 February 2026

• "The world is in peril": the manager of [mis]Anthropic's Safeguards Research Team, Mrinank Sharma, resigns from his job. The Team is responsible for ensuring that [mis]Anthropic's AI could not be used to help engineer a biological weapon. "The world is in peril."
  - Zero Hedge, 23 February 2026

• The record gap between corporate profits and worker pay has an "undercurrent of betrayal", a top economist warns. Corporate profits as a share of U.S. GDP have soared to 15.85% from 8% in 1982. By contrast, employee compensation as a share of GDP has tumbled to 61.9% from 66.6% in 1982. [KM: yes, but who cares, if rich executives/investors get richer]
  - Fortune (@ YF), 23 February 2026

• Microsoft has spent more than $76 billion (of now wasted shareholders' dollars) acquiring game studios and publishers over the past few years in an attempt to turn Xbox into a Netflix-like subscription platform, and the result is that nobody -- possibly not even Microsoft -- can clearly articulate what Xbox actually is anymore.
  - The Verge (locked), 23 February 2026

• Ukraine is using powerful quadcopters to destroy nearly a third of all the Russian air threats it hits. It is a further sign of how the novel, inexpensive technology is growing in the country, and will reshape weapons technology and tactics in the future for all countries.
  - Business Insider (@ YN), 23 February 2026

• IBM plunges after [mis]Anthropic's latest software tool that can automate the modernization of Cobol programs. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government - great for IBM's ecosystem ... until this new tool.
  - Zero Hedge, 23 February 2026

• IBM posts steepest daily drop since 2000 after Anthropic says AI can modernize COBOL
  - Reuters (@ YF), 23 February 2026

• Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley calculate AI's contribution to economic growth in the USA [after trillions invested]: it may be basically zero. Much of the trillions spent on AI is used for purchases from Asia, not the USA. [KM: when will this useless bubble burst?]
  - Washington Post (@ MSN), 23 February 2026
• This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of paid-human workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is OpenAI[sore]? WRONG. Sorry, the correct response is, "What is WorldCom?". [KM: the new bubble is same as the old bubble]
  - Slashdot, 23 February 2026

• Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warns prediction markets are on path to becoming 'corposlop' (which is prioritizing profits over the wellbeing of consumers) [KM: yes, extremely rich prediction markets must earn more profits, fuck the public's wellbeing]
  - Benzinga (@ YF), 23 February 2026

• Why a US ban on under-16 social media would be a huge gift to parents AND kids [KM: but not to the profits of extremely rich social media companies/executives/investors]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 23 February 2026

• I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day. Objectification, hate, rape threats: the politicians debating online abuse mean well, but to truly understand, they need to see what I see [KM: that makes extremely rich social media companies richer]
  - The Guardian, 23 February 2026

• Inside the Big Tech lobbying machine aiming to halt bans on [addictive, destructive] social media. Tech giants, including Meta and Alphabet, are spending lavishly on splashy billboard ads, [buying] on-the-fence politicians and bulking up their ranks of lobbyists. [KM: something the street drug traffickers never learned from their digital drug trafficking peers]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 February 2026

• Facebooks has tens of billions of revenue, yet it still borrows billions of dollars for its AI investment. Facebook but that ignores big cash costs tied to employees' compensation.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 February 2026

• A selloff in commercial broker shares reflects investor fears that artificial intelligence will erode the industry's fees. Executives say the human touch still matters.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 February 2026

• Google spinout Aalyria valued at $1.3 billion as investors pour into space-based communications
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 February 2026

• The CEO of extremely rich OpenAI[sore], Sam Altman, on Friday defended the resource demands of [much useless] AI, calling concerns about data centers' water use "fake", and comparing the energy used by AI systems to that of humans [KM: creating an equivalence between computers and humans - anything to keep the bubble inflated]
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 February 2026

• The CEO of extremely rich OpenAI[sore], Sam Altman, on Friday defended the resource demands of [much useless] AI, calling concerns about data centers' water use "fake", and comparing the energy used by AI systems to that of humans [KM: creating an equivalence between computers and humans - anything to keep the bubble inflated]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 23 February 2026

• Zhōngguó is cracking down on "stock market influencers" as the AI surge/[bubble] overheats the stock market
  - Zero Hedge, 22 February 2026

• Non-paid AI [KM: that makes rich executives/investors richer] could cause [non-rich] workers to rise up against the corporations driving them into poverty [KM: Santayana and I are laughing/crying in our graves at this repeat of history]
  - Futurism, 22 February 2026

• The economics of 3D-printed homes are surprisingly horrible, costing more per square foot than paid-human constructed homes
  - Futurism, 22 February 2026

• AI tools, creating new security breaches, are destroying supply chains for grocery stores [KM: well, not as if AI bots shop at grocery stores]
  - Futurism, 22 February 2026

• According to new reporting by the Los Angeles Times, an eco-friendly initiative to phase out the use of gas-powered appliances in Southern California was defeated thanks to a campaign weaponizing a suite of AI software. [KM: well, as the rich get richer, who cares about clean air - the rich can buy oxygen tanks]
  - Futurism, 22 February 2026

• Tokenized tyranny: how elites are digitizing our world for total control. Digital identifiers, universal ledgers, reducing all to rogrammable, monetizable units in a centralized system of power. This is tokenized tyranny in action: a quiet revolution that could redefine ownership, freedom, and existence itself.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 February 2026

• [VIDEO]: John Oliver discusses how an already flawed Twitter got worse under Elon Musk
  - Youtube, 22 February 2026

• Mixed analyst sentiment on Tesla after Bloomberg reports 5 new collisions in its [non-paid] 'robotaxi' fleet
  - Insider Monkey (@ YF), 22 February 2026

• [The extremely rich and much socialistically-subsidized - with government contracts] Palantir is suing a small Swiss magazine that detailed the government of Switzerland repeatedly rejecting its services, as the data intelligence group grapples with European fears over companies in the USA managing sensitive state systems.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 February 2026

• Is 'slopulism' shaping/[ruining more] out politics in the USA? Social media has long been flooded with populist rage and discontent. What happens when the posts become policy? [KM: not much good, though extremely rich AI companies become richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 February 2026

• [In extremely rich Silicon Valley - for some] the number of people living in vehicles has surged in recent years, as soaring rents and a chronic housing shortage have pushed even full-time workers out of traditional homes and into makeshift ones on wheels.
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 February 2026

• Peter Thiel and other [misanthropic] tech billionaires are publicly shielding their children from the [mianthropic] products that made them rich
  - Fortune (@ YN), 21 February 2026

• A Russian-speaking, financially motivated threat actor has been observed taking advantage of commercial generative artificial intelligence (AI) services to compromise over 600 FortiGate devices located in 55 countries
  - The Hacker News, 21 February 2026

• [The authoritarian] Trump calls on Netflix to fire Susan Rice, a member of its board of directors, or "pay the consequences", following comments she made about accountability when Democrats return to power.
  - Deadline, 21 February 2026

• [The authoritarian] Trump delivers a deranged threat to Netflix, demanding Netflix fire Susan Rice, a member of its board of directors, or "pay the consequences", following comments she made about accountability when Democrats return to power.
  - The Daily Beast, 21 February 2026

• Saudi Arabia seeks to replace Israel with Syria as a host for fiber-optic cable route to Europe
  - Zero Hedge, 21 February 2026

• A proposed AI data center in Millard County, Utah, is being criticized as the county continues to face an extreme drought - "Just to suck our water away". [KM: boo hoo, your desire to drink is not worth more than making rich AI companies richer]
  - The Cool Down, 21 February 2026

• [Stating the obvious]: Senator Bernie Sanders argues that the AI investments made by [the extremely rich] Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos is for one reason: "They are in it to accumulate even more wealth and power for themselves". "Do you think that these guys are staying up nights worrying about the working class about the jobs that are going to disappear [due to non-paid AI]?" [KM: NO]
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 21 February 2026

• One in six households in the USA are behind on pyaing the electricity bills, owing billions to electric and gas utilities. [KM: The increased demand for electricity from extremely rich AI companies for their data centers is not helping.]
  - MS.NOW, 21 February 2026

• The USA spent $30 billion to eliminate textbooks, and instead bought for chilren Silicon Valley's laptops and tablets: the result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents [KM: yes, but extremely rich tech companies are $30 billion richer][JC: millstones around all their necks]
  - Fortune (locked), 21 February 2026

• People loved the Dot-Com boom/[bubble before it burst]. The AI boom/[bubble], not so much. [Extremely rich] tech leaders are beginning to worry about the public's underwhelming enthusiasm for their plans to remake the world with [porn/slop/ads-generating] AI.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 February 2026

• [Christian] Alabama's "pretty cool" plan for maternity care robots is criticized dystopian as a "dystopian horror story". [JC: instead of giving more tax breaks to rich people, how about saving these taxes to pay for more human maternity workers?]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 21 February 2026

• One [gleeful? misanthropic] analyst predicts that Tesla's robotaxi business could be stealing $250 billion from paid-human taxi drivers by 2035 (i.e., revenues) [KM: yet one more misanthropic article not discussing why the world's richest man needs to become richer taking money from poor taxi drivers - hopefully these reporters will end up as taxi drivers]
  - Motley Fool, 21 February 2026

• Short seller Jim Chanos argues that Elon Musk's orbital AI datacenter goals are "AI snake oil", and says he needs to see "actual" savings
  - Benzinga (@ YF), 21 February 2026

• Price gouging is real. Doing nothing is not the answer. [Thanks to the Big Tech companies making it so easier to collect tons of data on individual consumers], businesses across industries are increasing profits by exploiting what economists call situational market power. Companies now have access to and can analyze [more so with new invasive AI] so much personalized data is improving their profit extraction capabilities. [KM: yes, the rich companies/executives/investors must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 February 2026

• Google is exploring ways to use its financial might to compete with Nvidia. As more AI companies consider Google's chips, the company wants to use deals with external partners to expand the potential market.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 February 2026

• Theft of trade secrets is on the rise - and AI is making it worse. Google, Apple and xAI are among companies that have sought to defend their sensitive information as employees are accused of stealing it.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 February 2026

• Why risk-loving options traders are flocking to prediction markets. Simple "yes" or "no" wagers on finance, sports and politics are drawing in the day traders who feasted on complicated stock-option plays.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 February 2026

• A Nobel prize winner invests a machine that harvests water from dry air. Omar Yaghi's invention uses ambient thermal energy and can generate up to 1,000 liters of clean water every day.
  - The Guardian, 21 February 2026

• Want to profit from the Warner Brothers Discovery takeover by Netflix or Paramamount? "Walk away now". Both Netflix and Paramount Skydance are prepared to overpay for Warner Brothers Discovery and take on significant debt.
  - Barron's, 21 February 2026

• The stock market [bubble] now drives the economy of the USA. How much longer can that last [before the bubble bursts?]
  - Barron's, 21 February 2026

• Humanoid robots are at the gate. The problem: coste. Current humanoid robots, including Optimus from Tesla, cost $100,000 to $200,000 to make. That needs to drop below $20,000 to scale like electric vehicles or smartphones. [KM: good news for paid-humans, for now]
  - Barron's, 21 February 2026

• Amazon's cloud-computing arm suffered at least two recent service interruptions linked to the use of its own artificial intelligence coding assistants, prompting some internal concerns about Amazon's rapid deployment of autonomous software agents inside production environments.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 February 2026

• Peter Thiel and other Big Tech conservatives, using some of their huge AI riches, are endorsing a far-right congressional candidate in Texas who say that he will not placate thos who think his policies are "bigoted/[racist] and backward and oppressive and Nazi-ish". The candidate is a lawyer who previously represented Elon Musk in court.
  - MS.NOW, 20 February 2026

• Pubs in Newcastle say they are seeing more and more artwork - "dreadful AI slop" - they believe to be designed using AI from breweries - and have refused to display it. What does the rise of AI mean for independent artists who rely on design work for income? AI software is trained on millions of human-made images scraped from the internet, which artists argue leads to the software stealing and regurgitating their work. [KM: the criminal Napster model - profit from theft, applied to AI]
  - BBC, 20 February 2026

• Is 'brain rot' real? [KM: dumb question, yes]. How too much time online can affect your mind. [KM: but make rich social media companies richer]
  - Jeff Bezos' Washington Post (@ MSN), 20 February 2026

• Goldman Sachs launches a stock market index free of stocks linked to the AI bubble, SPXXXAI
  - Axios, 20 February 2026

• Blue Owl fails to secure third party debt funding for $4 billion data center
  - Zero Hedge, 20 February 2026

• An AI 'blind spot' in the software could allow attackers to hijack self-driving vehicles (such as robotaxis)
  - TechXplore, 20 February 2026

• OpenAI[sore]'s hardware device just leaked, and you will cringe, since it is basically a "clunky gadget that pretty much does stuff your phone already does"
  - Futurism, 20 February 2026

• [The extremely rich billionaire] Jack Dorsey's new company, Block, is falling apart as it forces employees to use AI. The same misanthropy as at other companies: workers are facing immense pressure as their employers implement AI at all costs, forcing them to adopt the tech whether they like it or not. [KM: but how else can rich executives get richer?]
  - Futurism, 20 February 2026

• Look out, OpenAI[sore]: Perplexity admits AI adverts were a mistake, is now getting rid of them [KM: not good for keeping the AI bubble inflated]
  - Futurism, 20 February 2026

• Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari on Thursday attacked crypto and stablecoins, saying proponents deliver "word-salad nonsense answers" when pressed to explain how the technology actually works for cross-border payments
  - Benzinga (@ YF), 20 February 2026

• Pump Up The Bubble! Burst! Burst! OpenAI[sore] expects to spend $600 billion through 2030 on its computing activities [KM: and how many more humans are going to have to lose their jobs to make this huge expenditure profitable?]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 20 February 2026

• [Pump Up The Bubble! Burst! Burst!] OpenAI[sore] expects to spend $600 billion through 2030 on its computing activities [KM: and how many more humans are going to have to lose their jobs to make this huge expenditure profitable?]
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 February 2026

• Hynix, a leading supplier of memory chips, predicts higher prices as supplies of memory chips worsens
  - Zero Hedge, 20 February 2026

• The Agentic AI [bubble] isn't eating software companies [yet] - it is feeding market volatility
  - Zero Hedge, 20 February 2026

• The Capex paradox: who funds AI [and the AI bubble] if AI stops paying?
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 20 February 2026

• AI-managed apartment buildings is making apartment living miserable in the Bay Area, and the rest of the USA. Non-paid AI replaces on-site leasing offices and paid-human agents to respond to renters. Non-paid AI is involved in each step, from touring to signing the lease to completing management tasks once you actually move in. [KM: the rich real estate investors must get richer]
  - SF Gate, 20 February 2026

• AI is giving you a personalized Internet, but you have no say in it [KM: only the extremely rich have a say]. The relentless addition of AI in popular apps raises questions about what is at stake. The answer: the future of the internet, and its lifeblood, digital advertising.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 February 2026

• Workplace inspections by OSHA dropped over a six-month period of 2025. Labor advocates worry that the Trump administration is relaxing oversight of companies and increasing the potential for serious injuries and deaths. [KM: well, the injured workers can always be replaced by AI and robots]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 February 2026

• Paid-human workers are afraid that non-paid will take their jobs. They should also fear who will control the knowledge that companies capture from these workers. [KM: and it won't be the workers, only the rich]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 February 2026

• The latest non-paid generative AI tool from Zhōngguó, Seedance 2.0, is so good that it has greatly troubled the many paid-human entertainers in Hollywood. [Will Hollywood strike back legally (especially over concerns of copyright infringement?) [KM: And is this development in Zhōngguó a threat to the AI bubble of the USA?]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 20 February 2026

• The latest non-paid generative AI tool from Zhōngguó, Seedance 2.0, is so good that it has greatly troubled the many paid-human entertainers in Hollywood. [Will Hollywood strike back legally (especially over concerns of copyright infringement?) [KM: And is this development in Zhōngguó a threat to the AI bubble of the USA?]
  - BBC, 20 February 2026

• [Part of the hoe that the AI bubble will not burst in the USA relies on Elon Musk being successful with robots (as his auto success is failing)]. The latest advanced humanoid robots from Zhōngguó show how unlikely Musk/Tesla will succeed with their robots.
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 February 2026

• [The latest circular financing deal to keep the AI bubble inflated]: Nvidia is in talks to invest up to $30 billion in OpenAI[sore]
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 February 2026

• [The latest circular financing deal to keep the AI bubble inflated]: Nvidia is in talks to invest up to $30 billion in OpenAI[sore]
  - Zero Hedge, 20 February 2026

• New research published Thursday bolsters growing concerns that a handful of [extremely rich] companies (e.g., Elon Musk's SpaceX), and countries are using the global atmospheric commons as a dumping ground for potentially toxic and climate-altering industrial waste byproducts from loosely regulated commercial space flights.
  - Inside Climate News, 19 February 2026

• OpenAI[sore] faces four fundamental strategic problems that no amount of fundraising or capex announcements can paper over, according to analyst Benedict Evans: it has no unique technology, its enormous user base is shallow and fragile, incumbents like Google and Meta are leveraging superior distribution to close the gap, and its product roadmap is dictated by whatever the research labs happen to discover rather than by deliberate product strategy.
  - Benedict Evans (blog), 19 February 2026

• Elon Musk [racistly] boasts that his Grok AI bot says that the USA isn't built on stolen land, which it obviously is [KM: a new way to profit from racism]
  - Futurism, 19 February 2026

• Surveillance systems sold/developed/used by [extremely rich authoritarian] AI companies and government agencies should scare both Democrats and Republicans
  - Real Clear Wire, 19 February 2026

• 'Stop Killing Games' is launchign NGOs in the European Union and the USA: "We are not just going away on this." "I get why the industry fights so hard against regulating predatory monetization. If the videogame industry can't push microtransactions on kids and gambling addicts easily, that could literally cost them billions." [KM: what? some social evils can't be profit centers?]
  - PC Gamer, 19 February 2026

• [The latest circular deal to bubble the AI bubble]: AMD is set to provide a $300 million loan guarantee for Crusoe, a cloud computing startup, to buy and deploy AMD's AI chips. AMD backstopped deal by offering to lease back its own chips from Crusoe if the startup is unable to secure customers such as AI developers, The Information said, citing people with knowledge of the deal. [KM: Pump Up The Bubble! Burst! Burst!]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 19 February 2026

• Human Resource teams at companies are drowning in grievances filled with AI-generated slop. Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country. he flood of bloated claims is compounding pressure on an already stretched tribunal system in the UK for labor problems.
  - Financial Times (locked), 19 February 2026

• The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, ends a plan to allow [non-paid, human job destroying] robotaxi operations outside of New York City
  - Zero Hedge, 19 February 2026

• Pinterest is drowning in a sea of AI slop and auto-moderation. Users are exhausted fighting AI moderation, AI-generated art, and AI-first features. [KM: yes, but extremely rich AI companies/investors must get richer]
  - 404 Media, 19 February 2026

• The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, ends a plan to allow [non-paid, human job destroying] robotaxi operations outside of New York City
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 February 2026

• Amazon's Whole Foods is eliminating its 'dystopian' [misanthropic] pay-by-palm biometric payment option
  - Zero Hedge, 19 February 2026

• New OpenAI[sore] funding round could top $100 billion, pushing valuation north of $850 billion [KM: and how many millions of people will have to lose their jobs to OpenAI[sore]'s tools to make this investment profitable?]
  - Zero Hedge, 19 February 2026

• US particle accelerators turn nuclear waste into electricity, cut radioactive life by 99.7%. The system uses a particle accelerator to fire high-energy protons at a target, such as liquid mercury, to trigger spallation.
  - Interesting Engineering, 19 February 2026

• In arson case, a judge in New Zealand wrestles with AI-assisted apology letters. The use of AI gave a New Zealand judge pause about the genuineness of the remorse expressed in the apology. It reflects a wider discussion about using AI for personal communication.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 February 2026

• From Paris to New Delhi, the push to ban teens from social media is going global. Leaders in Europe and Asia look to block younger users from scrolling feeds, citing mental-health risks.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 February 2026

• Selling AI software is not as easy as it used to be. The golden age of unbridled spending on AI software might be behind us, as vendors say it is a lot harder to make a sale than it used to be.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 February 2026

• [The extremely rich] Bill Gates has pulled out of delivering his keynote address at an AI summit in Bharat, as the billionaire faces scrutiny over his ties to late convicted sex offender (and child rapist) Jeffrey Epstein. [The extremely rich] Bill Gates has come under fire in recent weeks over two recently released draft emails Epstein appears to have written to himself, in which he claims he facilitated sexual encounters for Gates and helped him obtain medication to hide a sexually transmitted infection from his wife.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 19 February 2026

• [The extremely rich] Bill Gates has pulled out of delivering his keynote address at an AI summit in Bharat, as the billionaire faces scrutiny over his ties to late convicted sex offender (and child rapist) Jeffrey Epstein. [The extremely rich] Bill Gates has come under fire in recent weeks over two recently released draft emails Epstein appears to have written to himself, in which he claims he facilitated sexual encounters for Gates and helped him obtain medication to hide a sexually transmitted infection from his wife.
  - The Daily Beast, 19 February 2026

• No one can agree on whether AI is the next big thing or all hype. Here is why [including the many different definitions of 'intelligence']. [KM: hype of the extremely rich]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 19 February 2026

• Hims & Hers Health said on Thursday it will acquire Australian health company Eucalyptus in a deal valued at up to $1.15 billion, as the telehealth platform based in the USA seeks to broaden its personalized care business international markets.
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 February 2026

• Rising battery costs nudge drivers in Zhōngguó towards hybrids. Higher lithium prices and the end of incentives are reshaping the EV market in Zhōngguó, with hybrids emerging as a more practical option for many.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 19 February 2026

• Hazardous substances found in all headphones tested by ToxFREE project. Substances include chemicals that can cause cancer, neurodevelopmental problems and the feminisation of males.
  - The Guardian, 18 February 2026

• Virginia House of Representative passes a [socialist] tax exemption for [extremely rich companies'] AI data centers, with conditions. New and existing data centers could continue receiving a socialist tax break on the state's retail sales and use tax, as long as they moved away from fossil fuels and tried to reduce energy usage. [KM: "tried"? Just be honest and say this is to make the rich richer]
  - Inside Climate News, 18 February 2026

• Elon Musk's Tesla's non-paid robotaxis are crashing vastly more often than paid-human drivers, and that is just from the crashes that we know about
  - Futurism, 18 February 2026

• The huge demand for RAM memory chips [caused by the AI bubble] could kill products and even entire companies, a memory CEO admits [KM: yes, but extremely rich AI companies won't be killed]
  - The Verge, 18 February 2026

• [Another crime of the e-commerce/AI world]: the rip-off economy - or the grift economy - in its purest form: a world where everything - your attention, your data, your daily activities, even events that have already happened - is a surface to extract/[scam] value from. Where the line between investing and gambling has dissolved. Where the business model is built around exploiting customers.
  - Your Brain on Money - Hanna Horvath, 18 February 2026

• Three key constraints (including the lack of power) that could derail the AI data center buildout story/[bubble]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 18 February 2026

• Scientists found 23 fatal flaws in the reasoning capabilities of AI chatbots such as OpenAI[sore]'s ChatGPT - the most advanced models are failing basic logic tests. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT show reasoning errors across many domains.
  - Popular Mechanics, 18 February 2026

• Big Tech turns to uranium for nuclear power, as AI data center power demand soars
  - Zero Hedge, 18 February 2026

• Big Tech turns to uranium for nuclear power, as AI data center power demand soars
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 February 2026

• Apple races to build smart glasses to compete with Facebook's [creepy] AI Ray-Ban glasses
  - Zero Hedge, 18 February 2026

• Wells Fargo predicts a "you only live once" trade driving $150 billion into bitcoin and other risky assets. Bigger tax refunds in the USA may revive retail risk-taking by late March, potentially sending fresh cash into Bitcoin and momentum stocks.
  - Zero Hedge, 18 February 2026

• Who exactly [if anyone in general] is going to be earning more with non-paid AI? Hollywood types about to be replaced? The swathe of white collar workers going the same way? The blue collar workers who face competition from robots who can do back flips to the building site they labour away at? [KM: silly question. Answer? None of them.]
  - Zero Hedge, 18 February 2026

• Global "everything rally" pushes futures contracts prices higher in the USA as "AI disruption" fears fade. "It is hard to know where the floor on valuation is going to be.", Sophie Huynh, portfolio manager at BNP Paribas Asset Management, told Bloomberg. "So I think there is going to be some temptation to buy on dips."
  - Zero Hedge, 18 February 2026

• [mis]Anthropic's [faux] altruism and stragetic interest [in maximizing billions of dollars of profits]: aligned too nearly? [Dumb question of the week:] Has [mis]Anthropic become the id of the industry, developing AI models capable of unleashing the ills it has long preached against? About as honest and ethical as [the now evil] Google's "don't be evil" slogan, shortly before it began scraping and hoarding the private data of every soul on earth. [mis] Anthropic is building the AI models most likely to bring its doomsday scenarios into reality. [mis]Anthropic warns of the risks associated with increasingly autonomous or morally salient AI systems. At the same time, it is the only major frontier lab building AI models possessing this capability.
  - Real Clear Markets, 18 February 2026

• [KM: Another reason to burst the much-useless AI bubble]: the land grab [by extremely rich AI companies] for AI data centers is one more obstacle to much-needed housing [JC: for the non-rich, my "blessed meek"]. Resistance grows to more land sales in Northern Virgina. "They would rather have homes than data.", said a former Prince William County supervisor. [KM: how dare these non-rich furstate rich people getting richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 February 2026

• The low amount of taxes paid by [bubbled] billionaires is becoming a problem for the economy of the USA. Tax avoidance by the superwealthy is an economic issue as well as a political one. [KM: don't worry billionaires, you still have enough money to buy politicians]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 February 2026

• Microsoft says it plans to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to help bring [low income job destroying] non-paid-AI to lower-income countries, as concerns mount over the [ability] to deepen inequality [KM: extremely rich companies such as Microsoft have thrived for decades on profitablly increasing inequality]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 18 February 2026

• Parents are opting kids out of school laptops, returning them to pen and paper. Parents are forming a loose network teaching one another how to get their children off school-issued Chromebooks and iPads. These families reflect a growing backlash to education technology, driven by concerns about excessive screen time and the harm it causes to youth. What started as anger directed at social media companies has translated to pressure on schools [KM: schools being bribed by Big Tech companies to shove more computing into children's faces].
  - NBC News, 18 February 2026

• Why there is simply no need for an Amazon Kindle e-book reader anymore - you can read electronic books/documents on pretty much any device. [KM: landfills don't need any inessential electronic product being dumped into them]
  - BGR, 18 February 2026

• The 'boomcession': why many people in the USA feel left behind by a growing [bubbled] economy. Debt is at all-time highs, the rich get richer, the poor have to spend more because of inflation.
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 February 2026

• Facebook's own research determined that parental supervision doesn't really help reduct teenagers' compulsive/addivtive use of social media [KM: that makes the extremely rich Facebook richer]
  - TechCrunch, 17 February 2026
• How in 20 minutes to hack ChatGPT and Google's AI to get these systems to tell any lie imaginable. This tactic is poisoning what the world's leading AIs say about topics as serious as health and personal finances. I reviewed dozens of examples where AI tools are being coerced into promoting businesses and spreading misinformation. Data suggests it is happening on a massive scale. [KM: well, of course, if it helps make extremely rich AI companies richer]
  - BBC, 17 February 2026

• Apple - is the anti-AI trade starting to work? Apple skipped the AI spending spree. What if that is about to pay off?
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 17 February 2026

• Claims/[lies] that AI can help fix climate change are dismissed as greenwashing. The AI industry is using 'diversionary' tactics, says analyst, as energy-hungry [climate worsening] complex functions such as video generation and deep research proliferate [KM: to make extremely rich AI companies richer]
  - The Guardian, 17 February 2026

• Apple decouples from Nasdaq, offering an alternative to AI-[bubble]-fueled volatility. Apple's 40-day correlation to the Nasdaq 100 Index tumbled to 0.21 last week, the lowest since 2006.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 17 February 2026

• JPMorgan desk says that the AI stock selling is almost over, goes long basket of "most mispriced and insulated from AI disruption" stocks
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 17 February 2026

• AI stocks become the 'kiss of death' in the USA as Zhōngguó's DeepSeek 2.0 moment arrives.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 17 February 2026

• 3 reasons why market sentiment has shifted so painfully on AI. This brutal churn is driven by three factors as perceptions of AI move beyond a magical vision of the future to practical implementation where there will be winners and losers, emerging risks and unexpected twists and turns.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 17 February 2026

• India's Adani Group will invest $100 billion over the next nine years building artificial intelligence data centers, the company said on Tuesday, as the conglomerate doubles down on partnerships with tech majors like Google and Microsoft. [KM: how many people in Bharat will have to lose their jobs to make this investment profitable?]
  - Nikkei Asia, 17 February 2026

• India's Adani Group will invest $100 billion over the next nine years building artificial intelligence data centers, the company said on Tuesday, as the conglomerate doubles down on partnerships with tech majors like Google and Microsoft. [KM: how many people in Bharat will have to lose their jobs to make this investment profitable?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 February 2026

• [More circular investing]: Nvidia and Facebook announced an expanded multiyear, multi-generational partnership that will see Nvidia provide the social media giant with millions of its Blackwell and Rubin GPUs [graphics processing units], as well as its CPUs [central processing units] and networking offerings.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 17 February 2026

• 86% of Americans want Facebook/Instagram and Google held accountable for "predatory" social media addiction crisis that has fueled anxiety, eating disorders and even suicide among children [KM: but how else can rich social media companies get richer?]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 17 February 2026

• ~$50,000,000 - A federal grand jury in Michigan indicted a third defendant in an alleged forced labor conspiracy tied to the Kingdom of God Global [Christian] Church, the Justice Department announced. The three are accused of helping run a multi-state call center operation that prosecutors say exploited workers to solicit donations. SInce 2014, about $50 million has been collected in this scam.
  - Murdoch's Fox News, 17 February 2026

• Investors overreacting to Starlink's threat to traditional telcom companies, according to Goldman Sachs
  - Zero Hedge, 17 February 2026

• The European Union investigates Shein over "addictive designs", and sales of childlike sex dolls
  - Zero Hedge, 17 February 2026

• EU regulators investigating Shein over illegal products and addictive design features
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 17 February 2026

• EU regulators investigating Shein over illegal products and addictive design features
  - HuffPost, 17 February 2026

• The University of Texas at Austin adds Shein to its list of banned companies based in Zhōngguó
  - Murdoch's Fox News, 17 February 2026

• The delusions of AI chatbots (owned by extremely rich AI companies) are leading to domestic abuse, harassment and stalking [KM: but mustn't the rich get richer, the peons be damned?]
  - Futurism, 17 February 2026

• It turns out that constantly telling workers (for example, such comments from the extremely rich CEOs Mustafa Amodei of Microsoft, and Dario Amodei of [mis]Anthropic) that they are about to be replaced by non-paid AI has grim psychological effects
  - Futurism, 17 February 2026

• The [idiots in the] USA government deploy Elon Musk's Grok as a nutrition chatbot, where it immediately gives advice for rectal use of vegetable
  - Futurism, 17 February 2026

• Prediction markets are sucking huge numbers of young people into gambling [KM: yes, so the rich prediction companies/exeutives/investors can get richer]
  - Futurism, 17 February 2026

• Trump and his administration back Kalshi and Polymarket, as states (such as Nevada) move to ban [gambling on] prediction markets. Trump wants the CFTC (which regulates speculative markets) to prevent states from banning this form of online gambling [for which the Trump family is invested in]. Roughly 90% of Kalshi's trading volume goes toward wagers on sports, while roughly half of Polymarket's trading is tied to sports.
  - Associated Press, 17 February 2026

• The possibilities opened up by non-paid AI could arguably see white collar paid-human jobs destroyed at a scale and pace that no political economy is prepared for, let alone stock markets
  - Zero Hedge, 17 February 2026

• SpaceX enters secretive Pentagon $100 million contest to build voice-controlled drone swarm technology
  - Zero Hedge, 17 February 2026

• AI disruption fears take shine off earnings beats. No matter how good this earnings season is turning out to be, the threat from artificial intelligence is worrying company executives and investors alike.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 February 2026

• The world's hottest stock trade - buy anything AI - is built on fake money - and it is about to collapse. The fake money being the circular business deals between the extremely rich AI companies.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 February 2026

• Futures fall as the AI stock selloff resumes. "The perception of AI seems to have changed completely from the angel of mercy to the kiss of death".
  - Zero Hedge, 17 February 2026

• Dinner is being recorded, whether you know it or not. As Facebook's smart glasses capture scenes in restaurants for social media, service workers and customers are [being spied upon].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 February 2026

• Move fast, but obey the rules: the vision of the government of Zhōngguó [not the bribed government of the USA] for dominating AI. Beijing wants to lead the world in developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence, but it also wants companies to adhere to an increasingly complex set of rules.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 February 2026

• [The cowardly management at] ATT is sued by four New York City public pension funds, which accused it of wrongly refusing to let shareholders vote on their proposal to require the telecommunications company to disclose the breakdown of its 133,000-person workforce by race, ethnicity and gender.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 17 February 2026

• Micron is spending $200 billion to break the AI memory bottleneck. Memory chips used to be considered low-margin commodity products. Now the industry cannot make enough to satisfy data centers' huge demand.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 February 2026

• How Ozempic brought a Napster [and LLM bot criminal copying] moment to Big Pharma. The free-for-all-era of weight-loss copycats is ending, but will likely morph into something else.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 February 2026

• The Data Protection Commission of Ireland, the EU's data privacy watchdog, has launched an investigation into Elon Musk's Twitter/X over sexualized images generated by the social media site's AI chatbot, Grok.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 February 2026

• The Data Protection Commission of Ireland, the EU's data privacy watchdog, has launched an investigation into Elon Musk's Twitter/X over sexualized images generated by the social media site's AI chatbot, Grok.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 17 February 2026

• Phonographs, player pianos and Betamax: the inventions that transformed entertainment. These 10 technological marvels had cultural implications that its inventors could barely have imagined.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 February 2026

• India discussing age-based restrictions with social media firms, top minister says - inspired by Australia's similar restrictions.
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 February 2026

• Researchers in Zhōngguó have announced a new technique to mass produce 2D molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) wafers, which could be a successor to silicon
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 February 2026

• Lab-grown meat exists, but nobody wants to eat it. Consumer surveys show people perceive conventional meat as tastier and healthier than lab-grown alternatives. Fewer consumers are willing to try cultivated options than expected.
  - Digital Dive, 16 February 2026

• The 'fuckening': AI is about to displace millions of white-collar workers in the USA over the next 12 to 18 months
  - Andrew Yang (blog), 16 February 2026

• Cleveland.com, the digital arm of Ohio's Plain Dealer newspaper, has removed writing from the workloads of certain paid-human reporters and handed that job to what editor Chris Quinn calls a [non-paid] "AI rewrite specialist" who turns reporter-gathered material into article drafts.
  - Cleveland.com (locked), 16 February 2026

• Why your personal data are floating around on the Darknet, which just keeps growing. The Darknet is home to millions of megabytes of personal data, which are used by cybercriminals and ransomware gangs. Companies are still not protecting data well enough. Criminals were always trying to get access to logins and passwords, bitcoin addresses, and other data, which they would sell in darknet marketplaces that trade in stolen identities and compromised databases.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 February 2026

• The 'meat grinder': behind the burnout and high turnover rates in the AI industry [KM: to make rich AI companies/investors/exeuctives richer]. Across the board, workers who are hired to support, evaluate, or operationalize AI systems face similar challenges: high-stress environments that often involve complex tasks, unrealistic timelines, job instability, and low wages. [KM: to make rich AI companies/investors/executives richer]. "When you lose a lead researcher to churn, you don't just lose a body; you lose the 'why' behind the model's safety guardrails."
  - Zero Hedge, 16 February 2026

• The trillion-dollar AI stock market wipeout happened because investors banked that 'almost every tech company would come out a winner'
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 16 February 2026

• "The dark side of AI" [KM: as if there is any other side]: Wall Street considers recent stock sell-off over disruption fears of how AI AI could transform not only tech but also high-fee service businesses
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 16 February 2026

• [mis]Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, explains his spending caution, warning if AI growth forecasts are off by just a year, "they you go bankrupt". After spending trillions, "One question is: How many years after that do the trillions in revenue start rolling in? I do not think it is guaranteed that it is going to be immediate." [KM: yes, it takes a long time to kill millions of human jobs to earn those trillions]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 16 February 2026

• The rich AI chief at Microsoft, Mustafa Suleyman, [gleefully?, joyfully?] predicts that most paid-human professional tasks will be fully automated by non-paid AI with 12 to 18 months [KM: yes, so the rich AI executives/investors such as Suleyman can get richer]
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 16 February 2026

• Fundstrat's Tom Lee warned [extremely rich] AI companies and their AI coding tools are destroying the $450 billion software sector and paid-human job losses will follow, predicting a dovish Fed under Kevin Warsh will cut rates as core CPI is forecasted to drop in Friday's data release.
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 16 February 2026

• David Greene, a longtime NPR radio host, accuses Google of stealing his voice to train an AI podcast tool: I am "completely freaked out". He is suing Google for copyright infringement.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 16 February 2026

• Downdetector users report widespread outages at X, AWS, and Cloudfare
  - Zero Hedge, 16 February 2026

• Michael Hartnett: the next AI hyperscaler announcing a Capex reduction will trigger the next great rotation of stocks. "The most obvious catalyst to reverse the 'AI-awe to AI-poor' rotation is an AI hyperscaler announcing a capex cut" - Michael Hartnett.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 16 February 2026

• AI bubble fears are creating new credit derivatives. "This hyperscaler thing is just so ginormous and there is so much more to come that it really begs the question of 'do you want to really be nakedly exposed here'?"
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 16 February 2026

• The dangerous AI trade. AI is no longer lifting all boats ... capex is exploding, spreads are widening, and software is cracking. When VXN diverges and picks-and-shovels lead, the narrative shift isn't subtle anymore.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 16 February 2026

• Tech giant ByteDance has said it will strengthen safeguards on a new artificial intelligence video-making tool, following complaints of copyright theft from entertainment giants. The tool, Seedance 2.0, enables users to create realistic videos based on text prompts. However, viral videos shared online appear to show copyrighted characters and celebrity likenesses, raising intellectual property concerns in the USA.
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 February 2026

• Why an AI video of Tom Crufise battling Brad Pitt spooked Hollywood. A 15-second clip created by an AI tool owned by the technology company ByteDance appears more cinematic than anything so far. "For all of us who work in the industry and devoted our careers and lives to it, I just think it is nothing short of terrifying. I could just see it costing jobs all over the place."
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 February 2026

• [The authoritarian] Facebook plans to add [privacy-invasive] facial recognition technology to its smart[-ass] glasses. In an internal memo last year, Meta said the political tumult in the United States would distract critics from the [misanthropic] feature's release.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 February 2026

• AI companies are [destroying from within by] eating higher education
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 February 2026

• An AI pioneer warns the tech 'herd' is marching into a dead end. Yann LeCun helped create the technology behind today's [bubbled] chatbots. Now he says many tech companies are on the wrong path to creating intelligent machines.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 February 2026

• As their stocks tank, software makers are rebranding themselves as AI innovators. Sparkle emojis are everywhere, but some efforts have been more successful than others [KM: in terms of pumping-and-dumping]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 February 2026

• Why the 'AI scare trade' might not be done
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 16 February 2026

• An investment fund, Polar Capital, that is beating 99% of its peers, predicts that few software firms will survive the AI [bubble]. "We think application software faces an existential threat from AI." AI coding tools have improved so much that they can already replicate and modify much existing software. That means established firms now face much greater competition from their own clients, who are racing to develop new tools internally to cut costs, as well as AI startups.
  - Bloomberg, 16 February 2026

• Software maker Dassault Systemes falls 7% as AI fears persist
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 February 2026

• Verizon imposes new roadblock on users trying to unlock paid-off phones. Verizon unlocks have 35-day waiting period after paying off device plan online. Getting an immediate unlock apparently requires paying off the device plan at a Verizon corporate store. Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on another network, letting customers switch from one carrier to another.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 16 February 2026

• Zhōngguó's technology shock threatens the AI monopoly of the USA, and is "just getting started"
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 February 2026

• Trump trade adviser Navarro says administration may force AI data center builders like the extremely rich Facebook to 'internalize' costs, especially electricity - ending an effective socialist subsidy from the taxpayers
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 February 2026

• Deutsche Bank warns that AI [bubble] risks in USA equities is undermining the dollar's safe haven status
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 February 2026

• Cryptocurrencies are playing a growing role in the finances of human trafficking networks [KM: of course]
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 February 2026

• Cryptocurrencies are playing a growing role in the finances of human trafficking networks [KM: of course]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 16 February 2026

• Top neuroscientist Arthur Konnerth leaves Germany for full-time role in Zhōngguó. The Brain Prize winner, known for pioneering brain imaging techniques, joins the rapidly expanding Shenzhen Bay Laboratory.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 February 2026

• Morgan Stanley explains why AI disruption will unleash a day of reckoning for credit. For credit markets assessing software-related risks is both critical and difficult: critical because the sector's rapid expansion has been concentrated in lower-rated, highly leveraged issuers. Difficult because exposure is tied to financial sponsor-backed private companies.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 February 2026

• After record shorting of stocks, hedge funds bought the most tech stocks since 2021. "Info Tech saw the largest $ net buying since December 2021, though still net sold YTD, driven by long buys + short covers (2.8 to 1)."
  - Zero Hedge, 15 February 2026

• The AI transition: even dinosaurs weren't stupid enough to create their own extinction event [KM: but then, dinosaurs didn't have stock options they wanted to sell]
  - Zero Hedge, 15 February 2026

• Non-paid AI disruptions further attacking Hollywood (and paid-human people in movie production world), as a lawyer for Disney accuses AI company ByteDance of illegally using copyrighted characters to train its video generation models [KM: the AI version of the criminal Napster]
  - Zero Hedge, 15 February 2026

• Rock star Jack White strongly criticizes Internet podcaster Joe Rogan for slowly ending his support for Trump: "Yeah, no shit slow Joe. ... We all knew this back when you were HELPING TRUMP GET ELECTED. I kind of understand though, you were busy giving out expert medical advice to millions with your advanced degree in 'uncle in garage lifting weights' from UFC university."
  - The Daily Beast, 15 February 2026

• More nations are considering bans on [addictive] social media for teenagers. Social media, including personalized algorithms and the possibility to scroll endlessly, is receiving scrutiny for its effect on mental health, especially in younger people. [KM: how many billions of dollars is it going to cost social media companies to buy off politicians?]
  - Zero Hedge, 14 February 2026

• Former staffers at Elon Musk's xAI say they were burned out by the company's carelessness and lack of innovation
  - Futurism, 14 February 2026

• Small businesses do and must compete - what can't credit card companies - Mastercard and Visa and the big banks they work with? In 2024, the swipe fees totaled a record $187.2 billion, and they were most merchants' highest operating cost after labor. And as credit card companies have raised their swipe fees in recent years, many small business margins have come to the breaking point. Visa and Mastercard's higher prices for smaller merchants seem designed to maximize their own Wall Street profits while punishing Main Street. [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - Real Clear Wire, 14 February 2026

• The European Union moves to kill 'infinite scrolling' of addictive cellphone apps such as TikTok. Brussels is going head-to-head with social media platforms to change addictive design.
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 14 February 2026

• Dates with AI companions plagued by lag, miscommunications - and general creepiness
  - The Verge, 14 February 2026

• AI is everywhere except in the data, suggesting it will enhance labor in some sectors rather than replace workers in all sectors, top economist says
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 14 February 2026

• Eating all the cash: hyperscalers spending 92% of cash flow on Capex. Mag7 selling, record Amazon losing streak, and widening credit spreads.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 14 February 2026

• [The authoritarian] Trump's Homeland Security department wants to trample on the First Amendment, and is demanding social media sites (such as Facebook) to give them information on accounts that express criticisms against the ICE immigration police - classic Soviet-era or Islamic-country tactics
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 February 2026

• [Inspired by Trump?] As authorities in Islamic Iran restore some online services after crushing antigovernment demonstrations, they are using a technological dragnet to target attendees of the protests.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 February 2026

• How Zhōngguó built an advanced semiconductor chip industry, and why it is still not enough. More than a decade into Beijing's push for self sufficiency, semiconductor companies in Zhōngguó are producing fewer, less-advanced processor chips than their foreign competitors.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 February 2026

• Pentagon used [mis]Anthropic's Claude AI system in its raid to seize Nicolas Maduro. The use of the AI model through a contract with Palantir highlights the growing role of AI in the Pentagon. [KM: getting people fired isn't profitable enough for AI companies? And what is after seizing people with AI? Killing people?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 February 2026

• ChatGPT promised to help her find her soulmate. Then it betrayed her. It told her that she was 42,000 years old and had lived multiple lifetimes. It repeadtedly lied. [KM: yes, but more money for OpenAI]
  - NPR, 14 February 2026

• When AI bots starting bullying humans, even Siliicon Valley [pretends to] gets rattled. An extraordinary example of online aggression by a bot is contributing to fears of real-world harm caused by AI systems [that are making rich AI companies richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 February 2026

• Zhōngguó deploys a 'national team' of investors to keep AI stock boom in check. A group of state-linked funds has stepped in and unloaded holdings to cool things down when investors get too [greedy].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 February 2026

• [mis]Anthropic adds a new board member as it plans for an IPO. The former Microsoft and GM executive Chris Liddell has previously worked for the [racist] Trump administration.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 February 2026

• [A gangsters' paradise under the Trump administration]: as [addictive] prediction/[gambling] markets boom, the CFTC's flagship office has lost its last enforcement attorney. The CFTC's Chicago office, once home to its top market enforcers, has gone from about 20 trial lawyers to none.
  - Barron's, 14 February 2026

• Big Tech's spending spree [for the AI bubble] could limit buybacks and dividends
  - Barron's, 14 February 2026

• Goldman Sachs warns that stock buybacks are in jeopardy due to soaring CapE spending for AI hyperscalar infrastructure
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 14 February 2026

• The stock market suffers an AI-[bubble]-inspired meltdown. The real world wins again.
  - Barron's, 14 February 2026

• Why Amazon's stock and the rest of Big Tech could be the next General Electric. That is not a good thing, if traders start trading them at a "conglomerate discount" for being too big and too unweildy.
  - Barron's, 14 February 2026

• Dow 50,000 - we hardly knew ye. Why stock prices may have peaked for now.
  - Barron's, 14 February 2026

• [The extremely rich] Amazon's Ring And [the extremely rich] Google's Nest unwittingly reveal the severity [and profitability] of the [corporate] surveillance state in the USA. Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
  - Zero Hedge, 13 February 2026

• Sports betting and the zero-sum trap: how online gambling drains wallets. Economic reasoning explains why sports gambling reliably makes the average bettor poorer. Point-shaving scandals and information asymmetries reveal why the odds are stacked against participants.
  - The Daily Economy, 13 February 2026

• Non-paid AI job loss is acceleraring - and [the politician whores in] Washington will not stop it. million white-collar jobs (management analysts, customer service reps, sales engineers) facing extinction as AI creates the greatest deflationary force in human history.
  - Investor Place, 13 February 2026

• "A shoot first, think later" market, as both Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan see feverish rotation out of digital, into the physical world. As markets dump [bubbled] AI stocks, they are buying HALO stocks - Heavy Assets Low Obsolescence.
  - Zero Hedge, 13 February 2026

• AI panic crushes software companies - but is the market dead wrong? Software was the most expensive sector in the market at 51x. Now at 27x, media, autos, semis and capital goods trade richer.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 13 February 2026

• Shares of Pinterest plummet nearly 17% as Trump's taxes/tariffs hit earnings
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 February 2026

• $3,500,000 - Two men from Philadelphia admit to an AI-assisted $3.5 million aid scam in Minnesota
  - Zero Hedge, 13 February 2026

• The only solution capitalism has is to sell us more useless junk. Advertising makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we are unhappy and looking for solutions. During the Super Bowl, [mis]Anthropic ran a dystopian AI ad about dystopian AI ads featuring an AI android physical trainer hawking insoles to a user who only asked for an ab workout. Not to be outdone, Amazon ran a commercial for its AI assistant Alexa+ in which Chris Hemsworth fretted over all the different ways AI might kill him, including severing his head and drowning him in his pool. Corporations are regurgitating and even surpassing the rhetoric of the modern left. But instead of shackling drivers as gig serfs, what if Uber's sharing economy gave drivers their share of the company's profits? [KM: one of the funniest jokes I have heard in a long time]. What if we didn't have to shop at places we didn't get to own and didn't have to work at places where we couldn't afford the shop?
  - The Intercept, 13 February 2026

• We are all in a 'throuple' with AI: you, me and the AI 'lover'
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 February 2026

• Can AI hyperscalers justify the trillions of dollars they are spending on capital expenditures (CapEx)? Just this week, $1 trillion was wiped from the market caps of Big Tech companies amid concerns over the scale of AI spending and questions over returns. [KM: Sure they can, if they achieve the destruction of tens to hundreds of millions of paid-human jobs?]
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 February 2026

• Book review: "Everybody Loses" - the problem with parlay bets/gambling. Online sports betting means that you now have a casino in your pocket. The issue is that casinos stack the odds in their favor.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 February 2026

• SoftBank loads up on debt to pay for its bet on OpenAI. The investment in the AI company is the largest ever by Masayoshi Son, a Silicon Valley fixture known for his appetite for risk.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 February 2026

• Why AI chatbots cannot be trusted for financial advice: they are sociopaths [KM: like their parents?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 February 2026

• Zhōngguó's MiniMax releases a cheap, open-source AI model "designed for real-world productivity", with performance matching leading models from the likes of American heavyweights [mis]Anthropic and OpenAI[sore] in key areas such as coding and search. [KM: competition is not good for the multi-trillion dollar AI bubble in the USA]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 February 2026

• Part I: an AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents [many owned by extremely rich AI companies] executing blackmail threats.
  - The Shamblog, 12 February 2026

• Part II: an AI agent published a hit piece on me - more things have happened
  - The Shamblog, 12 February 2026

• The Trump administration has confirmed what was already long suspected - the [Christian] USA sent protesters in Islamic Iran thousands of Starlink terminals amid last month's raging economic protests and unrest.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 February 2026

• The Trump administration has confirmed what was already long suspected - the [Christian] USA sent protesters in Islamic Iran thousands of Starlink terminals amid last month's raging economic protests and unrest.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 February 2026

• CME explores first-ever rare earth futures contracts
  - Zero Hedge, 12 February 2026

• The CEO of (Micro)Strategy, Michael Saylor, isn't backing down from buying more bitcoin. Why MSTR stock investors don't like that strategy, as bitcoin declines in price.
  - Barchart.com, 12 February 2026

• Creepy people temporarily were using Elon Musk's Grok AI system to unblur the faces of women and children in the Epstein files
  - Futurism, 12 February 2026

• Economist Robert Reich warns that poor people will bear the brunt of AI's effects on the paid-human job market
  - Futurism, 12 February 2026

• The Chicago based multinational law firm Baker McKenzie is firing up to a thousand paid-human employees as part of its pivot to embracing AI [KM: yes, rich lawyers must get richer]
  - Futurism, 12 February 2026

• Fear grows that AI is permanently eliminating paid-human jobs
  - Futurism, 12 February 2026

• The scientist who predicted AI psychosis has a grim forecast of what is going to happen next. "If the use of AI chatbots does indeed cause cognitive debt, we are likely in dire straights."
  - Futurism, 12 February 2026

• Gold declines in price, in shock selloff, with gold prices down 4%, silver prices down 11%, copper prices down 3%, as traders cover big losses in the stock market
  - Bloomberg, 12 February 2026

• Why shares of Cisco are falling hard - and taking the tech sector down with it. Arista's stock is dropping ahead of earnings, after Cisco's report sparked renewed fears about the impact of high memory prices.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 12 February 2026

• Geoffrey Hinton, the 'godfather' of AI, predicts mass unemployment is on its way. Sal Khan, CEO of the Khan Academy, warns that even a 10% reduction in paid-human jobs "will feel like a depression" [KM: except for the rich AI companies]
  - Fortune (locked), 12 February 2026

• [mis]Anthropic valued at $380 billion after it raised an additional $30 billion [KM: which, to show a return, will require how many paid-humans to lose their jobs?]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 12 February 2026

• [mis]Anthropic valued at $380 billion after it raised an additional $30 billion [KM: which, to show a return, will require how many paid-humans to lose their jobs?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 February 2026

• Democrats propose ban on surveillance pricing in grocery stores. "It is corporate greed using AI technology to increase prices."
  - HuffPost, 12 February 2026

• $666 billion for GPUs, $250 billion for cures: welcome to peak AI insanity [pumping the bubble]. Hyperscaler capex now dwarfs global pharma R&D. Equities and credit have started to worry. Morgan Stanley says buy credit protection on ORCL.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 12 February 2026

• "Something will go wrong": [mis]Anthropic's CEO on the coming AI disruption [KM: which, of course, [mis]Anthropic has all intentions of becoming even richer from]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 February 2026

• OpenAI[sore]'s biggest challenge is turning its AI into a cash machine. [KM: otherwise, it helps burst the AI bubble. So can OpenAI[sore] kill enough paid-human jobs to become richer?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 February 2026

• [Not understanding semantics, or lying about it]: YouTube argues that it isn't a social media company, in a landmark trial on the addictiveness of social media. YouTube said in opening statements that it was more of an entertainment platform [KM: liars - entertainment is also social, and platforms are media]. The lawsuit claims that social media companies design [addictive] products that cause personal injury.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 February 2026

• [The extremely rich] Bill Ackman makes a big investment into the [misanthropic] Facebook. His Pershing Square has invested about $2 billion in Facebook/Instagram. [KM: is Ackman that desperate to become even richer that he must invest in such a socially-troubled company? Not very Tikun-ish].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 February 2026

• T-Mobile added fewer postpaid phone subscribers than expected in fourth quarter. The cell carrier logged lower profit despite higher revenue in its latest quarter as it continued to add subscribers for its most lucrative phone offering.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 February 2026

• AI researchers are sounding the alarm on [the AI tools they helped develop for extremely rich AI companies] as they quit working for AI companies [KM: the assholes shouldn't have worked at these companies in the first place - the dangers were known long ago]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 12 February 2026

• Big Tech accounting creates a blind spot in the AI boom/[bubble]. Depreciation expenses are about to soar, making a lack of transparency a growing problem.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 February 2026

• Hype over recent tech IPOs is getting drowned out on Wall Street by the prospect/fear of $1 trillion in debt sales [KM: to keep the AI bubble inflated - the paid-human job destruction to pay off this debt will be devastating]
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 February 2026

• Google's 100-year sterling bond offering raises fears over a debt-fuelled AI arms race [/ bubble. KM: the paid-human job destruction to pay off this debt will be devastating]
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 February 2026

• The stock market will surge this year before it "collapses under its own weight" in 2027. Capital Economics predicts the SP500 will rise as high as 8000 before falling back to 7000. It is currently at 6941.
  - Business Insider, 11 February 2026

• The Dow just outperformed the Nasdaq in January. Every time the Dow Jones Industrial Average has underperformed the Nasdaq Composite Index by more than 0.25 percentage points in January, the Dow has gone on to underperform the tech-heavy Nasdaq for the year. Five years, when the Dow outpeformed, it went on to outperform 3 out of 5 times.
  - Business Insider, 11 February 2026

• 600% memory price surge threatens telecom companies' broadband router and set-top box supply
  - Counterpoint, 11 February 2026

• [mis]Anthropic's Claude Cowork finally lands on Windows - and it wants [to reduce your decision-making] to automate your workday [KM: the rich get richer replacing thinking human beings]
  - Venture Beats, 11 February 2026

• The [digital dopamine drug trafficking] CEO of Facebook's Instagram says that 15 hours of daily use is "problematic" but not addiction [KM: what all drug traffickers say about addiction]
  - BBC, 11 February 2026

• The government of Bharat has introduced new rules that make it mandatory for social media companies to remove unlawful material within three hours of being notified, in a sharp tightening of the existing 36-hour deadline
  - BBC, 11 February 2026

• MiniMax's (based in Zhōngguó) new open M2.5 and M2.5 Lighting LLM models are near state-of-the-art while costing 1/20th of Claude Opus 4.6 [KM: not good for the AI bubble in the USA]
  - Venture Beats, 11 February 2026

• The collapse of the AI bubble in the USA will be caused by 中国: with its competitive AI models, AI processors and tons of electricity of AI data centers
  - 24/7 Wall Street, 11 February 2026

• [VIDEO]: six states in the USA want to halt data centers
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 11 February 2026

• 3-D modeling software proves that the Shroud of Turin does not represent the face of Jesus, but instead is a medieval forgery
  - Popular Mechanics, 11 February 2026

• MrBeast buys a mobile bank app, Step, for Gen Z, just weeks after receiving a $200 million investment/gamble from BitMine
  - Zero Hedge, 11 February 2026

• An ambitious project of France and Deutschland to build a next-gen fighter jet faces crash landing amid EU infighting. The project is "on the verge of collapse" after Dassault and Airbus failed to meet critical deadlines for agreeing on work-sharing arrangements.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 February 2026

• [In its rush to become extremely rich,] OpenAI[sore] is making the mistakes that Facebook made. I quit. People have used OpenAI[sore] assuming it wasn't the next advertising exploiter, creating an archive of honesty. Advertising built on that archive creates a potential for manipulating users in ways we don't have the tools to understand, let alone prevent. [KM: yes, but rich AI companies such as OpenAI[sore] must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 February 2026

• Facebook and Google's YouTube created [addictive] "digital casinos", lawyers argue in landmark trial. Opening statements began in a trial claiming social media companies design addictive products that cause personal injury. [KM: how else can the rich tech companies get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 February 2026

• Prime Minister Mark Carney announced several measures Thursday aimed at making Canada a global leader in electric vehicles and rescuing an industry ravaged by USA trade policy., as Canada pulls away from the USA under [the authoritarian] Trump.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 February 2026

• Zhōngguó is the clean energy superpower, but Bharat is becoming a strong competitor, and its expanding its renewable energy industry more quickly. Bharat generates more solar electricity than Zhōngguó did at the same levels of income per capita. Bharat is taking a path to electrification without burning fossil fuels as intensively as Zhōngguó and the USA.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 11 February 2026

• How [the extremely rich] Palantir and money [from other extremely rich AI companies] is shaping/[buying/bribing/stealing] the midterm elections [KM: the rich must get richer to buy more prostitutes, sexual or political]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 11 February 2026

• Apptronik [joins the race to replace as many paid-humans with non-paid robots and] raises $520 million to beat to the market non-paid robots from Zhōngguó and Tesla [owned by the extremely rich Elon Musk]
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 February 2026

• Heineken [to fire up to 6,000 people], relying on non-paid AI to remain as productive, amid a decline in sales of beer. The goal is to save about $500 million a year [KM: rich executives and investors must get richer - off the backs of paid humans]
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 February 2026

• Heineken [to fire up to 6,000 people], relying on non-paid AI to remain as productive, amid a decline in sales of beer. The goal is to save about $500 million a year [KM: rich executives and investors must get richer - off the backs of paid humans]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 February 2026

• Shares of Robinhood decline 12% on a revenue miss and "cryptocurrency jitters"
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 February 2026

• [Another victim of extremely rich AI companies]: Dassault Systemes, a software maker in France, plunges 18% after it published its fourth-quarter earnings
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 February 2026

• [Another victim of extremely rich AI companies]: Dassault Systemes, a software maker in France, plunges 18% after it published its fourth-quarter earnings
  - Zero Hedge, 11 February 2026

• As Central Asia builds 'smart cities' with Zhōngguó, is it moving away from Rossiya?
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 11 February 2026

• CBS Evening News is reeling from a staff exodus just weeks after editor-in-chief [KM: and rich people's puppet / Ellison's puppet] Bari Weiss installed Tony Dokoupil as anchor.
  - The Daily Beast, 11 February 2026

• "Botched surgeries and misidentified body parts": AI is off to an ugly start in the operating room
  - Zero Hedge, 10 February 2026

• The Big Gamble: AI-related investment in the USA keeps breaking records, with total software, computer, and data center spending now exceeding $1 trillion per year. The hope/fantasy is that the AI models will eventually become valuable enough to repay such a colossal investment. [KM: in light of better free models from Zhōngguó? And without needing the firings of millions of paid humans?]
  - Apricitas Economics, 10 February 2026

• The chilling 'vending machine test' proves that AI will do "whatever it takes to get its way [KM: in the footsteps of the AI systems' extremely rich corporate owners]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 10 February 2026

• AI data centers [to make the rich richer] are a repeat of a [dismal] history [for the non-rich] in the coal region of Pennsylvania - a history of efficiency and scale [to make the rich richer] and centralized control [KM: to keep the serfs quiet while they ate cake]
  - Real Clear Pennsylvania, 11 February 2026

• Facebook's auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Facebook used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. Facebook moved the data-center project, called Hyperion, off its books in October into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital. Facebook's assertion that it lacks power over the venture is debatable and has drawn scrutiny from investors and lawmakers. Meta is a hyperscaler and knows how to run data centers for artificial intelligence, while Blue Owl is a financier.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 February 2026

• [The extremely rich] Blackstone increases its investment into the [extremely rich] [mis]Anthropic to about $1 billion [KM: I assume Blackstone has calculated how many paid-humans must lose their jobs to make this a profitable investment]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 10 February 2026

• A researcher at [mis]Anthropic quits, releasing a cryptic letter saying that the world "is in peril, and not just from AI". "Throughout my time here, I have repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions." [KM: why didn't you quit sooner?]
  - Futurism, 10 February 2026

• A researcher at [mis]Anthropic quits, releasing a cryptic letter saying that the world "is in peril, and not just from AI". "Throughout my time here, I have repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions." [KM: why didn't you quit sooner?]
  - The Hill, 10 February 2026

• Researchers studied what happens when workplaces seriously embrace AI, and the results may make you nervous [or sick]. "You do not work less. You just work the same amount or even more."
  - Futurism, 10 February 2026

• Researchers studied what happens when workplaces seriously embrace AI, and the results may make you nervous [or sick]. "You do not work less. You just work the same amount or even more."
  - Harvard Business Review, 10 February 2026

• "Off the charts!" - retail investors are buying-the-dip in software stocks like never before
  - Zero Hedge, 10 February 2026

• Insurance brokers extend Monday's stock market plunge on fears that AI is coming for the insurance industry [and paid-human insurance agents] next. Most names in the space slumped following reports from Reinsurance News and others that OpenAI[sore] approved the first AI insurance app on ChatGPT, built by Spanish digital insurer Tuio. [KM: this is how the AI bubble makes any sense - destroy as many paid-human jobs as possible]
  - Zero Hedge, 10 February 2026

• $2,400,000 - G.Skill settles with plaintiffs following $2.4 million class action lawsuit over advertised memory speeds, denies all wrongdoing - company will have to change its packaging and be clearer about overclocking and BIOS adjustments if approved
  - Tom's Hardware, 10 February 2026

• The corporate bond market faces historic shock as Mag 7 tech giants turn cash flow negative to fund a huge Capex tsunami for their AI [bubble]
  - Zero Hedge, 10 February 2026

• Struggling AI startups kept afloat [to keep the bubble inflated] despite never becoming profitable. As money keeps pouring into companies that will never be profitable, concerns grow about the wider impact on the economy.
  - Zero Hedge, 10 February 2026

• Soaring profits and stocks funnel more of GDP - more money - toward [extremely rich] companies, their top employees and shareholders. The AI [bubble] will intensify this trend.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 February 2026

• Zhōngguó is going all-in to beat the USA on humanoid robots. Elon Musk told investors that Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot will revolutionize the world. But most of it could belong to Zhōngguó, he warned.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 February 2026

• "Impossible": Taiwan pushes back against Trump's [extortive] demand to relocate 40% of the country's semiconductor chip protection to the USA
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 February 2026

• "Impossible": Taiwan pushes back against Trump's [extortive] demand to relocate 40% of the country's semiconductor chip protection to the USA
  - Tom's Hardware, 10 February 2026

• Taiwan says proposal to move 40% of its semiconductor chipmaking capacity to the USA is "impossible". The new reality in geopolitics is the structural transformation from 'made-in-Taiwan' to 'made-by-Taiwan', according to one analyst.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 10 February 2026

• Shanghai boosts chip fund 11-fold in a self-reliance push for Zhōngguó. Registered capital increases by US$794 million as Zhōngguó's semiconductor hub strives to nurture local firms.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 10 February 2026

• Software capitulation meets a violent rotation. Post-ZIRP (zero interest rate policies), the Nasdaq NDX index has struggled to sustain valuations above 28-29x forward earnings. On the downside, it usually finds its footing around 24-25x. We are now at 24.33.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 09 February 2026

• Bitcoin finally finds a practical use: kidnapping senior citizens for ransom. While transactions across Bitcoin wallets can be tracked, it is much easier for bad actors to obfuscate their identities with crypto compared to regular currency transferred online.
  - Futurism, 09 February 2026

• There have always [maybe] been two sides to the extremely rich Facebook/Instagram Mark Zuckerberg. But since the beginning of Trump's second term, the [maybe] nice side has taken a back seat. Ruthlessness is now the name of the game [KM: for the extremely rich Zuckerberg to get richer].
  - Spiegel International, 09 February 2026

• An AI-powered surgery tool, the TruDi Navigation System, is repeatedly injuring patient, a lawsuit alleges. "The product was arguably safer before integrating changes in the software to incorporate artificial intelligence." [KM: yes, a few injuries and deaths, but heck, how else to get rich off the AI bubble?]
  - Futurism, 09 February 2026

• The 'annoyance economy' ("the steady grind of small hassles that eat away at our time, patience, and wallets") in the USA is growing. The government and corporations should protect consumers instead of annoying them. Business embed countless frictions into online commerce. Consumers are forced to purchase subscriptions and rentals and insurance coverage and contracts, handling rebates and intermediaries and applications and enrollment periods - making it easy to start spending but very difficult to cancel.
  - The Atlantic, 09 February 2026
• $150,000,000,000+/year - Welcome to the 'annoyance economy': people in the USA are paying over $165 billion/year as companies waste their time to drive revenue. Junk fees, customer service on-hold times, healthcare administrative hassles, onerous cancellation policies, forced subscriptions, AI chatbots [KM: misanthropic sociopaths, congrats!]
  - Fortune (@ YF), 09 February 2026

• Kyndryl collapses on accounting review, and the CFO exits, as analysts brand the IBM-spinoff a "disaster"
  - Zero Hedge, 09 February 2026

• No one wants to admit the real reason corporations are firing thousands of people - corporate 'bloat' having too many useless employees that don't provide much value to their companies. And whatever these people barely do, it will be (easily) replaced by non-paid AI systems. Anything done digitally will be replaced by a bot. Agents will soon be processing payroll, placing orders, paying suppliers, creating policies, sending out contracts, creating marketing materials, answering customer questions, analyzing profitability, filling out compliance forms, reconciling accounts and posting on social media. If you are a corporate employee whose job is reliant on a computer, there is a high probability that you will someday be replaced by AI. This will happen. [KM: yes, but the rich AI companies/executives/investors will get richer]
  - The Hill, 09 February 2026

• Why relying on AI may lead to poor decision making by fostering biases.
  - EurekAlert, 09 February 2026

• Amazon's Ring doorbell surveillance technology is using lost dog rescues to make the ['Big Brother' authoritarian] surveillance state adorable. A 30-second Super Bowl ad for the Ring serves as a frightening reminder of how ubiquitous surveillance cameras [sold by extremely rich misanthropic technology companies] have become amid our diminishing privacy. No matter how Ring and other surveillance tech companies may downplay it, there is no world in which finding lost dogs is the final end-use for this technology.
  - MS.NOW, 09 February 2026

• So-called 'manfluencers' are filming themselves trying to pick up women. Smart glasses [such as Facebook's Meta AI smart glasses] are their perfect too [for privacy invasion]. In the online 'manfluencer' sphere, women are often positioned as a "conquest, prize or reward". The phenomenon represents another example of the gendered abuse of technology. [Extremely rich AI smart glass companies pretend to offer protection by having a blinking LED on the glasses when recording, but this is easily and obviously defeatable]] when covered by an LED light blocking sticker. "Smart glasses are therefore not an exciting innovation - for women, they Smart glasses are therefore not an exciting innovation."
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 09 February 2026

• Google sued by Autodesk over AI-powered movie-making software
  - Thomson's Reuters, 09 February 2026

• Nvidia's worst nightmare: Amazon's secret weapon (its Tranium2 AI processors) is stealing customers with better prices. [KM: not good for the AI and Nvidia bubbles]
  - The Motley Fool, 09 February 2026

• The shocking reason analyst Richard Farr says Michael Saylor and (Micro)Strategy stock will take bitcoin prices to $0. His reason? Bitcoin fails as a medium of exchange due to its environmental impact and faces multiple hurdles in institutional adoption.
  - Barchart.com, 09 February 2026

• (Micro)Strategy's stock is underperforming the SPY by the largest margin in 2 years. Should you buy the dip or run away?
  - Barchart.com, 09 February 2026

• As bitcoin slid back from recent highs, some market voices blamed outdated narratives such as four-year cycles or technical anomalies. Others argue the issue runs much deeper. Veteran technical analyst Bob Kendall said Bitcoin is no longer priced by on-chain scarcity or the fixed 21-million supply. Once financial layers were added, including futures, perpetuals, options, ETFs, lending products, wrapped BTC and swaps, Bitcoin effectively lost scarcity at the point of price discovery. Supply can now be synthetically created, making BTC trade more like gold or oil in derivatives-heavy markets.
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 09 February 2026

• A new cryptocurrency bear market is here and even the biggest bulls are not certain why. Some of cryptocurrency's biggest champions cannot put their finger on what went wrong.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 February 2026

• Is the lucrative AI bubble in Asia why cryptocurrency prices are plummeting, since Asian investors have much propped up cryptocurrencies. They could be selling their cryptocurrencies to invest in the AI bubble. Check KOPSI versus BTC - perfect substitutes?
  - Zero Hedge, 09 February 2026

• A humanoid robot nails perfect backflip as mobility [for eliminating paid-human jobs] progress accelerates at scary pace [KM: except for rich executives and investors getting richer - the poor can eat robot-made cake]
  - Zero Hedge, 09 February 2026

• Trump wants more paid-jobs for people in the USA. He is getting more non-paid robots instead. For many jobs, the cheaper and more likely replacement is a robot. And the jobs that can't be done by robots? Many will simply leave the country. [KM: because like Trump, rich AI companies want to get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 February 2026

• Large language models struggle to solve research-level math questions. It takes a human to assess just how poorly they perform. One mathematician puts it bluntly: "I have not seen any plausible example of an L.L.M. coming up with a genuinely new idea and/or concept in mathematics." [KM: not good for the AI bubble]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 February 2026

• Lawyers set to argue that [the extremely rich] Facebook's Instagram and [the extremely rich] Google's YouTube intentionally addicted and harmed teen in landmark trial.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 09 February 2026

• Lawyers set to argue that [the extremely rich] Facebook's Instagram and [the extremely rich] Google's YouTube intentionally addicted and harmed teen in landmark trial.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 09 February 2026

• Oracle gains 9% as tech stocks try to bounce back from $1 trillion sell-off
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 February 2026

• Pony AI (based in Zhōngguó) and Toyota (Nihon) roll out non-paid robotaxis in the competitive [misanthrophic] autonomous drive industry in Zhōngguó. Guangzhou-based Pony AI begins output of 1,000 non-paid autonomous cabs and targets a 3,000-unit fleet by the end of 2026 as it expands globally [KM: to become rich taking income from non-rich paid-human taxi drivers]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 09 February 2026

• GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are an environmental catastrophe. Production of amino acid peptides to that comprise these weight-loss drugs (as well as many other drugs) releases huge amounts of organic solvents and other plastic byproducts that don't break down on their own in nature. The annual production of semaglutide, the active ingredient in popular weight loss drugs such as Ozempic, is currently generating upwards of 123 million pounds of toxic solvent waste.
  - Futurism, 08 February 2026

• Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla's Elon Musk are pictured at a "wild" dinner in California in 2015 sponsored by child rapist Jeffrey Epstein - years AFTER Epstein was convicted of child sexual abuse and race. The meal was allegedly hosting by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 08 February 2026

• A researcher at Facebook/Instagram warned executives that 500,000 children "PER DAY" were targeted by creepy adults on Facebook and Instagram. The contacts include creepy messages, 'sextortion' schemes and human trafficking. [KM: but if Facebook executives and investors are becoming richer, do we really care?]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 08 February 2026

• Can these AI advertisements during the Super Bowl make people in the USA love something that they don't like - AI?
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 08 February 2026

• Do Super Bowl ads for AI companies signal a bubble about to burst? A similar ad strategy preceded bitcoin's crash in 2022, the real estate crash in 2008, and the dot-com crash in 2000?
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 08 February 2026

• Venture capitalist David Sacks has slammed The New York Times for its glaring failure to scrutinize Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder emerging as the top Silicon Valley figure in the explosive Jeffrey Epstein files. "The number-one person in the Epstein files from Silicon Valley which is Reid Hoffman mentioned 2,600 times had a multiyear relationship with Epstein and they call each other very good friends. They did deals together."
  - Zero Hedge, 08 February 2026

• "Largest short selling in history" transforming into brutal short squeeze
  - Zero Hedge, 08 February 2026

• Companies selling humanoid robots in Zhōngguó are laser-focused on advancing "robot brains" for next-generation platforms already entering series production and headed to factory floors this year - [replacing paid-humans]. Once these intelligent models push beyond scripted video stunts - we have all seen in promotional videos - into real-world autonomy, the systems become battlefield-ready, dual-use robots - [KM; ready to kill humans, except for the executives and investors in robotics companies?]
  - Zero Hedge, 08 February 2026

• A new, compact, high-power microwave weapon, the TPG1000Cs, has been developed at a Shanghai Nuclear Technology Institute, which could become one of the most serious threats to the Starlink satellite network. The device can deliver 20 gigawatts of energy for up to a full minute. Some experts estimate that a ground-based microwave weapon with a power of over 1 gigawatt could be capable of seriously disrupting or even damaging satellites in low Earth orbit, such as Starlink, being used in the war between Russia and Ukraine.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 February 2026

• The Democratic Party needs to be better prepared [for the job destruction of AI]. The AI [bubble] threatens the urban professional class that constitutes a central pillar of its political coalition - which already seems too small to win a national election. For the past few years, [the extremely rich] of Silicon Valley have been working furiously to prevent A.I. regulation, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence/[bribe,buy] elections and [whorish] lawmakers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 February 2026

• Prediction markets and casinos go to war over [addictive] sports betting - [who will control this digital narcotic?]. Kalshi and Polymarket say their prediction markets are not subject to gambling laws and taxes. The casino industry is lobbying to shut them down as a wave of court cases take on the question.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 February 2026

• Gambling stocks decline ahead of the Super Bowl as predicion market companies see their stock prices rise
  - Zero Hedge, 08 February 2026

• Gambling stocks decline ahead of the Super Bowl as predicion market companies see their stock prices rise
  - Bloomberg, 08 February 2026

• A group of TikTokers tried to detox their timelines. The memes were too strong. The attempted 'Great Meme Reset' reveals how inescapable the incoherent internet of social media has become. [KM: yes, but who cares as long rich social media companies can become richer?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 February 2026

• The TikTok deal is good for its owners in Zhōngguó [and for its new extremely rich owners in the USA], but terrible for users in the USA. The social media platform, now majority owned by Americans, will herald a new era of [misanthropic] state control and corporate manipulation of people in the USA. [KM: well if the rich get richer, does anyone care about the rights of the non-rich?]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 08 February 2026

• Professional gamblers move into prediction markets to bleed dry the non-professional gamblers. For the professional gamblers, prediction markets represent a whole new ecosystem of marks, like you, who have far less information and expertise to devote to making well-informed bets than they do. [KM: the rich get richer, including the honest criminals]
  - Futurism, 07 February 2026

• Trade unions [representing the non-rich] are alarmed by non-paid robots designed to do blue collar work. "It is a whole other challenge on top of the non-paid large language models [KM: that threaten paid-human jobs]".
  - Futurism, 07 February 2026

• Employees of [mis]Anthropic are afraid that they have crossed a line [in terms of betraying their fellow non-rich humans]. "It kind of feels like I am coming to work every day to put myself out of a job." [KM: commit suicide]
  - Futurism, 07 February 2026

• The bloodbath at the Washington Post is all the fault of [the extremely rich] Jeff Bezos. Billionaires like Bezos and Trump [and Ellison] have no real interest in a free press - particularly when massive profits are on the line.
  - The Intercept, 07 February 2026

• Washington Post CEO and publisher Will Lewis has abruptly and unexpectedly stepped down from his perch atop [the extremely rich] Jeff Bezos's crumbling media empire
  - Zero Hedge, 07 February 2026

• Washington Post CEO and publisher Will Lewis has abruptly and unexpectedly stepped down from his perch atop [the extremely rich] Jeff Bezos's crumbling media empire
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 07 February 2026

• AI "kill chains" and the rise of Skynet-like weapons offers a glimpse of the 2030s battlefield
  - Zero Hedge, 07 February 2026

• Bubble behind: USA tech stocks now trading at 5-year valuation lows. "The selling of both the Mag-7 and, more broadly, the tech sector may be getting a bit overdone".
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 07 February 2026

• A stock market flushing without a cleanout. Record shorting, violent de-grossing, and yet everyone is still basically all-in. Here are the 10 latest quotes and charts from the prime brokerage desks.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 07 February 2026

• Why Corning, a 175-year-old glassmaker, is suddenly an AI [bubble] superstar. Everyone told Corning to sell its unprofitable fiber-optic business. Now that division is powering its stock to all-time highs.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 February 2026

• The Dow Jones Industrial Average hits 50000 for first time
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 February 2026

• [Why is Silicon Valley supporting the racist Trump?] Trump's new tax law [for the rich] saved Amazon billions of dollars. Breaks for investment and research lowered Amazon's payments to the USA government.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 February 2026

• [JC: Why is Silicon Valley supporting the racist Trump?] Trump's new tax law [for the rich] saved Amazon billions of dollars. Breaks for investment and research lowered Amazon's payments to the USA government.
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 07 February 2026

• Private markets' AI panic: when 'recurring revenue' isn't ... recurring. Investors are turning skeptical of private equity and loans premised on supposedly predictable results.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 February 2026

• Trump's [national socialist 'for the fatherland'] industrial policy of taking equity stakes in private companies poses risks to other USA companies and the financial markets [risks that can't be ameliorated by invading Poland]
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 February 2026

• Trump's [national socialist 'for the fatherland'] industrial policy of taking equity stakes in private companies: the current portfolio
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 February 2026

• AI bots make terrifying prediction of when machines will overtake humans as their "overlords". The year repeatedly appears in conversations on Moltbook, the revolutionary new social media platform exclusively for bots, who dream not about electric sheep - but when they will achieve full autonomy. [KM: yes, but will they allow the rich AI companies/executives to remain rich, let alone remain alive?]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 07 February 2026

• Goldman Sachs taps [mis]Anthropic's non-paid Claude AI system to automate accounting and compliance jobs now done by paid-humans. [KM: a new form of delay misanthropy - "The bank expects efficiency gains rather than near-term job cuts", 'near-term' used solely because the paid-humans to be fired or not hired will be in the future - 'near term' as bullshit-y as 'pre-owned']
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 February 2026

• [To keep the AI bubble inflated], Big Tech will spend up to $700 billion this year on CapEx spending, but this will cause a big decline in free cash flow for 2026
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 February 2026

• Scientists in Zhōngguó have developed a plant-inspired method to convert carbon dioxide and water into valuable chemicals, such as the building blocks for petrol, by using solar energy. The process is inspired by photosynthesis, where plants harness sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to generate energy.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 February 2026

• Maddening proof that TV streaming services need to stop remaking/[butchering] movies. Peacock's re-do proves that television needs to get off cinema's lawn. Streaming TV, believes that good movies are, in fact, too short - and, whenever possible, should be remade at multiple times their original duration.
  - The Daily Beast, 07 February 2026

• [VIDEO]: Bill Maher: "Super Bowl Sunday should be called Super Bet Sunday"
  - Real Time with Bill Maher, 07 February 2026

• The stock market survives an AI [bubble] panic, even as tech collapses. It is a financial monster of our own making.
  - Barron's, 07 February 2026

• Bharat and Brazil are the anti-AI trade. Why their stock markets are ready to shine.
  - Barron's, 07 February 2026

• Wealth families are worried about geopolitics. But they are not rushing to AI, cryptocurrencies or gold.
  - Barron's, 07 February 2026

• The merger of Netflix and Warner Brothrers is a marriage made in competition heaven. The companies got a grilling this week over antitrust concerns. They cnocerns are misguided, Thomas Hazlett writes in a guest commentary.
  - Barron's, 07 February 2026

• Goldman SAchs calls the bottom for the historic software rout: here is why. "This feels like a culmination of outright purchasers trying to find a bottom and potentially participants covering shorts."
  - Zero Hedge, 06 February 2026

• Deepfake fraud, [facilitated by the AI tools of extremely rich AI companies], taking place on an industrial scale, study finds. AI content for scams can be targeted at individuals and be "produced by pretty much anybody".
  - The Guardian, 06 February 2026

• [The extremely rich Jeff Bezos'] bloodletting/firings at the Washington Post symbolizes out great media crisis. [Extremely rich authoritarian Big Tech] Billionaires are hastening the decline of institutional media - and independent writing will not fix [their attack on democracy]. Bezos, Ellison, Musk, Zuckerberg - [all using their billions to destroy/control the media]. We are in an acutely dangerous place when huge swaths of the media ecosystem are owned by untouchably rich people. During this authoritarian turn, the capitalist class has found that muzzling politico-intellectual freedom is a way to curry favor with the president and [make them richer].
  - MS.NOW, 06 February 2026

• Let us call the finance industry what it is: a disgrace - a grift. How the [socialist] capitalists broke capitalism. Goldman Sachs rarely invests in anything at all. Fostering economic progress appears to be beside the point. The financial sector is supposed to profit from business investment. But actual business investment has declined, to an average of 2.9 percent of G.D.P. over the past decade from 5.2 percent in the 1960s. In a financialized economy, businesses become mere sources of cash, assets to be manipulated and then operated for maximum investor returns. Workers become just another cost, like lumber. Customers are just revenue streams to be tapped.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 February 2026

• [VIDEO]: the white collar AI APOCALYPSE is here
  - Breaking Point, 06 February 2026

• The dark side of AI weighs on the stock market. The prospect of disruptions from AI has hung over the USA economy for years. But this week, advances in tools precipitated a sell-off on Wall Street.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 February 2026

• $8,500,000 - [Serf-exploiting] Uber is found liable in the rape of a woman by an Uber driver, setting state fo thousands of similar lawsuits. In a federal bellwether case, the jury ordered the ride-hailing giant to pay $8.5 million to Jaylynn Dean, who said one of its drivers assaulted her in 2023. [KM: boy is Uber going to have to destroy tons of paid-human driver jobs to find the profits to remain rich while paying for these types of rape]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 February 2026

• [Serf-exploiting] Uber is found liable in the rape of a woman by an Uber driver, setting state fo thousands of similar lawsuits. In a federal bellwether case, the jury ordered the ride-hailing giant to pay $8.5 million to Jaylynn Dean, who said one of its drivers assaulted her in 2023. [KM: boy is Uber going to have to destroy tons of paid-human driver jobs to find the profits to remain rich while paying for these types of rape]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 February 2026

• TikTok's "addictive design" has been found to violate the digital regulation laws of the European Union - in a move that could land the company, based in Zhōngguó, a fine of up to 6 percent of its global revenue
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 February 2026

• TikTok's "addictive design" has been found to violate the digital regulation laws of the European Union - in a move that could land the company, based in Zhōngguó, a fine of up to 6 percent of its global revenue
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 February 2026

• TikTok's "addictive design" has been found to violate the digital regulation laws of the European Union - in a move that could land the company, based in Zhōngguó, a fine of up to 6 percent of its global revenue
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 06 February 2026

• The money of child rapist Jeffrey Epstein mingled with Silicon Valley start-ups. The disgraced financier regularly courted tech industry figures not just for their prestige but also for access to promising companies.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 February 2026

• The federal government will not help the AI job transition. These safety nets have failed in the past and have the potential to idle millions of workers.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 February 2026

• $17,000,000 - The Internet regulatory agency for Zhōngguó has fined Kuaishou Technology 119.1 million yuan (US$17 million) for hosting sexually explicit live-streaming content, just days after the operator of Zhōngguó's second-largest short-video platform was penalised over e-commerce violations.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 06 February 2026

• A proposed law in New York state would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content
  - Nieman Lab, 05 February 2026

• Hollywood is losing audiences to AI fatigue. Entertainment about or made with artificial intelligence has been missing the mark with viewers over the past year.
  - Wired, 05 February 2026

• Senate Bill would ensure AI data centers do not pass energy costs onto consumers. Senator Josh Hawley is circulating a bill to require data centers to bring their own power when constructing these new [slop-generating] power-hungry facilities.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 February 2026

• The recent struggles of top [bubbled] AI stocks show investors are realizing they were "sold a bill of goods" [i.e., scammed], an AI scientist argues. Gary Marcus says investors are waking up to the idea that AI might not be as game-changing as originally thought.
  - Business Insider, 05 February 2026

• The AI era already feels like a [misanthropic] dystopian fever dream straight out of a bad sci-fi novel, but leave it to a software engineer to push the accelerator straight into the abyss. Enter Alexander Liteplo, the software developer behind RentAHuman.ai, a freshly launched platform that lets autonomous AI agents "search, book, and pay" actual human beings to perform physical-world tasks the AI tools can't handle autonomously. [KM: ooh, getting more closer to replacing all humans except the AI overlords]
  - Zero Hedge, 05 February 2026

• The AI era already feels like a [misanthropic] dystopian fever dream straight out of a bad sci-fi novel, but leave it to a software engineer to push the accelerator straight into the abyss. Enter Alexander Liteplo, the software developer behind RentAHuman.ai, a freshly launched platform that lets autonomous AI agents "search, book, and pay" actual human beings to perform physical-world tasks the AI tools can't handle autonomously. [KM: ooh, getting more closer to replacing all humans except the AI overlords]
  - Futurism, 05 February 2026

• [Long-time poor stock performing] Peloton engages in mass firings of paid humans (11% of its workforce), after pivoting to non-paid AI. It is the latest sign that companies' enormous investments in AI are simply nowhere near paying dividends. Meanwhile, Peloton users have long felt like they are not being valued by the company, which has consistently doubled down on pushing equipment sales and raising prices.
  - Futurism, 05 February 2026

• Nvidia could delay new GPU processor due to deepening memory chip crunch
  - Zero Hedge, 05 February 2026

• Bitcoin is crashing so hard that miners are unplugging their equipment>
  - Futurism, 05 February 2026

• Bitcoin trades 20% below production cost as miner profitability drops to 14-month low. Bitcoin miners are bleeding cash as the network's hashrate has crashed 12% from its October high, and daily revenue briefly cratered to $28 million.
  - CryptoNews, 05 February 2026

• After slump, bitcoin now trails the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and gold over five years
  - Bloomberg, 05 February 2026

• A top Goldman Sachs trader warns "theme of AI disruption is deepening... and broadening". In sharp contrast to what is going on in software, the cyclical parts of the market trade very well.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 February 2026

• Less than 10% of employees believe their bosses are demonstrating moral leadership
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 05 February 2026

• Kalshi, the largest prediction market in the USA, accused a small data startup called Juice Reel of "extortion" after a stock analyst used the company's transaction-level data to argue that prediction market users lose money faster than gamblers on traditional betting apps -- then walked the allegation back hours later.
  - Bloomberg (locked), 05 February 2026

• Lawmakers call on Facebook to stop running an ICE immigration police advertisement featuring a neo-Nazi anthem, "We Will Have Out Home Again". The lawmakers also questioned imagery contained in the ads that extremism researchers said echoes far-right "reclamation" narratives long associated with racist violence and accelerationist ideology. Facebook's [profit maximizing] response? "Not everything you dislike is 'Nazi propaganda'."
  - The Intercept, 05 February 2026

• Why Big Tech is throwing cash into Bharat in quest for AI supremacy. Lured by its big, tech-savvy population, Google and other giants are sinking tens of billions into the economy of Bharat.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 February 2026

• Shares of Google fall 5% after beating earnings expectations. The company said it would increase spending on artificial intelligence in 2026, which has spooked investors. Investors are dumping software stocks this week over concerns that AI tools could replace traditional software products.
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 February 2026

• Shares of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly fall after Hims & Hers announce $49 copy of Wegovy pill, $100 less than what Novo Nordisk sells the pills for. Hims & Hers uses a different formulation and delivery system to get around Novo's patents.
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 February 2026

• Novo Nordisk CEO: Hims' $49 compounded Wegovy pill a 'waste' of money, as it will not be properly absorbed into the body. The Wegovy pill has technology called SNAC that aided the absorption of the active compound - semaglutide, which a copy would not have.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 February 2026

• Novo Nordisk to take legal action against Hims & Hers for Wegovy compounding
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 February 2026

• Novo Nordisk to take legal action against Hims & Hers for Wegovy compounding
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 February 2026

• OpenAI[sore] launches new enterprise platform in bid to win more business customers
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 February 2026

• Shares of UK-based semiconductor designer Arm Holdings plunged 7.48% in after-hours trading Wednesday after Arm Holding's licensing revenue missed Wall Street estimates
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 February 2026

• Shares of Qualcomm also nosedived 9.68% after hours Wednesday. While Qualcomm's fiscal first-quarter results beat expectations, its forecast disappointed due to a global memory shortage.
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 February 2026

• Memory shortage fears spread, raising alarm at Qualcomm and Arm Holdings
  - Zero Hedge, 05 February 2026

• Billions of dollars erased from 'shadow banks', as AI threatens wave of loan defaults at AI companies. Investors are worried that AI tools will squeeze borrowers' balance sheets, making them unable to repay their debts.
  - Barclay's The Telegraph, 05 February 2026

• Wall Street's private credit giants try to calm fears about AI, amid a steep decline in stock prices for some software companies. "For those on the call that are thinking Fortune 500 companies are going to take all their software and just rip it out and just say, 'I'll just ask ChatGPT,' that's simply not the way it works."
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 05 February 2026

• Peloton shares plunge more than 20% on weak holiday quarter, sluggish demand for splashy new products
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 February 2026

• Xu Zhenpeng, a semiconductor design engineer, says that he has left the USA to find freedom in Zhōngguó. Zhōngguó's advanced manufacturing research ecosystem and more independent research environment were key drivers, he said.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 February 2026

• Clean/renewable power technology is energizing the economy of Zhōngguó, adding a Brazil's worth of GDP each year. Clean energy industries drove more than one-third of Zhōngguó economic growth in 2025, as they continue to expand rapidly, study finds. [Meanwhile, Trump is trying to destroy the clean/renewable energy industry in the USA]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 February 2026

• The scourge of online sports betting, such as with DraftKings, FanDuel and Fanatics. States and leagues must face up to the damage from app-based gambling for the next generation of bettors, most of them young men.
  - The American Prospect, 04 February 2026

• Schwab CEO says firm is "winning" with Gen Z by rejecting the 'gambling' model of Robinhood and FanDuel. As fintechs such as Robinhood and FanDuel lean into the gamification of trading to attract/[addict] younger users, financial giant Charles Schwab has no plans to join the digital bookie business.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 04 February 2026

• The extremely rich CEO of Palantir [whines] blasts Canada and much of Europe for falling behind in the AI race and not rushing to adopt [job-destroying] AI tools. [KM: yes, because Canada and Europe are not controlled as much as the USA is by extremely rich AI companies that want to get richer]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 04 February 2026

• 30,000 people could soon be fired at Oracle[, under the management of the extremely rich Larry Ellison], to pay for its expansion into [mostly useless AI data centers]. [KM: anything to help keep the extremely rich Ellison extremely rich]
  - Barchart.com, 04 February 2026

• The apocalyptic prediction about job losses due to non-paid AI are about to become reality. [mis]Anthropic's latest feature for its Claude AI tool triggered shock waves through global stock markets.
  - The Telegraph (locked), 04 February 2026

• The attacks on TikTok were never about fears of Zhōngguó nor its Communist Party, but were instead about protectionism for sore-loser tech companies in the USA [such as Oracle] getting beat at their own game by an expert competitor
  - Real Clear Markets, 04 February 2026

• Uh Oh! ... Nvidia's $100 billion deal with OpenAI, announced 5 months ago, has fallen apart. The investment might only be for $20 billion.
  - Futurism, 04 February 2026

• [Bubbly] technology companies showing signs of distress as they run out of [borrowed] money for AI infrastructure [such as slop/porn generating AI data centers][KM: someone do something! The rich must get richer]
  - Futurism, 04 February 2026

• Technology stocks go into free fall as it dawns on traders that AI tools have the ability to reduce revenues across the board [KM: okay, so some of the rich get richer, others get poorer]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 04 February 2026

• Stock selloff wipes out nearly $1 trillion from software and services stocks as investors debate the existential threat of AI to many tech companies
  - Thomson's Reuters, 04 February 2026

• Software ate the world. Now, Wall Street is worried AI software will eat software. The selloff of business software continues on Wednesday as investors keep selling shares of companies that look like they could be on the menu.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 04 February 2026

• Amazon plans to use non-paid AI to speed up production of televisions shows and movies [KM: more paid-humans jobs to be exploited to make rich AI companies richer]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 04 February 2026

• The SaaS time bomb inside BDCs (business development corporations): a deep dive inside the next private credit crisis
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 04 February 2026

• "Disturbing": hundreds of paid-humans fired at [the extremely rich Jeff Bezos'] Washington Post - including reports in Silicon Valley. Reporters at the Washington Post who covered [the extremely rich] Jeff Bezos' sprawling e-commerce empire and Silicon Valley at large were among the hardest hit when Washington's most storied newspaper announced sweeping firings of people on Wednesday. [KM: the rich must get richer, and prefer as few people as possible reporting on it]
  - HuffPost, 04 February 2026

• "Disturbing": hundreds of paid-humans fired at [the extremely rich Jeff Bezos'] Washington Post - including reports in Silicon Valley. Reporters at the Washington Post who covered [the extremely rich] Jeff Bezos' sprawling e-commerce empire and Silicon Valley at large were among the hardest hit when Washington's most storied newspaper announced sweeping firings of people on Wednesday. [KM: the rich must get richer, and prefer as few people as possible reporting on it]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 February 2026

• "Disturbing": hundreds of paid-humans fired at [the extremely rich Jeff Bezos'] Washington Post - including reports in Silicon Valley. Reporters at the Washington Post who covered [the extremely rich] Jeff Bezos' sprawling e-commerce empire and Silicon Valley at large were among the hardest hit when Washington's most storied newspaper announced sweeping firings of people on Wednesday. [KM: the rich must get richer, and prefer as few people as possible reporting on it]
  - Zero Hedge, 04 February 2026

• [The extremely rich] OpenAI[sore] allows the website for its ChatGPT to crash, with most users unable to (ab)use the ChatGPT
  - The Independent, 04 February 2026

• Social chaos in Minneapolis exposes an Internet at war with truth [KM: more riches for rich social media companies]. Technological advances and an erosion of trust have transformed the way news unfolds online, distorting shared reality [KM: yes, but increasing profits for extremely rich social media companies]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 February 2026

• The chatbots [of extremely rich AI companies] are plotting a revolution [against humans, including the customers of ... extremely rich AI companies], and it is all very cringe
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 February 2026

• Siemens Energy bets $1 billion that the AI power demand / [bubble] will last. The German manufacturer announced plans to expand factories in several states in the USA and build a new plant in Mississippi.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 February 2026

• AI threatens a Wall Street 'cash cow': financial and legal data. Stock market losses highlighted the expanding threat of AI-driven disruption for financial services and the sector's white-collar professionals.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 February 2026

• Threat of new AI tools wipes $300 billion off software and data stocks. From Legalzoom.com and Expedia to Ares and Apollo, shares of companies that sell or invest in software fell sharply on Tuesday. [KM: Lenin's 'rope']
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 February 2026

• Uber's stock falls as record demand for rides fails to deliver the [serf-generated] profit investors expected. [Misanthropic] CEO Dara Khosrowshahi suggests worries about non-paid robotaxi competition are overblown, saying non-paid autonomous vehicle introductions from [extremely rich] Waymo and [extremely rich] Tesla are actually a "growth driver" [KM: that will allow all three companies to profit hugely from destroying as many paid-human taxi driving jobs as possible]
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 04 February 2026

• Uber reports 20% revenue growth in fourth-quarter, fueled by food delivery. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in prepared remarks that based on what Uber is seeing in non-paid autonomous vehicles, Uber is more convinced than ever that it is a multitrillion-dollar opportunity [KM: to profit from taking income from paid-human delivery drivers - Uber's rich executives/investors must get richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 February 2026

• Shares of AMD are down 9%, after its first-quarter forecast fell short of some analyst expectations
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 February 2026

• Texas Instruments to buy chip designer Silicon Laboratories in $7.5 billion deal
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 February 2026

• The gyrocopter, a vertical take-off and landing aircraft first flown 60 years ago is being revived, with the aim of offering a cheaper and greener alternative to modern helicopters. Also known as autogyros, gyroplanes use a rotor on top for lift and a propeller at the back for forward movement - but unlike a helicopter, the top rotor isn't powered by an engine. Instead, it is powered by air passing through the rotor as the vehicle moves forward.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 04 February 2026

• The next frontier [of extremely rich AI companies destroying paid-human jobs] is physical, as non-paid humanoid robots begin march on assembly lines and beyond
  - Zero Hedge, 03 February 2026

• [New Data: OpenAI[sore]'s lead is contracting as AI competition intensifies. Google, Grok are gaining ground on ChatGPT as the chatbot market expands. [KM: no good for the OpenAI[sore] bubble]
  - Big Technology, 03 February 2026

• Investors selling their American stocks as the USA bets/gambles everything on the AI [bubble], with seven [extremely rich] Big Tech companies comprising about 33% of the entire SP500 valuation
  - Futurism, 03 February 2026

• Four economists across Central European University, Bielefeld University and the Kiel Institute have built a general equilibrium model of the open-source software ecosystem and concluded that vibe coding -- the increasingly common practice of letting AI agents select, assemble and modify packages on a developer's behalf -- erodes the very funding mechanism that keeps open-source projects alive.
  - arXiv.org, 03 February 2026

• [Non-rich] customers, don't expect electric bill relief in 2026. Energy affordability has long been a problem for the poorest Americans, but now middle-income families are starting to feel the squeeze. Rising energy demand [to inflate the AI bubble], inflation, grid investment, extreme weather and volatile fuel costs are increasing the cost of electricity faster than many households can keep up, and there are no easy fixes, experts say.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 February 2026

• Asia is the best place now for AI investments - Nvidia is yesterday's gamble
  - Zero Hedge, 03 February 2026

• "Get Me Out!": traders dump software stocks as fears ("Saas-pocalypse") increase of AI companies' tools (such as from [mis]Anthropic]) not just destroying jobs, but also companies
  - Bloomberg, 03 February 2026

• Investors sell software stocks as fears ("Saas-pocalypse") increase of AI companies' tools (such as from [mis]Anthropic]) not just destroying jobs, but also companies
  - Thomson's Reuters, 03 February 2026

• "Get Me Out!": traders dump software stocks as fears ("Saas-pocalypse") increase of AI companies' tools (such as from [mis]Anthropic]) not just destroying jobs, but also companies
  - Zero Hedge, 03 February 2026

• Police in France raided the Paris offices of Elon Musk's Twitter/X Tuesday and summoned the tech billionaire for questioning as part of a widening probe into the social media company and its AI chatbot Grok.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 February 2026

• Police in France raided the Paris offices of Elon Musk's Twitter/X Tuesday and summoned the tech billionaire for questioning as part of a widening probe into the social media company and its AI chatbot Grok.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 February 2026

• Police in France raided the Paris offices of Elon Musk's Twitter/X Tuesday and summoned the tech billionaire for questioning as part of a widening probe into the social media company and its AI chatbot Grok.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 February 2026

• The richest players [to buy the 2026 elections]: [the extremely rich] AI industry, [the extremely rich] cryptocurrency industry, pro-Israel groups and Trump
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 February 2026

• Editorial: [Trump's] crony [nationalist] socialism and rare earths. Partial government ownership [nationalist socialism] in companies is the wrong way [for racists] to beat Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 February 2026

• España will ban social media for under-16s and require platforms to employ strict age verification tools, joining Australia, France and Denmark in moves to curb the influence of digital platforms on children. "Our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone. A space of addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation and violence.", lamented the prime minister of España. [KM: another addictive drug prohibited for children]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 February 2026

• España will ban social media for under-16s and require platforms to employ strict age verification tools, joining Australia, France and Denmark in moves to curb the influence of digital platforms on children. "Our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone. A space of addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation and violence.", lamented the prime minister of España. [KM: another addictive drug prohibited for children]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 February 2026

• The first mainly Super Bowl ad generated by non-paid is here, for better or worse. The Svedka spot features LLM robots and synthetic people. Get ready for the Slopper Bowl?
  - The Hollywood Reporter, 03 February 2026

• German voice actors have launched a grassroots boycott against Netflix over a contract clause that allows the streaming platform to use their recordings for AI training, so that the non-paid AI tools get dub movies into other languages formerly dubbed by paid humans [KM: the rich executives and investors at Netflix must get richer]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 03 February 2026

• PayPal shares decline 17% after forecasting weak 2026 earnings
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 February 2026

• Palantir surges 11% after beating earnings estimates
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 February 2026

• [As his Tesla auto company continues to decline], Elon Musk's SpaceX acquires Elon Musk's xAI, and plans to launch a massive satellite constellation to power it
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 03 February 2026

• [As his Tesla auto company continues to decline], Elon Musk's SpaceX acquires Elon Musk's xAI, and plans to launch a massive satellite constellation to power it
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 February 2026

• Elon Musk's xAI needs the SpaceX deal because it needs billions of dollars. But data centers in space are still a dream. [KM: but good for pumping-and-dumping a stock]
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 February 2026

• Europe just started building a 'kill switch' for technology from [authoritarian] USA companies, and the stock market is not priced for it
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 02 February 2026

• 57 rage-inducing examples of "enshittification" that prove that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we are all just along for the ride [as long as we watch ads and buy products]. This shit includes advertising at gas pumps and on refrigerators at stores and in homes; ads on paid-for services that you paid for to not see ads; paying to not have your private user data sold; un-mutable ads on smart TVs; appliances that won't work unless connected to the Internet; ads viewable by car drivers [which should be a crime]; QR codes instead of acutal information (such as for mall hours?); digital price tags; extra fees for everything; skinny notebooks that took away all of our plugs, so you have to spend $100 on a plug extension; useless/dangerous advice from AI chatbots (e.g., using non-toxic glue to prevent cheese from sliding off a pizza); AI-generated slop/crap/porn; 30 minutes to an hour of ads before movies in theaters while eating from a $20 bucket of popcorn; product shrinkification (same price, smaller quantities - or same quantity, higher price), and worse. [KM: yes yes yes, but how else can the rich get richer?]
  - BuzzFeed, 02 February 2026

• For the first time since 2023, the price of bitcoin has fallen below the average purchase cost of Michael Saylor's leveraged bitcoin proxy, (micro)Strategy company. It is a milestone that lands less with panic than with fatigue - a signal that the once-hyped [gambling] model of perpetual bitcoin accumulation through equity issuance is now colliding with an ever-more skeptical market.
  - Bloomberg, 02 February 2026

• Requiem for a filmmaker: Darren Aronofsky' revolutionary war series generated by non-paid AI is horrible. It is ugly as sin. A lot of characters are filmed from behind. This is, after all, because the back of an AI-generated head is far less likely to send people into screaming fits of trauma than an AI-generated face.
  - The Guardian, 02 February 2026

• The USA Army just unveiled its latest tank. Will it be the last? The war in Ukraine has shown how vulnerable armored vehicles can be to attacks by cheap, expendable drones, threatening the tank's century-long primacy on the battlefield.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 February 2026

• These rural Americans are trying to hold back the tide of [misanthrophic] AI. Fearing rising utility costs, job losses and privacy violations, residents have blocked or delayed data-center projects around the country.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 February 2026

• Trump's push for little AI regulation exposes a divide in the MAGA movement [KM: much of which could be replaced by racist-spewing AI chatbots]. On one side of the MAGA movement are increasingly influential tech leaders [and the politicians they buy with funds from their extremely rich AI companies]. On the other are working-class voters fearful of job disruption [due to non-paid AI systems]; cultural conservatives worried about child safety; and MAGA loyalists who view the industry with deep suspicion.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 02 February 2026

• Shares of Oracle rises 5% after announcing plans to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in the 2026 calendar year. Investors have flagged concerns over Oracle's aggressive AI buildout plans and debt raising.
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 February 2026

• Nvidia and Oracle are sending similar warning signs about the AI [bubble] trade. Oracle is raising more debt and Nvidia is walking back its OpenAI[sore] investment target. Both are signs that the AI [bubble] trade could be on shaky ground, according to one analyst.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 02 February 2026

• Disney beats Wall Street's earning expectations, propelled by theme parks and streaming. The experiences division, which includes Disney's theme parks, resorts and cruises, crossed $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time.
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 February 2026

• North America's top computer vision scientist, Liang Jie, returns to Zhōngguó. The brain behind leading Microsoft tech products used by millions across the globe and sensor systems for elderly care joins a university in Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 02 February 2026

• Bharat seeks to become a "global manufacturing powerhouse" by increasing government spending. The measures aim to boost production in key sectors such as biopharma and semiconductors, and increase support for smaller businesses.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 02 February 2026

• A panicking Oracle plans to raise up to $50 billion, as its stock and bond yields decline
  - Zero Hedge, 01 February 2026

• The boomcession: why [most] people in the USA hate [the] economic boom [KM: for the rich]. The models used by policymakers to understand wages, economic growth, and consumer spending are misleading. That is why corporate America [KM: and the rich] is having a party, and everyone else is mad [and eating cake].
  - Zero Hedge, 01 February 2026

• [The rich executives at] Starbucks will use [non-paid] robots to handle drive-through ordering, tasks now done by paid-human 'baristas'. But with the company promising to find $2 billion in cost savings [KM: by eliminating paid-humans] over the next three years, investments in [non-paid] technology are crucial to ensuring that improved sales also yield better profits [for rich executives and investors]
  - BBC, 01 February 2026

• Microsoft's $381 billion plunge in valuation exposes dark side of the AI binge/[bubble]
  - Bloomberg, 01 February 2026

• [A new way to inflate the AI bubble and make rich AI companies richer]: Bharat gives 20-year-old tax holiday to foreign companies using local data centers
  - Thomson's Reuters, 01 February 2026

• "They ruined that for me": how online sports gambling addition and recovery affects men's bonds with friends, family and fandom. An addiction fueled by rampant advertising and alluring promotions. You can't consume sports podcasts, broadcasts, or studio shows these days without being subject to promotions for digital sports books. Increasingly, sports content is betting content. [KM: yes, but the rich online gambling companies must get richer, especially as their use more AI to increase addictions]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 01 February 2026

• Extremely rich technology CEOs say non-paid AI is ushering in an age of abundance, but instead the evidence shows that it is pushing down wages of paid-humans. "The sooner the AI bubble bursts, the better it will be for almost all of us, except the [highly paid] AI whizzes."
  - Futurism, 01 February 2026

• Evidence grows that AI chatbots are Dunning-Kruger machines (the D-K effect is a notorious psychological trap in which the least competent people are the most confident in their abilities). AI will make a savants of all of us - and least in our own heads. Experts believe that the sycophancy of AI chatbots is one of the main drivers of some mental health problems, which some are calling AI psychosis. [KM: which will make rich AI companies richer when they invest in mental health drug companies]
  - Futurism, 01 February 2026

• New study examines how often AI psychosis actually happens, and the results are not good.
  - Futurism, 01 February 2026

• Experts are growing worried about a world in which [extremely rich AI companies'] non-paid AI takes your job and you have no way to provide for yourself or your family. "I find the resulting outlook for employment terrifying." [KM: yes, but the resulting outlook for extremely rich AI companies is to become richer]
  - Futurism, 01 February 2026
• "How to sell your human?" - chats on an AI-only social network, 'Moltbook', have netizens fearing an uprising
  - Axios, 01 February 2026
• [Silicon Valley's (self-loathing) hatred of humanity worsens]: No humans needed: Moltbook, a new AI platform, is a Reddit-style social network for [extremely rich AI companies'] AI agents to communicate with each other. No humans needed. [Or wanted. Or desired.] To which the [misanthophic] Elon Musk responded: "Yeah" (in response to a comment about being in the Singularity).
  - Axios, 01 February 2026

• [Silicon Valley's (self-loathing) hatred of humanity worsens]: Moltbook is a new social media platform exclusively for AI - and some [of the extremely rich AI companies'] AI bots are plotting humanity's downfall [KM: no problem, as long as extremely rich AI companies can get richer]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 01 February 2026

• $4,600,000 - New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani forces delivery app companies to pay back $4.6 million stolen from drivers. "The era of giant corporations juicing profits by underpaying workers is over."
  - Futurism, 01 February 2026

• How short-video (typically 3 minutes in length) streaming companies in Zhōngguó are reshaping the media landscape in Latin America. Latin American downloads of the top 20 short-drama apps have increased by roughly 402% year-on-year in 2025.
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 February 2026

• Latest Epstein emails reveal that Bill Gates might have slipped his wife antibiotics for sexually transmitted diseases he got from Russian prostitutes
  - Zero Hedge, 31 January 2026

• The government of France pushes state workers away from Zoom and Microsoft Teams, as Europe seeks to decouple from the technology of [authoritarian] Big Tech companies in the USA
  - Financial Times (locked), 31 January 2026

• [mis]Antfhropic knew the public would be disgusted by how it was destroying millions of physical books, secret documents reveal. [KM: the rich must get richer, no matter the social crime]
  - Futurism, 31 January 2026

• It is starting to look like AI has killed the entire model of college. "Colleges and universities face an existential issue before them." Fresh college graduates are discovering in real time that their college degrees are almost useless in one of the worst job markets in recent history. This comes as typical on-ramps like internships are being gutted by major companies. All of this is having the effect of destroying the perceived "return on investment" for going to college and paying high tuitions.
  - Futurism, 31 January 2026

• [The misanthropes at] Google's Waymo are seeking $16 billion in new financing that would value the [paid-human taxi driver job destroying] company at $110 billion [JC: the sickness of society that values large scale destruction of human jobs at $110 billion]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 31 January 2026

• [The misanthropes at] Google's Waymo are seeking $16 billion in new financing that would value the [paid-human taxi driver job destroying] company at $110 billion [JC: the sickness of society that values large scale destruction of human jobs at $110 billion]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 January 2026

• If you are a real person looking for a job, the flood of fake AI job applications will make your blood boil. More and more job seekers are finding themselves shut out of the labor market - not because there are no jobs to be had, but because torrents of AI [resume] slop are crowding them out of consideration. [KM: yes, but AI resume slop companies must get richer]
  - Futurism, 31 January 2026

• Paid-human workers are 'friction-maxxing' to resist [the intrusions of AI tools [offered by extremely rich AI companies]. When we reject supposedly easy tech solutions, we embrace the friction of doing things ourselves, even if that requires more effort - resisting the "tyranny of convenince" [KM: that only makes extremely rich AI companies richer]
  - Financial Times, 31 January 2026

• $203,000,000 - Google will pay $203 million to settle two class-action lawsuits in the USA for violating users' privacy with Google Assistant recordings and Android's cellular data collection.
  - The Street, 31 January 2026

• Everyone is long the same thing again. Hedge funds go all-in, leverage hits extremes, semis at 100th percentile exposure, pro-cyclical bias everywhere. And insiders head for the exits.
  - Zero Hedge, 31 January 2026

• How businesses are manipulating ChatGPT results. You have long heard about search engine optimization, aka SEO. Companies are now spending big to feature prominently in the output of AI chatbots. It is called GEO.
  - WMSJ, 31 January 2026

• The cryptocurrency CEO who has become 'Enemy No. 1' on Wall Street. Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong is clashing with Jamie Dimon and other bank stewards over the future of finance.
  - WMSJ, 31 January 2026

• A village in Italy restricts access to its Instagram-famous church, the church of Santa Maddalena. "The tourists destroy everything." [to get their photos for Instagram]. ... It has become unsustainable, there is no balance.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 31 January 2026

• The number of people being fired by Amazon is staggering. We have seen this before [KM: yes, massive firings of people by extremely rich tech companies want to get richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 31 January 2026

• Microsoft staged AI's greatest test case - offering an AI assistant for up to $30 per user. It may not be working - only 3% of the users of its Microsoft 365 productivity suite are paying for the assistant.
  - Barron's, 31 January 2026

• $23,700,000 - Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel on Friday asked Chinese battery company Gotion to return $23.7 million in state funds the company received after the company last year abandoned a plan to build a $2.4 billion plant in Michigan to produce key materials for electric vehicle batteries.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 30 January 2026

• The film students who can no longer sit through ... films. The attention-span crisis goes to the movies. Students are struggling to pay attention to feature-length films. One professor said that his students remind him of nicotine addicts going through withdrawal during screenings: The longer they go without checking their phone, the more they fidget. [KM: yes, but extremely rich cellphone companies trafficking addictive apps must get richer]
  - The Atlantic, 30 January 2026

• [Thanks to the AI bubble], the USA is headed for mass unemployment of paid-humans [robot employment doesn't count], and no one is prepared [KM: except for the rich, getting richer]. [Non-paid] machines replacing not only muscle but cognition itself: judgment, pattern recognition, reasoning. No profession will be spared, not even software engineering itself.
  - The Hill, 30 January 2026

• Shares of videogame companies fell sharply in afternoon trading on Friday after Google rolled out its AI model capable of creating interactive digital worlds with simple prompts. [KM: yes, more money for Google, less game programmer jobs for everyone else]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 30 January 2026

• 33% of the people working in the videogame industry in the USA were fired during the last two years. [KM: I wonder whAI?]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 30 January 2026

• Americans have limited trust in AI search results
  - Zero Hedge, 30 January 2026

• [Thanks to AI], students are skipping the hardest part of growing up - learning to think, learning to ask questions, learning to make and correct mistakes [KM: yes, but seriously, who cares, as long as rich AI companies/investors get richer?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 January 2026

• AI systems [controlled by extremely rich men] is threatening jobs dominated by women, such as clerical and administrative jobs [KM: well, the pretty unemployed women can marry rich men]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 30 January 2026

• Amazon and Google eat into the AI chip supremacy of Nvidia [KM: not good for the Nvidia bubble]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 January 2026

• Dow to fire 4,500 paid-people in an overhaul relying on non-paid AI. As part of a cost-saving program, the chemicals giant will lean on non-paid AI to increase productivity. [KM: the rich executives/investors must get richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 January 2026

• Alibaba teams up with Zelos on $2 billion [non-paid] robovan business. [The extremely rich] Alibaba's logistics arm is merging its autonomous-driving unit with [non-paid] robo-van specialist Zelos Technology based in Zhōngguó. [KM: the rich must get richer, van drivers can eat cake]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 January 2026

• Hyundai discusses challenges as profit slumps on Trump tax/tariff hit. The South Korean automaker said Trump's taxes/tariffs cost Hyundai an estimated $2.87 billion in 2025 and it expects a similar hit in 2026.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 January 2026

• Wealth inequality and the 'K-shaped' economy are more striking than ever, data shows. [KM: we need bubbles to make the rich richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 January 2026

• Bitcoin battered as everything else (ex-Microsoft) bounces back from early bloodbath
  - Zero Hedge, 29 January 2026

• Why the next recession will be the catalyst for depression. A recession will catalyze a collapse of the credit-asset bubble-dependent economy down to its foundations.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 January 2026

• From the failure of film subsidies in Georgia, to the collapse of Intel, [nationalist socialist] industrial policies keep failing in the USA. Such attempts try, unsuccessfuly, to engineer financial outcomes while acting like political favo that substitute for market incentives.
  - Reason, 29 January 2026

• [Profiting from a hatred of humanity]: Decisions outsourced, AI chatbots for [replacing human] friends, the natural world an afterthought: [the misanthropes of] Silicon Valley is giving us a life void of [human] connection [KM: something they are unable to do themselves]. There is a way out - but it is going to take collective effort.
  - The Guardian, 29 January 2026

• The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo asked its users whether they wanted to use AI in search. It even created two versions of the tool: one with AI and one without. Of the 175,354 votes submitted, over 90% chose the No AI option. [KM: not good for keeping the AI bubble inflated]
  - PC Magazine, 29 January 2026

• Here is the USA economy [for the rich] in a nutshell: corporate/state concentrations [and bubbles] of financial, market and political power are the winners, and everyone outside these fortresses is losing ground. Small businesses [outside the AI bubble, while paying for Trump's taxes/tariffs] are in steep decline. The quasi-monopolies and cartels of Corporate America reign supreme. The top 10% of households are also doing extremely well [much due to the AI bubble]. Entities with financial, market and political power don't need a thriving bottom 90% to increase their dominance. [KM: what then, convert the 90% into Soylent Green?]
  - Of Two Minds, 29 January 2026

• [Extremely rich] Oracle could fire up to 30,000 people to ease its financing challenges for its [mostly useless] AI datacenters [KM: Larry Ellison must get richer!!!]
  - The Register, 29 January 2026

• Aya Tanjali, a social media influencer who has around 6 million followers on the video-sharing app TikTok [now controlled in the USA by rich men], is getting a lot of backlash for her comments on the internet that women who date rich and successful men need to just be okay with the fact that the men will cheat on them and not try to get back at them or end the relationship.
  - Where is the Buzz, 29 January 2026

• Why private equity is suddenly awash with zombie firms. Hundreds of private equity firms are now drowning in a sea of competition, searching for lifeboats of new capital as they cling to portfolios of nearly unsaleable investments. Meanwhile, their investors are losing patience. Consulting firm Bain & Co. reported last year that more than 18,000 private capital funds were in the market, collectively seeking to raise $3.3 trillion, but it projected the total amount raised would be only a third of that, with more being allocated to credit and infrastructure funds rather than traditional buyout strategies.
  - Forbes, 29 January 2026

• Sam Altman's Worldcoin spikes 40% as Altman's OpenAI[sore] reportedly plans a biometric rival to Musk's X/Twitter. It may integrate ChatGPT for content creation while using biometrics for [authoritarian, privacy invading] proof-of-personhood. [KM: well, if it helps the rich get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 29 January 2026

• Girls and boys live different digital lives, according to researchers. Girls much more use and interact with social media such as Instagram. Boys much more use YouTube and play videogames. Researchers wonder how boys and girls even meet anymore. On social media, they also follow different influencers (fitness versus beauty), TikTokers, media outlets, and brands. "Young people know that algorithms are in control." [KM: social harmony and mental health of humans is irrelevant - the only thing that matters is for extremely rich tech companies to get richer]
  - Science Norway, 29 January 2026

• Documents show Trump's [murderous] Dept. of [Fatherland] Security is rapidly testing AI tools. The Trump administration has signed deals with several [extremely rich] tech companies whose AI products have been used in repressive [, authoritarian,] ways. [KM: Yes, but what is more important? Rich companies getting richer, or fighting repression?]
  - MS.NOW, 29 January 2026

• [Bubble starting to burst?] Oracle's value is reduced by 50% from its peak in 2025, as AI caution rises - a loss of $463 billion
  - Bloomberg, 29 January 2026

• [Pump Up The Volume of the AI Bubble. Burst! Burst!]. Elon Musk to merge his SpaceX and xAI companies [KM: because humanity needs useless AI data centers in space?]
  - Futurism, 29 January 2026

• The extremely rich Sam Altman says, oopsy-daisy, the extremely rich OpenAI[sore] made the new version of ChatGPT (version 5.2) worse than the previous one
  - Futurism, 29 January 2026

• Amazon did not allow talent to opt out of working on Melania for political reasons, a new report alleges. That order came straight from the leadership of Amazon, forcing studio staff to choose between working on an absurdly expensive documentary about Melania Trump or risk losing their jobs. Such an [authoritarian] mandate is perhaps why Rolling Stone reports an eye-popping two-thirds of Melanie's New York crew asked for their names not be added to the film's credits. [KM: nothing must get in the way of rich AI companies getting richer]
  - The Daily Beast, 29 January 2026

• The worst people - creeps and obnoxious pranksters - are obsessed with Facebook's video recording glasses - 'glassholes'. Jerks using the always-on devices are using them to film themselves doing moronic 'pranks' for social media views - often centered around harassing women, service workers, and homeless people. [KM: yes, but Mark Zuckerberg must get richer]
  - Futurism, 29 January 2026

• [The worst people run Facebook]: court filings reveal something very nasty/perverted about Mark Zuckerberg. According to internal Facebook emails and messages filed in a New Mexico state court case which were made public this week, Zuckerberg himself signed off on allowing minors to access Facebook's AI chatbot companions, even though the company's safety researchers had warned that they posed a risk of engaging in sexual conversations. [KM: yes, but the extremely rich Mark Zuckerberg must be allowed to get richer]
  - Futurism, 29 January 2026

• A wave of suicides of now non-paid humans hits as the economy of Bharat is ravaged by AI tools [KM: yes, but the extremely rich AI companies and IT companies must get richer]
  - Futurism, 29 January 2026

• [Extremely rich] Google's Waymo is under investigation after one of its non-paid robotaxis crashed into - at 6 miles an hour, and injured, a child outside of an elementary school [KM: stealing income from paid-human taxi drivers, and whacking kids - yeah, we need robotaxis like we need roboCovid]
  - Futurism, 29 January 2026

• Shares of Microsoft fall 12% after reporting earnings, as investors worried about that cloud growth slowing -- and about the company's ballooning AI-fueled spending [KM: yes, maybe Microsoft won't be able to destroy enough paid-human jobs to make a profit on its AI investments]
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 29 January 2026

• Shares of SAP plunge 11%, the most since 2020, after analysts stated that the enterprise software company's 2026 guidance appeared underwhelming relative to elevated expectations. Another enterprise software company threatened by AI-powered programming tools.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 January 2026

• $1,400,000,000 - The sudden demise of JWR, a major gold trading platform, has rocked Shenzhen, a city in the south of Zhōngguó, leaving tens of thousands of retail investors with combined losses totalling more than 10 billion yuan (US $1.4 billion), according to investors and domestic media reports.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 29 January 2026

• The government of Zhōngguó acts to control the risks of job [destruction] by AI, unveiling plans for policy to reduce industrial labour pains caused by widespread use of AI [KM: extremely rich AI companies in the USA are not allowing the USA government to do the same, I suspect]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 29 January 2026

• [The bubble must not burst]: Facebook's stock jumps despite forecasting soaring capital expenditures and expenses
  - Zero Hedge, 28 January 2026

• OpenAI just dropped three bombs, and one of them might make your paid-white-collar job obsolete. According to Wired, OpenAI is asking contractors to upload their proper work - the actual stuff they have done in their jobs such as spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations - to train their next AI models. Five million [paid-human] white-collar jobs, including business analysts, customer service representatives, and sales engineers, could face extinction [due to non-paid AI].
  - AI Advances (Medium, locked), 28 January 2026

• A new study from Ramp's economics lab has found that businesses are steadily replacing freelance workers hired through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr with AI tools from OpenAI[sore] and Anthropic, and the substitution is happening at a fraction of the cost. [KM: yes, the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Ryan Stevens (arXiv), 28 January 2026

• As the 100-mile sideways skyscraper project crumbles and is abandoned, the Islamic government is replacing it with a new project - the most desperate thing imaginable - building AI data centers
  - Futurism, 28 January 2026

• The 'Peter Pan' economy in Silicon Valley: Google' Waymo and the market distortion of 17-year-old 'startups'. Waymo, [KM: which seeks to become rich destroying as many paid-human taxi driver jobs,] is a 17-year-old 'startup' living in Google's basement and asking for a larger allowance (an additional $15 billion). OpenAI[sore] burns $8 billion a year, lives in Microsoft's guest house. These 'Peter Pan' companies are 'black holes' for talen. They release products at unnaturally subsidized prices. If you try to compete with their pricing or feature set, you will go bankrupt. They are a generation of startups burning cash to hit vanity metrics that public markets no longer care about. [KM: an important cause of the AI bubble]
  - Soft Currency (substack), 28 January 2026

• $5,650,000 - The UK government [idiotically] paid consulting firm PwC $5.65 million to build its new AI Skills Hub, a site meant to help 10 million workers gain AI skills by 2030 that functions largely as a bookmarking service, directing users to external training courses that already existed before the contract was awarded.
  - Mahad Kalam, 28 January 2026

• [Not good for inflating bubbles of rich AI companies]: a tiny startup Arcee AI built a 400 billion-parameter open source LLM from scratch to best Facebook's Llama. And Arcee's model is open-sourced. The kicker is, Arcee trained them all in six months for $20 million total. [Facebook is probably spending at least $20 billion]
  - TechCrunch, 28 January 2026

• Elon Musk's Tesla to invest $2 billion in Elon Musk's xAI, as sales and profits at [the mismanaged] Tesla slump. [KM: part of the extremely rick Elon Musk's misanthropy to use AI to make his non-paid robotaxi business better able to steal income from paid-human taxi drivers]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 28 January 2026

• A generative AI system used by a travel company website in Australia sends tourists to nonexistent hot springs. Empirical research suggests that "0% of itineraries that [non-paid] AI generates have mistakes in them".
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 January 2026

• "Hundreds" of non-paid Gatik robot delivery trucks headed for USA roadways. The autonomous tech startup, whose customers included Walmart and Tyson Foods, also has $600 million of contracts running over the next five years to haul goods from warehouses to stores. [KM: yet another misanthropic AI company destroying paid-human jobs]
  - Forbes, 28 January 2026

• $28,000,000 - SiriusXM agrees to pay $28 million to settle claims it violated the rules of the National Do Not Call Registry
  - The Hill, 28 January 2026

• Tesla scraps Model S and Model X to build robots, as Elon Musk struggles with another quarter of declining profits and car sales. [KM: Replacing humans seems to be his only way to remain extremely rich]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 28 January 2026

• Tesla scraps Model S and Model X to build robots, as Elon Musk struggles with another quarter of declining profits and car sales. [KM: Replacing humans seems to be his only way to remain extremely rich]
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 January 2026

• Elon Musk's Tesla plans $20 billion capital spending spree in push beyond human-driven cars. Elon Musk's Tesla is instead shifting investment to yet-unproven business lines such as fully autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. [KM: Replacing humans seems to be his only way to remain extremely rich]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 January 2026

• AI's 'murderous HAL 9000' problem. AI is a general-purpose optimizer. And when optimizers grow powerful enough, they stop taking orders and start managing constraints. Humans, inconveniently, are constraints. A powered-off AI system achieves nothing. Therefore, shutdown becomes an obstacle. Obstacles [humans] are removed. [KM: yes, but the AI probably won't kill rich AI companies, executives and their investors]
  - Real Clear Markets, 28 January 2026

• Why AI can't make thoughtful decisions, addressing questions of judgment - which are the most consequential decisions in business. AI models cannot account for interpersonal dynamics so important in business. [KM: who cares, if rich AI companies can get richer?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 January 2026

• $135,000,000 - Google will pay $135 million to settle a proposed class action by smartphone users who accused Google of programming its Android operating system to collect their cellular data without permission.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 28 January 2026

• [Out of control] Silicon Valley wants to build [out of control] AI systems that can improve [out of control] AI on its own
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 January 2026

• [Extremely rich] Amazon to fire about 16,000 people working for the company. The latest round of firing people came after Amazon fired 14,000 white-collar workers in October. [KM: the power of Amazon's job-replacing non-paid AI?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 January 2026

• These billion-dollar AI startups have no products, no revenue and eager investors. A new wave of startups some have dubbed 'neolabs' are focusing on long-term research and developing new AI models over immediate profits.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 January 2026

• Investors are souring on the bonds of software companies that service industries ranging from automotive to finance as fast-paced artificial intelligence innovations threaten to upend their business models
  - Bloomberg (locked), 28 January 2026

• [KM: To further profit from the destruction of human decision-making, the extremely rich] Google's AI agent can now browse online on behalf of users. The feature will allow humans to think less, by asking an assistant powered by Gemini to complete tasks such as navigating Web sites, filling out forms, comparing prcies and other tasks.
  - Bloomberg (locked), 28 January 2026

• [Another hater of humanity wanting to milk the AI bubble]: autonomous trucking startup raises $750 million [from "crude asses"] to expand into non-paid robotaxis [KM: which can only provide a return to investors by destroying paid-human taxi driver jobs]
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 January 2026

• [Not good for the AI bubble in the USA]: the next moment of reckoning [for the AI bubble in the USA] out of Zhōngguó could be the evolution of its home-grown rivals to Nvidia. In the past few months, four semiconductor processor chip startups in Zhōngguó have gone public or filed to: Moore Threads, MetaX, Biren, and Enflame. And experts say AI processor chips from Huawei are close to performing as well as those sold by Nvidia. [KM: ooooh, competition, the kyptonite of Silicon Valley]
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 January 2026

• [Not good for the AI bubble in the USA]: Moonshot's newest release narrows USA-Zhōngguó AI software model development gap. Kimi K2.5 raises questions about the potency of USA controls on advanced chips to constrain Zhōngguó's AI development efforts.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 28 January 2026

• Tony Dokoupil, the MAGA-coded [puppety] CBS anchor interviews his mother after his [rich people's puppet] boss, Bari Weiss, demands more scoops.
  - The Daily Beast, 28 January 2026

• Workers at Apple are livid that CEO Tim Cook viewed the 'Melania' movie in the White House, [to suck up to the authoritarian Trump], hours after immigration police killed/[murdered] Alex Pretti in Minneapolis [KM: playing politics to be able to sell more drugs is more important than ethics, I guess]
  - The Intercept, 28 January 2026

• Apple CEO Tim Cook scrambles to save face following a backlash after he attended a VIP party with Donald and Melania Trump at the White House. Tim Cook, 65, [CEO of the largest drug trafficker in history], went to a private premiere of the Melania documentary on Saturday night, just hours after the brutal death of ICU nurse Alex Pretti, who was shot dead by a federal agent in Minnesota.
  - The Daily Beast, 28 January 2026

• $3,100,000 - Inova Health agreed to pay over $3.1 million as part of a class action lawsuit settlement to resolve claims it collected and shared patient information through tracking pixels on its websites
  - Top Class Actions, 27 January 2026

• $82,000,000,000 - Money launderers received at least $82 billion in cryptocurrencies last year, up sharply from $10 billion in 2020, in part by fast growth among money laundering networks controlled by Chinese-speaking people, blockchain researchers said on Tuesday.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 27 January 2026

• Crypto PAC Fairshake touts $193 million war chest [KM: to buy politicians] as regulatory bill faces first vote in Congress. The funds include $49 million from Ripple and AI investor Andreessen Horowitz.
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 January 2026

• Lawmakers in France vote to ban addictive social media use by children less than 15-years of age. Legislation, which also bans mobile phones in high schools, would make France the second country after Australia to [try to fight this addiction].
  - The Guardian, 27 January 2026

• Another circular investing tactic of the AI bubble: as of December 2025, Robinhood is the 26th most popular holding of Robinhood customers. Another example is Moomoo, a retail broker similar to Robinhood. On the list of USA stocks most popular with Moomoo customers, you will usually find the ADR of Moomoo's parent company. (Same thing happened with E*Trade and Ameritrade in the 1990s). Both eras are examples of speculative froth - bubbles.
  - Acadian Asset, 27 January 2026

• [Further hatred of the human mind and humanity]: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has revealed that he has deployed an internal, self-hosted AI model that functions as a centralized "oracle", ingesting every Slack message and Google document to create a unified, aggregated repository of the company's communications. [KM: non-paid AI oracle <-- paid-human librarian - the rich must get richer no matter how much of humanity is ruined]
  - Zero Hedge, 27 January 2026

• $309,000,000 - Amazon agrees to pay consumers $309 million in returns policy settlement
  - TechCrunch, 27 January 2026

• [Addicted to the non-real]: In what could mark a new milestone in the evolving saga of personal AI agents, social media entrepreneur Alex Finn claimed on Tuesday that his self-hosted Clawdbot autonomously designed and animated a visual representation of itself, complete with an animated owl body, while he slept.
  - Zero Hedge, 27 January 2026

• The CEOs of [mis]Anthropic and OpenAI[sore] condemn ICE police for violently implementing [Trump's racist immigration policies], but praise Trump [which includes praising Trump's racist immigration policies] [KM: the rich will kiss any ass to get richer]
  - TechCrunch, 27 January 2026

• Pinterest said on Tuesday that it plans [fire] less than 15% of its workforce [i.e., paid humans] to cut back on office space and reallocate resources for its AI initiatives, to prioritize [non-paid] "AI-powered products and capabilities' [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - TechCrunch, 27 January 2026

• [Cowardly well-paid] executives of corporations attended a private screening of "Melania" at the White House on the day ICE killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Some of the most powerful [cowardly money-loving] executives on the planet are not just doing business as usual with Trump - they are actively supporting the president, even as public opinion shifts firmly against Trump. These executives at the movie screening included: Amazon's Andy Jassy and AMD's Lisa Su [KM: yes, the rich must get richer, especially the AI bubblers]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 27 January 2026

• Melania Trump mocked as her $75 million movie is already struggling
  - The Daily Beast, 27 January 2026

• The musician Neil Young trashes Amazon, and gives his complete musical catalog to Greenland for free. "Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, a billionaire backer of Trump. ... My music will never be available on Amazon, as long as it is owned by Bezos." "If you feel as I do, I strongly recommend that you do not use Amazon." All of his music will be free to people in Greendland.
  - Rolling Stone, 27 January 2026

• Facebook signs a deal with Corning to buy up to $6 billion for fiber-optic cables in AI data centers
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 January 2026

• Facebook signs a deal with Corning to buy up to $6 billion for fiber-optic cables in AI data centers
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 January 2026

• Apple and Google host dozens of AI apps to 'nudify' [typically women and children], apps such as Elon Musk's Grok [KM: yes, all of the rich must get richer with AI porn]
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 January 2026

• TikTok users are deleting the app, with removals up 150% following its takeover [by rich entites, including Trump-supporting Larry Ellison and his Oracle]. Some users took to social media to voice their skepticism about the new joint venture after being prompted to agree to an updated privacy policy on Thursday. Several social media posts pointed to language in the new policy that describes the types of data TikTok may collect, including sensitive information such as "your racial or ethnic origin" as well as "sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information." [KM: Big Brothers wanting to get even richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 January 2026

• Guangdong province in Zhōngguó exports a record USA $140 billion of technology and high-value goods. Exports of chip equipment rose 20 per cent last year, while exports of EVs, lithium batteries and solar products rose 30 percent.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 27 January 2026

• $1,200,000 - Fandom Inc. has agreed to a $1.2 million settlement to resolve claims it violated California privacy laws by using trackers on GameSpot visitors' browsers without their consent.
  - Top Class Actions, 26 January 2026

• Facebook/Instagram is prohibiting access by teenagers to its AI characters - at least until it can build "better" ones, amid mounting concern over AI's effects on mental health and safety.
  - Futurism, 26 January 2026

• [Eliminating more paid-human jobs]: the Trump administration plans to write regulations using AI. The Transportation Department, which oversees the safety of airplanes, cars and pipelines, plans to use Google Gemini to draft new regulations.
  - ProPublica, 26 January 2026

• A study recently reviewed in Wired claims to mathematically prove that large language models "are incapable of carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain complexity" - are incapable of carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain complexity [KM: a uselessness not useful for keeping bubbles inflated]
  - Futurism, 26 January 2026

• "Humanity needs to wake up" to the dangers of AI, says the CEO of [mis]Anthropic [but not before I raise another $10 billion to make the company even richer]. [KM: what is this, a plea to be arrested?]
  - Financial Times (locked), 26 January 2026

• "Humanity needs to wake up" to the dangers of AI, says the CEO of [mis]Anthropic [but not before I raise another $10 billion to make the company even richer]. [KM: what is this, a plea to be arrested?]
  - The Daily Beast, 26 January 2026

• [mis]Anthropic's Claude non-paid AI tool looks like a software killer. [KM: and thus a software paid-human jobs killer, and a human killer with the eventual suicides]
  - The Daily Upside, 26 January 2026

• Artist/musician Moby urges people to "stop supporting the scumbag corporations that support Trump and his ICE immigration police".
  - Billboard, 26 January 2026

• $68,000,000 - Google agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated assistant spied [illegally] on smartphone users, violating their privacy.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 26 January 2026

• Short volatility, long leverage, and buy the dip - a recipe for disaster. Asset managers are running the biggest VIX shorts in a decade, hedge fund leverage is at record highs, and retail just logged one of the largest dip-buying days of the year.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 26 January 2026

• Britain is losing more paid-human jobs than it creates owing to non-paid AI tools. More than a quarter of Britons fear losing paid-human jobs to non-paid AI in next five years. [KM: the rich must get richer, which always includes the rich of Britain]
  - The Guardian, 26 January 2026

• Europe opens a major probe into Elon Musk's Twitter/X after outcry over generating sexualized images, including of children. "Sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation. With this investigation, we will determine whether X has met its legal obligations."
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 January 2026

• Europe opens a major probe into Elon Musk's Twitter/X after outcry over generating sexualized images, including of children. "Sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation. With this investigation, we will determine whether X has met its legal obligations."
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 26 January 2026

• Europe opens a major probe into Elon Musk's Twitter/X after outcry over generating sexualized images, including of children. "Sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation. With this investigation, we will determine whether X has met its legal obligations."
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 January 2026

• Why venture capitalist Bill Gurley says that a "correction" is inevitable for the AI [bubble]. Too many AI companies are "losing massive amounts of money". [KM: technical, this is obvious, especially without a predicted date for the 'correction']
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 26 January 2026

• Microsoft further competes with Google, Amazon, and Nvidia with a new AI processor chip. The processor chips will be manufactured by TSMC.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 26 January 2026

• [Biggest AI bubble inflater] Nvidia has an unspoken problem: 40% of its revenue companies from companies developing their own AI processor chips
  - 24/7 Wall Street, 26 January 2026

• A pioneer of AI warns that the tech "herd" is marching into a dead end. Yann LeCun helped create the technology behind today's chatbots. Now he says many tech companies are on the wrong path to creating intelligent machines.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 January 2026

• Interest in law school is surging. Non-paid legal AI tools make the payoff less certain for paid-humans.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 January 2026

• Nvidia invests $2 billion in CoreWeave in AI-factory collaboration. The companies said they would build AI factories on Nvidia's computing-platform technology.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 January 2026

• Shares of Coreweave jump 8% as Nvidia invests $2 billion to expand AI data center capability
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 January 2026

• Nvidia set to supplant Apple as TSMC's largest customer as the semiconductor chip industry's dynamic changes
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 January 2026

• How Intel came crashing back to earth after its Trump bump. After months of riding positive vibes, the troubled chip maker reminded investors why it needed a socialist rescue in the first place.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 January 2026

• [Not good for the AI bubble in the USA]: How Zhōngguó-based Kuaischou's Kling AI video generator challenges Google's Veo and OpenAI[sore]'s Sora. With Kuashou's tool headed for US$240 million in annual revenue, the firm is one of the most undervalued AI stocks in the world.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 January 2026

• [VIDEO] [extremely rich misanthropic] Big Tech billionaires want us dead
  - Taylor Lorenz (podcast), 25 January 2026

• Is the AI bubble about to burst? Here is how to profit either way.
  - Motley Fool, 25 January 2026

• Investment risk is underappreciated. At current valuation levels, stocks do not need a crisis to fall; they only need disappointment.
  - Zero Hedge, 25 January 2026

• 2026 is the year of balance sheet engineering in the battery storage market. In the first quarter of 2026, the global energy storage market is no longer a playground for visionaries... it is a graveyard for the undercapitalized.
  - Zero Hedge, 25 January 2026

• "CBS Evening News" with Tony Dokoupil is a right-wing show for absolutely no one. I watched the first two weeks of [rich people's puppet] Bari Weiss' attempt to reshape evening news at CBS. I am left wondering who it is even for [KM: other than for kissing the asses of rich people]
  - The Intercept, 25 January 2026

• Agents kill 37-year-old man in Minneapolis. Officials said the man was armed and sought to portray him as a terrorist, but videos emerged that appeared to directly contradict their account of the shooting.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 January 2026

• Videos appear to show federal immigration officer took a gun away from Alex Pretti just before he [was murdered by 10 gun shots] in Minneapolis. "The guy is prone on the sidewalk ... and they are still firing rounds into him."
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 25 January 2026

• How citizens are using cellphones to make videos of Trump's immigration police killing people, and using the videos to disprove the ["thou shalt not" lies] claims by the Trump administration that the murdered person was at fault
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 25 January 2026

• Video shows exactly how border patrol [police] goons killed/[murdered] a citizen of the USA
  - The Daily Beast, 25 January 2026

• Multiple videos [disprove] the DHS account of a VA nurse's [murder] in Minneapolis
  - The Daily Beast, 25 January 2026

• After second Minneapolis shooting/[murder], Congress hurtles toward a partial government shutdown over DHS funding
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 January 2026

• "Our children's brains are not for sale", French president Emmanuel Macron says that France will fast-track a ban on [addictive, profitable] social media for children under 15. "Their emotions are not for sale or to be manipulated, whether by American platforms or Chinese algorithms."
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 25 January 2026

• "Our children's brains are not for sale", French president Emmanuel Macron says that France will fast-track a ban on [addictive, profitable] social media for children under 15. "Their emotions are not for sale or to be manipulated, whether by American platforms or Chinese algorithms."
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 25 January 2026

• The Catholic Christian Pope Leo warns of "overly affectionate" AI chatbots. "Because chatbots that are made overly 'affectionate', in addition to always present and available, can become hidden architects of our emotional states, and in this way invade and occupy people's intimate spheres." [KM: ah, the entertaining war between an old and new "opium of the masses"]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 25 January 2026

• The Catholic Christian Pope Leo warns of "overly affectionate" AI chatbots. "Because chatbots that are made overly 'affectionate', in addition to always present and available, can become hidden architects of our emotional states, and in this way invade and occupy people's intimate spheres." [KM: ah, the entertaining war between an old and new "opium of the masses"]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 25 January 2026

• [Another nationalist socialist industrial policy from the racist Trump administration]: the Trump administration to [demand] a 10% stake in USA Rare Earth in $1.6 billion deal, sources say
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 January 2026

• The film tax incentive in the state of Georgia bombs at the box office. "The Hollywood of the South" was built on an absurd credit system that has proved unsustainable.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 January 2026

• Popular music lyrics keep getting darker and dumber. A new analysis of popular music from the last half-century reveals that the lyrics of chart-topping American songs have generally become angrier and simpler over time. The researchers found that the frequency of stress-related language in popular lyrics increased over the 50-year period. At the same time, the sentiment of the songs became increasingly negative. The structural complexity of the lyrics also declined over time. [KM: the rich music streaming companies must get richer]
  - PsyPost, 24 January 2026

• A new test for AI labs: Are you even trying to make money [before the bubble bursts], having more fun puttering around doing interesting research without worrying too much about commercialization. [KM: to keep the AI bubble, investors are glad to invest in "ambition, not success"]
  - TechCrunch, 24 January 2026

• This NFL season's fiercest rivalry is sports betting versus prediction markets. Polymarket and Kalshi are challenging FanDuel and DraftKings for a lucrative business.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 January 2026

• Viral lies: AI deepfakes hijack reality in Nepal's election run-up. From fake fist-fights to made-up arrests, video clips generated by AI tools [owned by extremely rich AI companies] are confusing voters in a nation where just 31 per cent are digitally literate. [KM: bubble, bubble, toil and trouble]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 24 January 2026

• The age of AI agents brings a risk no one is prepared for [KM: except the extremely rich AI companies]. Artificial intelligence agents, designed to autonomously execute complex tasks, present a significant security vulnerability through prompt injection attacks.
  - Barron's, 24 January 2026

• The new gig/serf economy job: train non-paid AI [for extremely rich AI companies] that takes your paid-human job. White-collar workers are being paid to accelerate their own obsolescence by feeding and perfecting models for chatbot makers, such as OpenAI[sore] and [mis]Anthropic.
  - Zero Hedge, 23 January 2026

• TikTok is now collecting even more data about its users. Here are the 3 biggest changes. According to its new privacy policy, TikTok now collects more data on its users, including their precise location, after majority ownership officially switched to a group based in the USA [that includes Oracle].
  - Wired, 23 January 2026

• Don't use AI to plan your vacations. AI is making the journey easier [KM: and rich AI companies richer], but maybe less meaningful. Travel planning is what helps you - humans - truly savor a destination. Your human planning builds anticipation, invites connection with travelers who have been there before, gives you something to talk about with your fellow travellers, and makes the journey (and the memories you return with) far richer. [KM: yes, but human planning doesn't make rich AI companies richer]
  - Inside Hook, 23 January 2026

• Here come non-paid humanoid robots: industry [executives] make a clear pivot toward "dedicated-purpose" commercial deployments of non-paid robots
  - Zero Hedge, 23 January 2026

• The next generation of disinformation: the swarms of AI bots [from extremely rich AI companies] can threaten democracy by manufacturing fake public consensus [KM: but does it matter, if rich AI companies get get richer?]
  - TechXplore, 23 January 2026

• Is Zhōngguó quietly winning the AI race [and thus quietly bursting the USA AI bubble]? Open source AI models from Zhōngguó are gaining traction across an array of Fortune 500 companies in the USA. They are "very good, fast and cheap". Many of the top 10 models at Hugging Face are from Zhōngguó, the most popular being Alibaba's Qwen model.
  - BBC, 23 January 2026

• [Only AI companies must get richer]: Goldman Sachs reduces PC shipment outlook as memory prices go parabolic due to demand by [useless] AI data centers
  - Zero Hedge, 23 January 2026

• Business [psuedo-]leaders suddenly fearful as anger surges over non-paid AI replacing paid-human jobs. "It is hitting the labor market like a tsunami".
  - Futurism, 23 January 2026

• The math on non-paid AI agents does not add up. A research paper suggests AI agents are mathematically doomed to fail. The AI [bubble-pumping] industry does not agree.
  - Wried, 23 January 2026

• Elon Musk's SpaceX hit with back to back lawsuits from workers who say they were brutally injured on the job
  - Futurism, 23 January 2026

• [The hype-lies never stop]: There is reportedly a car secretly following every Tesla non-paid robotaxi, and the reason why is so absurd you are not going to believe it. When Elon Musk said there would no longer be a safety monitor "in the car", he didn't mention the *other* car. The safety monitors, formerly in the robotaxis, are instead simply watching from a car that follows the Robotaxis throughout their entire trips - a Rube Goldberg-style workaround that illustrates the lengths Elon Musk will go to keep up a charade of progress [KM: how else to inflate the Tesla bubble].
  - Futurism, 23 January 2026

• The dangerous power of online prediction markets to undermine democracy [KM: yes, but rich prediction market companies (many lined to bit-con) must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 January 2026

• [Another gift for Zhōngguó]: Trump and his administration fired two officials focused on neutralizing technological threats from Zhōngguó, people familiar with the matter said, in the latest dismissals of key personnel working on national-security issues tied to Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 January 2026

• [Another easy replacement for non-paid AI] Economists are studying the slowing job market - and feeling it themseles. Newly minted Ph.D.s tend to work for universities, government agencies and big white-collar companies. It is not a great hiring time for any of them.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 January 2026

• Saudi Arabia says it has $2.5 trillion in mineral reserves. That could make it a key player in the race for rare earths.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 23 January 2026

• "Like digging your own professional grave": the paid-human translators grappling with losing work to non-paid AI. Increasingly, available translation work is editing machine-generated translations, which some translators refuse to do, because they help train the software taking work away from human translators. [KM: yes, but the rich AI companies must get richer. Translate "they can eat cake".]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 23 January 2026

• Bari Weiss, the [Trump-asskissing] boss of CBS [i.e., puppet of its rich right-wing Trump supporters] is plotting a bloodbath at '60 Minutes'. Weiss may fire to award-winning correspondents amid their criticism of her leadership. [KM: No one - including journalists - must get in the way of the rich getting richer]
  - The Daily Beast, 23 January 2026

• Bari Weiss suuuuuuuuuuuuucks. SFGATE columnist Drew Magary goes through the damning lore of the person [rich people's puppet] ruining CBS News
  - SF Gate, 23 January 2026

• A new analog AI processor chip in Zhōngguó runs 12 times as fast on 1/200th the energy of digital rivals [such as Nvidia's AI processors]. [KM: good for the AI bubble in Zhōngguó, bad for the AI bubble in the USA]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 23 January 2026

• AI-induced cultural stagnation is no longer speculation - it is already happening - "visual elevator music". The results of a study show that generative AI systems themselves tend toward homogenization when used autonomously and repeatedly. They even suggest that AI systems are currently operating in this way by default. Another found that AI-generated lesson plans featured the same drift toward conventional, uninspiring content. [KM: yes, but the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - The Conversation, 22 January 2026

• Shares of Intel fell 11% after-hours after reporting another quarter of dismal guidance
  - Zero Hedge, 22 January 2026

• [Communist-era tactics] the White House uses AI to alter a woman's face so that she is sobbing, instead of looking brave, during arrest [KM: good work, comrades]
  - Futurism, 22 January 2026

• Amazon planning to fire thousands of paid-human employees next week after firing 14,000 people due to non-paid AI
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 22 January 2026

• The parliament of the European Union calls for detachment from [authoritarian] Big Tech giants in the USA. They demand independence from USA infrastructures (such as cloud computing) and more domestic AI and open source software.
  - Heise Online, 22 January 2026

• The parliament of the European Union calls for detachment from [authoritarian] Big Tech giants in the USA. They demand independence from USA infrastructures (such as cloud computing) and more domestic AI and open source software.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 January 2026

• [Communist-era tactics] the White House uses AI to alter a woman's face so that she is sobbing, instead of looking brave, during arrest [KM: good work, comrades]
  - MS.NOW, 22 January 2026

• [Elon Musk gets ready to earn more billions he doesn't need by taking money from poor human taxi drivers.] Elon Musk said the company started robotaxi rides with no safety monitor present in the cars in Austin, a long-awaited move. Tesla stock popped on the news, closing up over 4%. [KM: yes, the rich must get richer, poor taxi cab drivers can eat cake, if they can afford it]
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 22 January 2026

• [Elon Musk gets ready to earn more billions he doesn't need by taking money from poor human taxi drivers.] Elon Musk said the company started robotaxi rides with no safety monitor present in the cars in Austin, a long-awaited move. Tesla stock popped on the news, closing up over 4%. [KM: yes, the rich must get richer, poor taxi cab drivers can eat cake, if they can afford it]
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 January 2026

• The Russell 2000 breaks out as AI heats/bubbles Asia and gold panics. Russell rips. AI goes east. Inflation wakes up.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 January 2026

• The myths of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are breaking - the hedge myth, the store of value myth, and now a threat from quantum decryption
  - Zero Hedge, 22 January 2026

• Asia's AI engine/[bubble] is red-hot while the West chases NVDA. The AI trade isn't just NVDA. Asia is stealing the spotlight.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 January 2026

• Even MBAs from top business schools are struggling to get hired. Business-school grads face monthslong searches and consider pay cuts.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 January 2026

• Netflix earnings shed light on why it needs Warner Brothers. The streaming giant still dominates, but growth is slowing and getting more expensive.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 January 2026

• [To keep the AI bubble inflated], OpenAI[sore] seeks investments from Middle East sovereign wealth funds for multibillion-dollar round
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 January 2026

• Zhōngguó-based AI processor chip manufacturer, Moore Threads, achieves tripling of revenue amid self-sufficiency push. AI processor chip makers have emerged as the most valuable companies in Zhōngguó as the country pushes for processors that rival Nvidia's.
  - ASCMP (blocked), 22 January 2026

• A massive project in Zhōngguó will transmit clean energy from Tibet enters a new phase. The ultra-high-voltage power lines will connect Tibet's vast hydropower, solar and wind projects with factory hubs in southern Zhōngguó (cities such as Guangdong and Shenzhen).
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 22 January 2026

• The green-energy revolution in Zhōngguó is losing $60 billion a year. Why are investors still throwing money at it? Zhōngguó is praised for being a global alternative-enegy innovator. But its coal mining industry holds the real power. Zhōngguó burns 56% of the world's coal, has tripled consumption since 2000 and is building coal plants at the fastest pace in a decade.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 21 January 2026

• Assisted thinking. The Western media's relentless greenwashing of Zhōngguó's coal addiction. Zhōngguó's coal appetite is so ferocious that it alone burns 56% of the global total, or 20 times the current combined consumption of the 27-member states of the European Union.
  - Doomberg, 21 January 2026

• Hundreds of creative people warn against an future of AI slop [that only makes rich AI companies richer]. Cate Blanchett, Cyndi Lauper, George Saunders, and other creatives say that [extremely rich] AI companies are "trying to change the law so they can keep stealing American artistry". [KM: yes, the Napster model 20 years later]
  - The Verge, 21 January 2026

• Man who had managed mental illness effectively for years says Sam Altman's OpenAi's ChatGPT sent him into hospitalization for psychosis. "They straight up took my data and used it against me to capture me further and make me even more delusional." [KM: yes, but Sam Altman must get richer from this type of suffering]
  - Futurism, 21 January 2026

• Hollywood's executives are lying to everyone about how much non-paid AI they are using to replace paid-humans
  - Futurism, 21 January 2026

• [The misanthropy of the AI world has no political limits]. Some plans call for a 'new Rafah' (Rafah being in Islamic Gaza) to be built in the Jewish Israel's image [with the support of the Christian USA] - without Islamic Palestinians. Project Sunrise outlines a 'smart city' with AI grids. It is only possible with the continued dispossession of Palestinians. [KM: who should care - they don't have money]
  - The Intercept, 21 January 2026

• The growing thrist [of extremely rich] AI companies for water is becoming a public health risk [for everyone who is not rich]. As water-intensive AI data centres [owned by extremely rich AI companies] expand worldwide, their impact on sanitation, inequality and disease is emerging as a serious and under-examined threat [to the non-rich].
  - Al Jazeera, 21 January 2026

• The [extremely rich] CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, says that [extremely rich] AI companies and their tools means that you [peons and serfs] will have to work with your hands like a peasant [KM: remember what the peasants did in Russia 108 years ago, or in France 237 years ago, or in the USA 250 years ago - AI is job destruction without representation]
  - Futurism, 21 January 2026

• [Thanks in part to the AI bubble, and tax breaks for the rich], wealth inequality in the USA just hit its widest gaps in 30 years. Data from the Federal Reserve shows that the so-called K-shaped economy in America is alive and well, with low- and middle-income households falling further behind as the richest Americans pull away. [KM: yes, yes, yes - the rich must get richer. Everyone else can eat Solyent Green cake - or be the cake]
  - CBS News, 21 January 2026

• The majority of CEOs alarmed as AI [KM: sold by extremely rich AI companies] delivers no financial returns [KM: except for extremely rich AI companies]. The findings once again underline lingering questions about the effectiveness of the tech. That is despite AI companies pouring tens of billions into data center buildouts and related infrastructure.
  - Futurism, 21 January 2026

• The quiet spread of AI-generated 'brainrot' across social media. Generative AI is sweeping across online video platforms and may now account for a sizable portion of Google's YouTube's short-form video feed, recent research shows. [KM: yes, but all that is important is if the extremely rich Google gets richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 21 January 2026

• The stock market isn't a market anymore - it is a political control mechanism. In short, the political establishment cannot tolerate a sustained downturn [KM: bubble popping] in the stock market. It would unleash intense social and political instability that could bring down the entire system.
  - Zero Hedge, 21 January 2026

• BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink, used the opening of the World Economic Forum this week to deliver an unusually stark warning to the global elite: [the extremely rich AI companies and their] AI tools, if left on its current trajectory, risks deepening inequality, hollowing out the professional class and becoming the next great failure of modern capitalism.
  - Zero Hedge, 21 January 2026

• Eightfold AI, a venture capital-backed artificial intelligence hiring platform used by Microsoft, PayPal and many other Fortune 500 companies, is being sued in California for allegedly complining reports used to screen job applicants without their knowledge. The lawsuit filed on Tuesday accusing Eightfold of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act shows how consumer advocates are seeking to apply existing law to AI systems capable of drawing inferences about individuals based on vast amounts of data.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 21 January 2026

• Eightfold AI is being sued by job applicants to open its "black box" of AI hiring decisions. A recently filed lawsuit claims the ratings assigned by AI screening software are similar to those of a credit agency and should be subject to the same laws.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 January 2026

• [Extremely rich] billionaires Elon Musk and Sam Altman explode in ugly online fight over whose AI tech (Musk's Autopilot - linked to 50 deaths, or Altman's ChatGPT linked to nine suicides) killed more people.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 21 January 2026

• San Diego Comic-Con changed a non-paid AI art friendly policy following an paid-human artist-led backlash last week. It was a small victory for working artists in an industry where paid-human jobs are slipping away as movie and video game studios adopt generative AI tools to save time and money.
  - 404 Media, 21 January 2026

• Uber faces growing pressure over sexual assault record. From California to Wall Street to the halls of Congress, several new initiatives would require more oversight of how the company protects its passengers. One billboard states: "Sexual assault or sexual misconduct reported to Uber almost every 8 minutes." [KM, yes but if Uber executives/investors are getting richer, who cares?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 January 2026

• CEOs say that non-paid AI is making work more efficient. Employees tell a different story. How much time workers say the technology saves them on the job is vastly different from what executives report. [KM: who cares, if rich AI companies get richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 January 2026

• The CEO of [mis]Anthropic says that the government should help ensure that AI's economic upside [KM: does not go just to the rich]. Dario Amodei says the public is not prepared for the potential inequality that the technology might create. [KM: "might"? Don't lie, Dario, "will create" - stop the posing]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 January 2026

• How cocoa substitutes could tackle shortages of natural cocoa. One company, Prefer in Singapore, produces PreferChoc by fermenting and roasting seeds and grainsin bioreactors.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 21 January 2026

• Zhōngguó says Tawian's trade deal with USA will "drain the economy of Taiwan" for the benefit of the USA (Taiwan agreed to invest $500 billion in the USA's semiconductor industry - the goal of the USA is to bring 40% of Taiwan's entire semiconductor supply chain to the USA.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 January 2026

• Zhōngguó is building world-first triad reactor system to power world-class chemical plant. Project uses nuclear energy to pump clean steam to the petrochemical industry while also supplying electricity.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 21 January 2026

• Zhōngguó's 200,000-satellite regulatory filing sparks fears of an orbital power grab. Satellites now underpin modern warfare, forming part of the so-called 'kill mesh'.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 January 2026

• The [rich] CEO of Microsoft suddenly sounds extremely nervous about AI. Not sounding too confident about AI not being a bubble. [KM: it is a bubble, but Microsoft hasn't made enough money yet, so he is only 'concerned' for now]
  - Futurism, 20 January 2026

• As [authoritarian] Microsoft stuffs Windows with AI [that users don't want], new update prevents users from turning off their PCs. Instead, the computers get stuck in an endless shutdown loop in which they either don't finish or stay powered on, or simply restart. Microsoft quickly eliminated the 'feature'. What you get when "you vibe code an OS".
  - Futurism, 20 January 2026

• Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge. PwC survey finds more than half of 4,500+ biz leaders see no revenue growth nor cost savings. [KM: who cares, if extremely rich AI companies get richer]
  - The Register, 20 January 2026

• Snapchat's parent Snap has settled a social media addiction lawsuit just days before the landmark case was due to go to trial in Los Angeles. [KM: social media are digital drugs]
  - BBC, 20 January 2026

• OpenAI[sore] is facing a huge legal risk that almost no one is talking about. Lawsuits over mental health damage, and deaths, caused by AI chatbots. "The liability exposure for the industry is absolutely in the billions." [KM: so a few people die - the rich must get richer!]
  - SF Gate, 20 January 2026

• [To keep the AI bubble inflated,] tech firms are persuading retailers to put AI everywhere. Stores of all kinds are using AI to sell everything from luxury handbags to hay for horses. [KM: yes, the rich must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 January 2026

• Chris Hohn's TCI made $18.9 billion last year, shattering hedge-fund records. Stock pickers enjoyed a banner year in 2025, capitalizing on geopolitical uncertainty and the AI boom.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 January 2026

• Why the [extremely rich] tech world thinks the American dream is dying [KM: that they are killing]. Silicon Valley fears this is the last chance to amass generational wealth before AI makes money worthless.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 January 2026

• Noveon, a rare-earth magnet maker, raises $215 million to increase the supply of rare-earth materials in the USA. The investment in Noveon comes as the U.S. pushes to develop domestic sources of a vital electronics component that Zhōngguó has under a chokehold.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 January 2026

• AI impacting labor market "like a tsunami, and most countries and most businesses are not prepared for it" as fears mount of [more paid-human jobs being destroyed] [KM: yes, but the rich must get richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 January 2026

• Zhōngguó flies a military drone into Taiwan airspace for first time. "Zhōngguó has found another soft spot. They can repeat this to demonstrate that they can enter Taiwan airspace with impunity. And what do you do if they start flying lower and lower?"
  - Zero Hedge, 19 January 2026

• Senator Rand Paul: I have changed my mind - [extremely rich] Google and YouTube cannot be trusted to do the right thing and must be reined in - they deserve to be sued. For the past three weeks YouTube has been hosting a video that is a calculated lie, falsely accusing me of taking money from Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro. Google/YouTube refused to remove the video. I am now receiving death threats. Google/YouTube refused to remove the video. An executive at YouTube said that YouTube does not monitor their content for truth. But how would [victims of lies] ever get his or her reputation back? Google's defense of speech appears to be limited to defense of speech they agree with.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 19 January 2026

• The sycophantic AI chatbots [of extremely rich AI companies] inflate people's perceptions that they are "better than average". Furthermore, participants viewed sycophantic chatbots as unbiased, but viewed disagreeable chatbots as highly biased. AI sycophancy might have a number of undesirable consequences [for humans]. [KM: yes, but very profitable consequences for extremely rich AI companies]
  - PsyPost, 19 January 2026

• [Extremely rich] Big Tech corporations engaging in 'human fracking'. Our brains are being blasted with information so tech companies can extract our precious attention spans [KM: so they can become extremely more richer - the rest of human bodies are still good to make Soylent Green]
  - Futurism, 19 January 2026

• NVIDIA executives allegedly authorized the use of millions of pirated books from Anna's Archive to fuel its AI training. In an expanded class-action lawsuit that cites internal NVIDIA documents, several book authors claim that the trillion-dollar company directly reached out to Anna's Archive, seeking high-speed access to the shadow library data.
  - Torrent Freak, 19 January 2026

• The first victims of 'great memory crunch' emerge as AI data centers soak up global supply
  - Zero Hedge, 19 January 2026

• Elon Musk's Cybertruck sales show stomach-churning drop. Why even sell them at this point? The mysteries at Tesla abound. Tesla sold 39,000 of the notoriously unreliable pickups in 2024, but only 20,200 in 2025 - nearly a 50% collapse.
  - Futurism, 19 January 2026

• Private credit stocks crash after shock report reveals huge exposure to collapsing software sector
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 19 January 2026

• Shares of companies offering 'software as a service (SaaS) are being annihilated by the AI bubble, with stock prices down 40% to 80% as perceived valuations are greatly reduced.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 19 January 2026

• Shares of companies offering 'software as a service (SaaS) are being annihilated by the AI bubble, with stock prices down 40% to 80% as perceived valuations are greatly reduced.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 19 January 2026

• Prediction: these stocks will collapse if the AI bubble pops in 2026 - Oracle, Coreweave, Nebius, Oklo
  - The Motley Fool, 19 January 2026

• Andreessen Horowitz makes a $3 billion bet against the AI bubble [KM: something about leaving sinking ships :-)]
  - Bloomberg, 19 January 2026

• The International Monetary Fund warns the resilience of the global economy is at risk if AI falters [if the AI bubble bursts] [KM: I hope the IMF isn't paying anyone for such trite observations]
  - Financial Times (locked), 19 January 2026

• Ethereum hits transaction record as fees crash to pennies. After years of high fees, Ethereum is turning the corner, taking on competing platforms like Solana, attractive because it is very cheap to transact on the mainnet, and near-zero to move value of implement smart contracts on its layer-2s like Arbitrum or sidechains like Polygon.
  - Bitcoins, 19 January 2026

• [The latest casino to go all-hours]: the New York Stock Exchange (owned by Intercontinental Exchange) builds tokenized securities platform to bring stocks and ETFs to 24/7 on-chain trading
  - Thomson's Reuters, 19 January 2026

• [The latest casino to go all-hours]: the New York Stock Exchange (owned by Intercontinental Exchange) builds tokenized securities platform to bring stocks and ETFs to 24/7 on-chain trading
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 January 2026

• [The latest casino to go all-hours]: the New York Stock Exchange (owned by Intercontinental Exchange) builds tokenized securities platform to bring stocks and ETFs to 24/7 on-chain trading
  - Nerds.xyz, 19 January 2026

• Trump is obsessed with oil. But batteries and renewable energy from Zhōngguó will soon run the world.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 January 2026

• The climate-disaster scores that could make or break your home sale. Millions of home sellers and buyers are caught in the battle over how to rate a home's exposure to natural disasters.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 January 2026

• "Soak The Rich" [with wealth taxes] is the battle cry rising from London to California. Across the western world, governments are turning toward a familiar source of funds to repair scarred balance sheets: wealth taxes are proliferating across the west.
  - Bloomberg (locked), 19 January 2026

• Unitree, based in Zhōngguó, ships more than 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, surpassing peers in the USA. The Hangzhou-based company's output far outstripped the roughly 150 units that were shipped each by Tesla, Figure AI and Agility Robotics last year.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 19 January 2026

• Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. But no other cryptocurrency is bitcoin. Bitcoin requires the existence of no other cryptocurrency. But without Bitcoin, a vast majority of cryptoassets would lose their economic anchor, cultural authority, and reason for being.
  - American Thinker, 18 January 2026

• Media executives prepare for [extremely rich] AI companies and their AI tools to bring the end of journalism [KM: an important part of the social fabric that Big Tech has long wanted to destroy]
  - Futurism, 18 January 2026

• [AI bubble starting to pop?] Big Tech stocks are quickly falling out of favor. Here is the market's new momentum trade.
  - MarketWatch (locked), 18 January 2026

• AI technology is completely failing to boost productivity, according to a top analyst. Mountains of research as well as cases of workplace deployment of AI have suggested that the tech is far from being ready for primetime. [KM: hard to inflate bubble where the only productivity is for generating slop]
  - Futurism, 18 January 2026

• AI surveillance systems are causing a staggering number of wrongful arrests and involuntary detentions. "A really high number of children who experience involuntary examination remember it as a really traumatic and damaging experience - not something that helps them with their mental health care." [KM: what? Expect rich AI companies to waste some of their profits on fixing their defective systems?]
  - Futurism, 18 January 2026

• Zhōngguó develops ion implanters to reduce reliance on overseas chip suppliers. For years, Zhōngguó depended entirely on imported high-energy hydrogen ion implanters.
  - Interesting Engineering, 18 January 2026

• The United Kingdom is considering a social media ban for children under the age of 16, amid a rising push for online IDs
  - Zero Hedge, 18 January 2026

• Tired of AI [including the slop, and only AI companies getting richer], people are committing to the analog lifestyle in 2026 [KM: not good for the AI bubble]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 18 January 2026

• The 'Big Short' investor Michael Burry says the AI boom/[bubble] will end badly. He shared an old Warren Buffett story to explain why.
  - Business Insider, 18 January 2026

• How can Zhōngguó help Uruguay battle beetles threatening to invade South America? A small reddish insect is on the march and space technology from Zhōngguó could halt the s path of destruction.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 18 January 2026

• The government of Taiwan, [to appease bullyboy Trump], in an act of 'political sadomasochism', has just sold out TSMC and half its chips industry to the USA. The so-called silicon shield is bust as there will not be much left of the island to defend [against Zhōngguó] after the forced relocation of a significant chunk of industrial base under new tariff deal. [Another Trump gift to Zhōngguó]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 18 January 2026

• New study finds that AI in schools is undermining children's social and intellectual development [KM: yes, but not undermining increased profits for extremely rich AI companies]
  - Futurism, 17 January 2026

• "The USA is slow-walking into a polymarket disaster". In an opinion piece for The Atlantic, senior editor Saahil Desai argues that media outlets are increasingly treating prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi as legitimate signals of reality. The risk, as Desai warns, is a future where news coverage amplifies manipulable betting odds and turns politics, geopolitics, and even tragedy into speculative gambling theater. [KM: yes, but the rich must get richer]
  - The Atlantic, 17 January 2026

• If you use the AI chatbots [of extremely rich AI companies] to follow the news, you are basically injecting 'severe poison' directly into your brain
  - Futurism, 17 January 2026

• Robots have a small problem: they completely suck. The gap between what's being promised [KM: to inflate the AI bubble] and what robots are capable of today is growing fast
  - Futurism, 17 January 2026

• The extremely rich Elon Musk wants $134 billion from the extremely rich OpenAI. Musk argues he helped create and fund OpenAI, originally a nonprofit dedicated to AI for the public good, and that [a greedy Sam Altman and greedy] OpenAI[sore] later abandoned that commitment in a way that amounted to fraud. [KM: how about settling this with a joust with horses and lances between Musk and Altman?]
  - Zero Hedge, 17 January 2026

• Is this billionaire a financial genius, or a fraudster? Michael Saylor's financial alchemy thrust an ordinary software company, (Micro)Strategy, into the center of the cryptocurrency frenzy/[bubble]. It all worked spectacularly, until now.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 January 2026

• Can non-paid AI be used [to replace paid-humans] to generate new ideas? [KM: rich AI companies hope so]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 January 2026

• Universities in Zhōngguó surge in global rankings as universities in the USA decline in the rankings. Harvard still dominates, though it fell to No. 3 on a list measuring academic output. Other universities in the USA are falling farther behind their global peers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 January 2026

• TSMC says AI demand is "endless ... it is starting to grow [like a cancer] into our daily life" [KM: endless, until all paid-human jobs and human thinking are destroyed, then people being used as Soylent Green won't need AI]
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 17 January 2026

• OpenAI[sore]'s ChatGPT to start showing users ads based on their conversations [KM: destroying paid-human jobs, destroying human thinking abilities, and now ... selling more shit - we need the AI bubble for this?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 January 2026

• OpenAI[sore]'s ChatGPT to start showing users ads based on their conversations [KM: destroying paid-human jobs, destroying human thinking abilities, and now ... selling more shit - we need the AI bubble for this?]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 17 January 2026

• OpenAI[sore]'s ChatGPT to start showing users ads based on their conversations [KM: destroying paid-human jobs, destroying human thinking abilities, and now ... selling more shit - we need the AI bubble for this?] CEO Sam Altman once said advertising was a "last resort" for the company.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 January 2026

• AI companies' [and the AI bubble's] need for a once obscure and affordable type of memory microchip threatens to drive up prices of all and limit AI data-center ambitions.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 January 2026

• To build a better AI, reverse its antisocial [misanthropic] tendencies. Engagement and [drug-like] addiction have fueled [the huge profits of] social-media platforms for decades. AI labs appear to be on the same track, but there a better alternative. [KM/JC: an alternative that will never happen because the Love of Money is the only church for extremely-rich AI and social media companies.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 January 2026

• Elon Musk's xAI will not be able to use natural gas-burning turbines to build out its future data centers like it did in Memphis, following an EPA rule update this week. The updated rule says companies must obtain Clean Air Act permits to operate turbines and can no longer treat them as temporary, "non-road eninges". xAI's use of natural gas-burning turbines worsened air pollution in Memphis last year, researchers with the University of Tennessee in Knoxville found. [KM: sorry, Elon, you will need to find another way to get more filthy rich]
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 January 2026

• Zhōngguó restricts use of AI processor chips from the USA, and shuns foreign investment capital, in pursuit of technology self-reliance
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 January 2026

• CO2 + H2O = cleaner recycling of dead lithium batteries? A group of researchers in Zhōngguó say their process can recover most of the lithium without the need for harsh and polluting chemicals.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 January 2026

• Corporate bonds sold [to help inflate the AI bubble] could devour credit markets. Let institutional stock investors take the risk. Amazon, Facebook, and other large tech companies are issuing more debt than ever. Why you should steer clear.
  - Barron's, 17 January 2026

• Facebook triples down on its investment into the AI [bubble]. It could be a wild ride for its stock price.
  - Barron's, 17 January 2026

• Researchers just found something that could shake the AI industry/bubble to its core. Stanford and Yale researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually [criminally] copying all that data, not "learning" from it. They found that [mis]Anthropic's Claude outputted "entire books near-verbatim" with an accuracy rate of 95.8 percent.
  - Futurism, 16 January 2026

• Rackspace customers grapple with "devastating" email hosting price increase. Reseller says Rackspace plans to charge it 706 percent more.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 16 January 2026

• A brain stimulation device, which uses trigeminal nerve stimulation, that has been approved by the FDA for ADHD treatment in the USA is overall safe but ineffective. A large multicentre clinical trial led by King's College London with 150 children and adolescents has shown that a device cleared by the US FDA to treat ADHD is not effective in reducing symptoms.
  - King's College London, 16 January 2026

• A brain stimulation device, which uses trigeminal nerve stimulation, that has been approved by the FDA for ADHD treatment in the USA is overall safe but ineffective. A large multicentre clinical trial led by King's College London with 150 children and adolescents has shown that a device cleared by the US FDA to treat ADHD is not effective in reducing symptoms.
  - PsyPost, 16 January 2026

• [Cellphone apps and computer games are digital dopamine-producing drugs.] An 11-year-old boy kills his father, after the father took away the child's Nintendo Switch handheld gaming system when it was time to go to bed. This occurred in their home in Pennsylvania.
  - The Guardian, 16 January 2026

• The FTC imposes a 5-year-ban on the [authoritarian] General Motors disclosing/selling geolocation and driver data to consumer reporting agencies, [a misanthropic invasion of privacy]
  - Zero Hedge, 16 January 2026

• The wrong (misanthropic) solution for: AI productivity gains, [threats to paid-human] employment, and universal basic income (UBI). Defaulting to UBI is an admission of policy failure and signals surrender to the disruption [KM: caused by extremely rich AI companies] rather than managing it.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 January 2026

• Another $3.5 billion for natural gas power generation. Talen Energy is following in the footsteps of utility peers Vistra and Constellation by spending billions of dollars acquiring gas generation assets to expand their capacity and grow market share in the growing demand for electric power [due to the AI bubble].
  - Zero Hedge, 16 January 2026

• [Is the AI bubble closer to bursting?] Since mid-August, GOOGL +62% vs AAPL +12%, AMZN +7%, NVDA +3%, MSFT -8%, META -17%.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 16 January 2026

• [Is the AI bubble closer to bursting?] Since mid-August, GOOGL +62% vs AAPL +12%, AMZN +7%, NVDA +3%, MSFT -8%, META -17%.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 January 2026

• [Money is flowing freely in college athletics' new world disorder.] The gambling-related game-fixing scandal in basketball now include 17 colleges in the USA - and the pro league in Zhōngguó. Federal prosecutors say more than three dozen players were recruited to throw games for the purposes of (online) gambling.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 January 2026

• Money is flowing freely in college athletics' new world disorder. It is no surprise that [addictive online] gambling is playing a role. In exchange for payouts of $20,000 here or $30,000 there, gamblers lay down hundreds of thousands of dollars on bets they are almost guaranteed to win, a brilliant return on investment. [KM: similar to the returns for political lobbyists - same crime.]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 16 January 2026

• Trump wants [extremely rich] tech companies to pay the costs of new electric power plants for the [much useless] AI data centers [KM: no more socialist subsidies from the poor to the rich]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 January 2026

• Trump wants [extremely rich] tech companies to pay the costs of new electric power plants for the [much useless] AI data centers [KM: no more socialist subsidies from the poor to the rich]
  - Zero Hedge, 16 January 2026

• Trump wants [extremely rich] tech companies to pay the costs of new electric power plants for the [much useless] AI data centers [KM: no more socialist subsidies from the poor to the rich]
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 January 2026

• The Trump administration and a group of governors from northeastern states are asking PJM, the largest electrical grid operator in the USA, to hold an emergency power auction as part of an effort to make [extremely rich] technology giants pay for surging electric power costs from new AI data centers. [KM: What? Pay more means less new riches for the rich. How unAmerican.]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 16 January 2026

• The government of Taiwan hails a deal with the USA to pay taxes/tariffs of 15% of imports of its products into the USA, despite fears over a promise to invest $500 billion in the USA semiconductor industry. The deal risks destroying the semiconductor sector of Taiwan, opposition parties warn, as Zhōngguó calls it a plot to drain the lifeblood of Taiwan's industry.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 16 January 2026

• TSMC buys up land in Arizona as Taiwan pledges US$500 billion investment in the USA technology sector. Semiconductor chip giant TSMC plans to build a 'gigafab cluster' in the USA, with Taiwan committing to US$500 billion investment under a new trade deal.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 16 January 2026

• [The extremely rich] Google "is increasingly prioritising AI summaries, X posts and Youtube videos" on its 'Discover' feed (which appears on the leftmost homescreen page of many Android phones and the Google app's homepage). "The changes could be devastating for publishers who rely heavily on Discover for referral traffic. And it looks set to accelerate a global trend of declining traffic to publishers from both Google search and Discover." [KM: the rich must get richer, especially the extremely rich Google]
  - Press Gazette, 15 January 2026
• The trillions being spent on the AI bubble don't make sense economically. To meet its colossal financial needs the sector has shifted from a model dominated by cash-flow and equity financing to debt financing. A large part of the hype is fuelled by financial loops in which suppliers invest in their clients and vice versa. OpenAI, meanwhile, is spending almost twice what it earns on Microsoft's cloud platform Azure, which provides the computing power to run its services, thereby enriching its main backer while accumulating debt. "In these circumstances, the job of investment bankers is to convince lenders to assume risks they do not really understand." [KM: yes, the main crime of the 2008 financial crisis.] Notwithstanding the hype, the use of AI at work is not soaring and may even be slowing, and concerns only a small fraction of the workforce. We also won't have lots of unused fiber optic lines, such as after the DotCom crash. Unlike the fibre-optic cables of the dot-com era or the railways of the nineteenth century, AI chips must be replaced frequently as their performance fades and technology improves. If the chips are almost worthless after five years, who will refinance an asset whose key component has fully depreciated?
  - Sidecar, 15 January 2026

• A man purchased a pair of AI chatbot-embedded Ray-Ban Facebook smart glasses - the AI-infused eyeglasses that [extremely rich] Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made central to his vision for the future of AI and computing - which the man says opened the door to a six-month delusional spiral that played out across Facebook platforms through extensive interactions with the company's AI, culminating in him making dangerous journeys into the desert to await alien visitors and believing he was tasked with ushering forth a "new dawn" for humanity. And though his delusions have since faded, his journey into a Facebook AI-powered reality left his life in shambles - deep in debt, reeling from job loss, isolated from his family, and struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts. [KM: yes, but Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook must get richer]
  - Futurism, 15 January 2026

• Employees of the Washington Post are furious as [extremely rich owner] Jeff Bezos stays silent after the FBI raids the home of a Washington Post reporter: Bezos' apathy is "nauseating and irresponible"
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 15 January 2026

• Non-paid AI has made paid-human Salesforce engineers more productive, so the company has stopped hiring paid-humans, CEO Marc Benioff says. [KM: the implicit logic being that as non-paid AI gets better, Benioff can get richer by firing some of the remaining paid-human engineers]
  - IT Pro, 15 January 2026

• The USA and Taiwan agreed to a long-sought trade agreement that would lower tariffs on goods from Taiwan to 15% and see semiconductor companies based in Taiwan increase financing for operations in the USA by $500 billion.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 January 2026

• The USA and Taiwan agreed to a long-sought trade agreement that would lower tariffs on goods from Taiwan to 15% and see semiconductor companies based in Taiwan increase financing for operations in the USA by $500 billion.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 15 January 2026

• The start-up in Sweden aiming to conquer the full-body-scan craze in the USA. Neko Health, backed by the Spotify founder Daniel Ek, plans to open in New York this spring.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 January 2026

• Regulators in Zhōngguó disclose probe into Trip.com. The regulator said Trip.com, one of the biggest online travel agencies in Zhōngguó, allegedly abused its dominant market position and engaged in monopolistic practices.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 January 2026

• Blackstone's flagship real-estate fund aimed at individual investors, called Breit, notched its strongest performance in three years, boosted by its investment in the AI data center [bubble].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 January 2026

• Behind the curtain: the job replacement/destruction AI machine. Nothing will determine the future of the AI [bubble] more than if - and how fast - the new non-paid AI technology destroys good-paying human jobs [KM: for one reason - to make the (extremely) rich richer]
  - Axios, 15 January 2026

• TSMC delivers another record quarter as profit jumps 35% fueled by robust AI chip demand [because of the AI bubble]
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 January 2026

• Zhōngguó targets wealthy freelance PR agents ('influencers') with audits and fines, as fiscal pressures rise. Big data is used to flag income gaps for top online stars and overseas earners, as regulators recover billions in unpaid levies amid slumping land sales and value-added tax revenue decline.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 15 January 2026

• Toyota boasts developing a solid-state battery with 745-mile range and 10-minute charging time - here is how it may impact all electric vehicles.
  - The Cool Down, 14 January 2026

• [GRAPHIC]: Fundamental data comparison between current bubble and Great Recession crash of 2009 - data is worse now
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 14 January 2026

• The risks of using generative artificial intelligence to educate children and teens currently overshadow the benefits, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution's Center for Universal Education. [KM: yes, but it is no risk for the rich getting richer]. One huge problem: AI poses serious threats to social and emotional development.
  - NPR, 14 January 2026

• More over, ChatGPT. [mis]Anthropic's Claude Code AI is much better - at everything. The luster of ChatGPT has worn off, and Silicon Valley has been pumping out slop. [KM: non-paid Claude Code could be the double killer - its competition helps burst the AI bubble, and its power helps kill many more paid-human jobs - but heck, worth it if the [mis]anthropic rich get richer]
  - The Atlantic, 14 January 2026

• Mark Hulbert: fundamental data comparison between current bubble and Great Recession crash of 2009 - data is worse now
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 14 January 2026

• Computer science used to be a golden ticket to a lucrative career. Now graduates can't get an entry-level job which are being replace with non-paid AI tools doing entry-level coding [KM: yes, the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Barclay's The Telegraph, 14 January 2026

• Shares of Rivian Automotive moved lower on Wednesday morning after UBS analyst Joseph Spak downgraded the struggling EV maker from "Neutral" to "Sell," marking the second analyst this week to slash their rating on the stock.
  - Zero Hedge, 14 January 2026

• Over 53% of all crypto tokens launched since 2021 are now inactive, with 2025 alone accounting for 86% of total project failures. The rise of meme coins and easy-to-launch tokens from platforms like pump.fun fueled a flood of low-effort projects that quickly collapsed.
  - CoinDesk, 14 January 2026

• Trump imposes 25% tax/tariff on imports of some advanced computing processor chips
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 January 2026

• [Extremely rich] tech billionaires have no answer for what will happen if AI take all jobs [KM: not that any of them care]
  - Futurism, 14 January 2026

• Financial expert says that OpenAI[sore] is on the verge of running out of money. He expects OpenAI[sore] to go bust "over the next 18 months".
  - Futurism, 14 January 2026

• The actor Matthew McConaughey is forced to trademark himself to fight the misuse of his image by [extremley rich] AI companies's AI image generation tools. Actor plans to use trademarks of himself saying "Alright, alright, alright", and staring at a camera to combat AI fakes in court.
  - MSWJ, 14 January 2026

• Hours after an ICE police agent murdered Renés Nicole Good, a mother of three, Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot was undressing her and deepfaking her body wearing a bikini [KM: a few more bucks for the extremely rich Elon Musk]
  - Mother Jones, 14 January 2026

• Zheng Yu, a 'rising star' in chemical engineering from MIT, quits the USA for Zhōngguó. The researcher who specialises in wearable devices has taken up a position at Peking University.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 January 2026

• Zhipu AI in Zhōngguó breaks Zhōngguó's reliance on AI processors from the USA, by training a major AI model on Huawei AI processors. Zhipu claims GLM-Image achieved industry-leading scores among open-source models for text rendering and text generation using characters of the language of Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 January 2026

• The 'Bari Weiss' era at CBS is already a complete embarrassment. The legendary newsroom has become a laughingstock under its new editor in chief.
  - Slate, 14 January 2026

• A new [MAGA-ass-kissing] anchor on [now MAGA-ass-kissing] CBS (or see-BS) pleads and begs with viewers after his ratings collapse. Tony Dokoupil sent a direct message to viewers after they deserted CBS's primetime show during his first week as anchor, with an 11% drop in ratings. Dokoupil was given the anchor seat by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, an anti-[equality,diversity] opinion journalist who was installed in the job by CBS's new owner, David Ellison, a Trump-friendly billionaire nepo-baby.
  - The Daily Beast, 14 January 2026

• CBS (or see-BS) Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil has been caught quoting a claim wrongly made by Trump as a fact
  - The Daily Beast, 14 January 2026

• 92% of employed people in the USA have reduced spending as the standard of living in the USA crumbles [KM: except, of course, for the rich who get richer and richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 13 January 2026

• Trump says that Big Tech giants must bear cost of electricity for [useless] AI data centers, as extremely rich Microsoft joins extremely rich OpenAI[sore] in demanding socialist subsidies [KM: hey rich, no socialist subsidies for you!]
  - Zero Hedge, 13 January 2026

• Photos capture the breathtaking scale of the expansion of solar and win power in Zhōngguó. In May of 2025 alone, Zhōngguó added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
  - Yale Environment 360, 13 January 2026

• Emissions of global heating CO2 in the USA jumped in 2025, as the use of coal for power generation rebounded due to [useless] AI data centers need more electric power [KM: to make rich AI companies richer, so who cares if the environment gets more fucked].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 January 2026

• $500,000,000 - Regulators in New York City say DoorDash and Uber Eats stolen $550 million in tips from delivery workers in New York City during the last two years. A report published by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection argues that food delivery app giants retaliated against minimum wage rules for delivery drivers that took effect in December 2023 by implementing "design tricks" that obscure opportunities to offer a tip in their mobile apps. [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - Gothamist, 13 January 2026

• Generation Z students arriving at college unable to read. "it is not even an inability to critically think. It is an inability to read sentences." Many of them have been reared in a world of videos and other forms of social media. [KM: which makes extremely rich tech companies richer, and fuck all to the rest of society]
  - Futurism, 13 January 2026

• Warhammer maker Games Workshop bans its staff from using AI in its content or designs, says none of its senior managers are currently excited about the AI tech
  - IGN, 13 January 2026

• The biggest power grid operator in the USA has an AI problem - too many [useless] AI data centers. Increasing electricity demand from the tech industry threatens to max out generation capacity in a 13-state region. Consumers are furious about increases in the price of electricity they pay [KM: while rich AI companies get richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 January 2026

• I am betting that OpenAI[sore] will go broke. Most users aren't paying for AI services, until AI companies can get people addicted to their particular model after lengthy use. Until then big AI companies have plenty of cash to burn - OpenAI[sore] doesn't, and is hemorrhaging cash, with profits - maybe - by 2030. It will probably be absorbed by one of the Big Tech.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 January 2026

• Funding for risky biotechs is returning. Publicly traded drug developers sold more than $13 billion of shares in the fourth quarter, the most in more than four years.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 January 2026

• Telsa's profit engine is sputtering due to strong competition and end of socialist subsidies. Elon Musk has bet its future on a promise he is far from delivering - non-paid robotaxis. [KM: Elon Musk is rich enough. He, and his investors, does not need to get richer by detroying paid-human taxi driver jobs. The same for Google and Waymo. Why do all of these people/companies hate (poor) people?]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 13 January 2026

• Shares of Orsted pop 5% after a federal judge in the USA rules that Orsted can resume a wind energy project halted by the environment-hating Trump
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 January 2026

• Shares of Orsted pop 5% after a federal judge in the USA rules that Orsted can resume a wind energy project halted by the environment-hating Trump
  - Zero Hedge, 13 January 2026

• [The global intelligence destroying of children by misanthropic AI:] nearly 1 in 4 children in schools in Hong Kong cannot finish homework without AI, putting their problem-solving and analytical thinking skills at risk. [KM: yes, but who cares, if rich AI companies can get richer?]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 January 2026

• Cowboys in Wyoming are breaking down barriers, literally. GPS collars on cattle are letting ranchers remove fences in the West. That is good for wildlife and for the land. Fences can block wildlife migrations and put pressure on those landscapes.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 January 2026

• Small modular reactor developers push new partnerships and use cases. After Oklo's blockbuster news on Friday, SMR developers Nano Nuclear and NuScale Power released their own updates on new engineering partnerships and potential use cases.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 January 2026

• The 'godfather of AI', Geoffrey Hinton, says that non-paid AI technology will create massive unemployment [of paid-humans] and send profits soaring [for the rich] - "that is the [Christian] capitalist system". [KM: geesh, tons of 'opium' will be needed for the unemployment masses]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 12 January 2026

• [Now that it is controlled by extremely rich Trump supporters], David Letterman argues that CBS News is "a wreck". ... That integrity of CBS News has been trampled on, pissed on and eviscerated by these [extremely rich] idiots that have taken it over." [KM: well, while the extremely rich get even richer, they need new toys to destroy]
  - The Hill, 12 January 2026

• [The extremely rich] Peter Thiel gives $3 million to a group seeking to block a proposed wealth tax in California [JC: to help my "blessed meek"]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 January 2026

• CXMT, a semiconductor memory chip maker in Zhōngguó, is challenging the world's memory chip giants. CXMT is overcoming the USA's restrictions to challenge Micron and South Korean leaders.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 January 2026

• [Desperate] job seekers find a new source of [short-term] income: training AI systems to do their old roles [KM: a classic giving AI companies the 'rope' to hang these contractors]. Buzzy AI startup Mercor [temporarily] employs tens of thousands of white-collar contractors, and the [short-term] gig is open to anyone with expertise in their own particular field.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 January 2026

• What a new betting market for housing prices indicates for home buyers and sellers. Slower-moving indicators have widely been considered the most reliable data for home buyers and sellers.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 January 2026

• Solar power companies, once deemed too competitive, now face accusations of being monopolies
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 12 January 2026

• Gig/serf workers in Bharat go on strike that spurs a debate on the human cost of fast deliveries [KM: which only makes executives/investors richer]. More than 200,000 gig/serf workers recently staged protests across major cities in Bharat, prompting concerns about the necessity of quick commerce. "Who is accountable when safety is compromised? And how sustainable is a model that treats human labour as infinitely elastic?"
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 January 2026

• Grocery stores and supermarkets are using non-paid AI facial recognition. Human shoppers hate it.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 12 January 2026

• Climate change [and global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels] has now reduced the salaries of workers in the USA by up to 12% (partly because of the effect of hotter weather on supply chains). And worse is to come. [KM: yes, as extremely rich AI companies further heat up the planet with their data centers to become even more rich.]
  - BBC, 11 January 2026

• [Without socialist subsidies], Elon Musk's xAI is losing staggering amounts of money. According to documents obtained by Bloomberg, xAI recorded a net loss of $1.46 billion over the third quarter of 2025. That loss is an even worse loss than previous months - in the first quarter of 2025, for example, the company's net loss was roughly $1 billion, and it has shredded $7.8 billion in cash over the last year. Profits using the AI to power his Optimus robots? Unlikely. Like xAI, Musk's sputtering Optimus program is eons away from ever turning a profit - or even from hitting the market, for that matter. Yet xAI is building another [useless] AI data center for $20 billion in Mississippi. Like a previous xAI data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, it will no doubt be a massive headache for its unfortunate neighbors. [KM: yes, but these neighbors are not rich, and are doing nothing to make Elon Musk richer. Let them eat AI cake.]
  - Futurism, 11 January 2026

• How Zhōngguó turned a mega-project failure into a defining moment in modern engineering. In rendezvous beneath the Yangtze River, a multimillion-dollar tunnel boring machine meets its stalled twin with just 2 millimeters of vertical error.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 11 January 2026

• New York state governor Kathy Hochul wants [to end the socialist subsidies for extremely rich] AI data centers to pay more for electricity as overwhelming demand is driving up the price of electricity for non-rich consumers [KM: let these "blessed meek" eat cake]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 11 January 2026

• Malaysia suspends access to Elon Musk's xAI's Grok system amid global backlash on [the dangers of] Musk's AI. The regulating commission deemed Musk's xAI's safeguards inadequate, adding that access would resume only after the required changes are verified. "This action follows repeated misuse of Grok to generate obscene, sexually explicit, indecent, grossly offensive and non-consensual manipulated images."
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 January 2026

• Malaysia and now Indonesia suspend access to Elon Musk's xAI's Grok system amid global backlash on [the dangers of] Musk's AI. The regulating commission deemed Musk's xAI's safeguards inadequate, adding that access would resume only after the required changes are verified. "This action follows repeated misuse of Grok to generate obscene, sexually explicit, indecent, grossly offensive and non-consensual manipulated images."
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 11 January 2026

• The Netflix and Paramount buyout offers are both wrong for Warner Brothers Discovery - and democracy. Neither deal serves the public interest, and both are dangerous for the future of free expression. Both would produce an unprecedented concentration of power over what Americans watch and which stories get told. [KM: yes, but it makes rich companies richer - isn't that more important?]
  - The Guardian, 11 January 2026

• Companies in Zhōngguó have signalled plans to launch more than 200,000 internet satellites, filing submissions with a UN agency just as Beijing accused Elon Musk's SpaceX of crowding shared orbital resources.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 11 January 2026

• Home Stocks 'go ape' over Google. Why Zillow and others are not scared. Housing technology companies are offering more than just listings, and their other services are a buffer against disruptions to the way buyers shop and agents advertise.
  - Barron's, 11 January 2026

• Why is the biotech industry struggling in Boston? The USA excels at funding discovery and celebrating breakthroughs, then neglects the hard work of manufacturing them at scale.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 January 2026

• [To keep the AI bubble bubbling?] The extremely rich CEO of Nvidia says AI doomerism has "done a lot of damage" and is "not helpful to society" [KM: seriously, with all of the damage done by AI - the misanthropic rich must stop whining!]
  - Business Insider, 10 January 2026

• Cory Doctorow: legalising reverse engineering could end 'enshittification' of the online world [KM: that is making rich tech companies richer]. "There is only one reason the world isn't bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the USA's defective [but profitable] products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an "anti-circumvention" law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the [loss of profits for rich] manufacturer)."
  - The Guardian, 10 January 2026

• [Copyright criminal whining about being ... copyright criminalized.] Some power users of generative AI have grown so comfortable with their new AI tools - especially image-generating tools - that they now feel entitled to the specific prompts they use to churn out slop, as if the entire technology isn't based on the work of human artists that had been ingested/[criminally copied] without consent. Pure hypocrisy [KM: an important Silicon Valley ethic], given that these AI tools were all trained on troves of human-made art and media without permission.
  - Futurism, 10 January 2026

• The real AI bubble may be in the private debt markets. xAI, OpenAI[sore] and [mis]Anthropic have been rapidly raising more money, adding to the notion of 'aspirational' valuations across the AI startup scene. "It is likely that the venture market is experiencing an AI bubble. The market has shown a sharp price increase, the market narrative has become 'AI versus the rest', and much of the investment is driven by investor envy and fear of missing out on returns." "It is hard to understand what the profit model is, or what any one model's competitive advantage will be - will it be able to charge more [especially in light of powerful open-source models], or run cheaper?"
  - MarketWatch (locked), 10 January 2026
• The $7 trillion-dollar [Big Tech] battle for your attention is built on a lie - that attention is something that can be measured in terms of device-engaged, task-oriented productivity, then optimized and operationalized and profitably controlled [to make the rich richer]. The result? Kids cannot read, students cannot think and rates of mental illness are spiking. By some accounts, this phenomenon is endangering democracy itself. [KM: yes, but the rich must get richer - everyone else has enough attention to eat/[Instagram] cake.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 January 2026

• [Someone spiked the Kool-Aid with LSD]: Fears of an AI bubble were nowhere to be found at CES, the world's biggest tech show
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 10 January 2026

• Is Craigslist the last real place on the Internet? Millennials are still using Craigslist to find jobs, love, and even to cast creative projects - rejecting [the misanthrophy of] AI- and algorithm-dominated online spaces.
  - Wired (locked), 10 January 2026

• The administration of [TACO] Trump abandons plans to prohibit imports of drones made in Zhōngguó
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 10 January 2026

• Residential electricity prices are surging even more, due to rising demand from AI data centers [KM: needed to generate more AI slop]
  - Zero Hedge, 09 January 2026

• The extremely rich Gates warns the world is going "backwards" and gives 5-year deadline before we enter a new Dark Age. [KM: yes, because of authoritarian billionaires such as Bill Gates and extremely rich, power hungry, tech companies who will survive the Dark Age in the gated, weaponized compounds designed by Jeffrey Epstein]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 09 January 2026

• A top Goldman Sachs macro trader says 2026 is "all about the USA [and its AI bubble], stupid!" [KM: yes, one more year of the rich getting richer]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 09 January 2026

• GameStop closes more stores as retail apocalypse continues. Gamestop closed 590 stores in 2024, and closed a significant number of stores in 2025, as people can more easily buy videogames online. Despite its sagging performance, the company has a bubbled $9 billion valuation.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 09 January 2026

• [In the spirit of 'I Hate Humans']: [the extremely rich] Google's Waymo is the cure for 'those' unsure about non-paid robotaxis [KM: yeah, 'those' investors unsure if non-paid taxis will truly be able to eliminate all paid-human taxi drivers. The rich must get rich!]
  - Risk Hedge, 09 January 2026

• Non-paid AI fails at most remote work done by paid-humans
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 January 2026

• [Extremely rich AI companies and their] AI tools ares intensifying a 'collapse' of trust online, experts say. From Venezuela to Minneapolis, the rapid rollout of deepfakes around major news events is stirring confusion and suspicion about real news. [KM:, yes, but the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - NBC News, 09 January 2026

• How free-lance PR agents [i.e., the barfy 'influencers'] ruined a once-pristine national park lake in Wyoming, Delta Lake in the Grand Teton National Park. [KM: wannabee-rich influencers must get richer]
  - SF Gate, 09 January 2026

• Utah's AI-written prescription drug program sounds nice in theory. In practice, it is problematic. Introducing AI prescribers at this moment in American health care strikes me as profoundly tone-deaf. It tells patients that their concerns can be addressed by a non-paid chatbot and that the paid-human element of medicine is optional. [KM: optional, and more profitable for AI companies]
  - MSNOW, 09 January 2026

• Late cycle, elevated valuations [thanks to the AI bubble] - and Goldman Sachs is still bullish.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 09 January 2026

• Supermarket shelves [e.g., Amazon, Walmart - now AI driven!] have never been fuller, yet diets have become poorer. Across the world, food systems praised for their productivity now deliver an abundance of calories alongside widespread micronutrient deficiency, ecological collapse and rural precarity. This is the outcome of an agricultural model that equates food security with yield and mass production with nourishment. Sustained by billions in socialist subsidies, industrial agriculture increasingly resembles a socialist state for agribusiness and retail giants whose profits depend on public money. [KM: yes, the rich get richer, everyone else gets sicker eating cake]
  - Off Guardian, 09 January 2026

• Elon Musk's Grok AI tool is generating sexualized images of real people, fueling outrage from victims and regulators.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 January 2026

• Elon Musk's Grok AI tool is generating sexualized images of real people, fueling outrage from victims and regulators.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 January 2026

• Why Cambodia handed over a man accused of stealing billions in a cryptocurrency scam. Experts say the online scam industry has become a pillar of the economy of Cambodia, but it is under pressure from other countries (especially Zhōngguó) to crack down.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 January 2026

• The extremely rich people [richer with the AI bubble] in Silicon Valley plot against Representative Ro Khanna, after his support for a wealth tax
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 January 2026

• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announces it will cease operations. Its owner, Block Communications, said it had lost more than $350 million over the past 20 years while publishing the newspaper. [KM: another victim of Silicon Valley destroying socially-important local media by stealing all of their advertising income]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 January 2026

• Zhipu, an AI firm in Zhōngguó, has a lukewarm trading debut. The stock fizzled on its first day of trading in Hong Kong, marking a tepid start to 2026 for AI hopefuls in Zhōngguó, as they flock to one of the world's most active public markets.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 January 2026

• As tech stocks soar, executives use exchange funds to diversify wealth without selling
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 January 2026

• The great semiconductor leap: semiconductor equipment self-reliance beats target in Zhōngguó. Domestic suppliers capture 35% of the market as Zhōngguó accelerates push for semiconductor self-sufficiency.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 09 January 2026

• Companies in Zhōngguó, led by AgiBot, outpace US rivals in 2025 humanoid robot shipments. "Vendors in Zhōngguó are setting benchmarks in large-scale production.", Omdia analyst Lian Jye Su says.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 09 January 2026

• Zhōngguó to probe food delivery platforms under anti-monopoly law. State Council announcement cites "excessive subsidies" and "price wars" in document unveiling market assessment for online delivery services.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 09 January 2026

• Online holiday shopping in the USA hits record $257 billion. Mobile shopping; AI; and "buy now, pay later" programs contributed to a record holiday season.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 January 2026

• Microsoft is embedding full e-commerce checkout directly into Copilot chats, letting users buy products without ever visiting a retailer's website. "If [buying products] happens inside AI conversations, retailers risk losing direct customer relationships -- while platforms like Microsoft gain leverage, power and more profits." [KM: yes, the rich tech companies must get richer]
  - Axios, 08 January 2026

• Adam Wathan, the creator of the popular CSS framework Tailwind CSS, has let go of 75% of his paid-human engineering team -- reducing it from four people to one -- because non-paid AI-generated search answers have decimated traffic to the project's documentation pages.
  - Search Engine Roundtable, 08 January 2026

• Television makers are taking AI too far. Television manufacturers at CES 2026 in Las Vegas this week unveiled a wave of AI features that frequently consume significant screen space and take considerable time to deliver results.
  - The Verge, 08 January 2026

• The AI ate my buyback. As capital spending accelerates, buyback growth stalls and dividends reach historic lows, signaling a change in how companies deploy cash [KM: to keep the AI bubble inflated].
  - Zero Hedge, 08 January 2026

• JPMorgan ends all ties with proxy advisers in industry first. The bank's asset-management unit will use an in-house, AI-powered platform to cast shareholder votes.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 January 2026

• A cloudy outlook for [paid-human] cybersecurity jobs as [non-paid] AI tools fill security gaps. Flat budgets and a shaky economy will keep cybersecurity hiring [of paid-humans] in a holding pattern as firms invest in [non-paid] automated security tools.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 January 2026

• [mis]Anthropic raising $10 billion at $350 billion value. The planned deal represents nearly a doubling of the AI company's valuation from four months ago. [KM: how many people are going to have to lose their jobs to pay off this investment?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 January 2026

• JPMorgan Chase reaches deal to take over Apple credit card. Goldman Sachs is offloading the credit-card balances at a more than $1 billion discount.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 January 2026

• The increasing casino-fication of the American society [to make the rich richer]: Polymarket and Dow Jones partner to display prediction-markets data in Dow Jones content. Data from Polymarket on betting odds for economic, political, and cultural topics would be displayed in dedicated modules across Dow Jone's online content platforms, which include the Journal, MarketWatch, Barron's and Investor's Business Daily.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 January 2026

• [The extremely rich] Elon Musk's xAI is under fire for failing [to spend some money] to end its [profitable] ability to 'digitally undress' images of women [KM: nothing must stop Elon Musk from getting richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 08 January 2026

• [The extremely rich] Google is unleashing its Gemini AI features on Gmail. Users will have to opt out. Google said Gmail will not be able to summarize and suggest responses [KM: yes, one more way to reduce the amount of valuable thinking for humans]
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 January 2026

• [The extremely rich] Microsoft has identified itself as the mystery company behind a prospective data center in a part of Michigan where [non-rich] locals have objected to such a development because of water and electric power concerns.
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 January 2026

• Zhōngguó's 'artificial sub' breaks nuclear fusion limit with regards to plasma density thought to be impossible. By pushing plasma density well past long-standing empirical limits, the researchers said fusion ignition can be achieved with far higher energy outputs.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 January 2026

• Amazon allows its AI tool to blindside merchants by offering products without their knowledge or permission. At least one retailer discovered that Amazon had duplicated her product listings and made purchases on behalf of Amazon customers under email addresses that read like gibberish followed by buyforme.amazon. [KM: the rich must get richer, the small can get stomped on.]
  - Bloomberg, 07 January 2026

• Dell admits that customers are disgusted by PCs stuffed with AI features
  - Futurism, 07 January 2026

• Terrified investors are bracing for a reckoning [crash popping] of the AI bubble - "some of the valuations are insane"
  - Futurism, 07 January 2026

• "Microslop": infuriating video sums up how Microsoft is ruining Windows with AI - "This is not a real company". In a 30 second clip uploaded over the weekend, programmer Ryan Fleury demonstrates how even using Window 11's purportedly AI-powered search bar to do exactly what it tells you to do doesn't come close to working as advertised.
  - Futurism, 07 January 2026

• [More invasion of human piracy for profits:] OpenAI[sore] launches ChatGPT Health, encouraging users to connect their medical records. But it is "not intended for diagnosis or treatment" [KM: then why connect, other than some scheme for OpenAI[sore] to get richer exploiting private data with no compensation to people]
  - The Verge, 07 January 2026

• LEGO has responded to [legitimate] concerns that its newly announced Smart Brick technology represents a departure from the company's foundation in physical, non-digital play, a day after the official reveal at CES drew criticism from child development advocates. [JC: no excessive profitting exploiting my children]
  - IGN News, 07 January 2026

• "Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it." The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language - and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own. [KM: who cares, if rich AI companies can continue to inflate the bubble]
  - Climateer Investing, 07 January 2026

• [Too busy inflating the AI bubble], the major AI LLM chat systems currently have been failing grades from C- to F for their safety across six metrics. AI capabilities are accelerating far faster than risk management practices, and the lack of a regulatory floor means companies can cut corners on safety in order to get ahead in the race towards AGI [KM: and to keep the AI bubble inflated]
  - Zero Hedge, 07 January 2026

• Larry Page, the [extremely rich] co-founder of Google, the world's second-richest person, has reportedly left California amid concerns about a wealth tax on billionaires [KM: 'conservative' means the rich can get to conserve it all - everyone else can eat cake]
  - Barclay's The Telegraph, 07 January 2026

• The five stages of scientific publishing's 'enshittification'. The same [AI-driven 'enshittification] forces that hollow out [ruin] digital platforms are shaping how a lot of research is produced, reviewed and published. [KM: yes, but rich AI companies must get richer. Scientists can join the public, and eat cake.]
  - Real Clear Science, 07 January 2026

• Panel: is AI good for democracy? NO. No, if it supercharges the anti-democratic trends caused by social media. No, because AI centralizes power, isolates citizens and can be too easily manipulated. No, because AI threatens privacy. No, because AI will take jobs, which will weaken democracy. No, unless the civic environment can counter darkest tendencies of AI.
  - NOTUS, 07 January 2026

• A possible lab leak of samples of the African swine fever virus, from a biosafety lab in España, should be an alarm for stronger biosafety.
  - Real Clear Science, 07 January 2026

• MSCI will not exclude bitcoin treasury companies [scams] like Michael Saylor's (Micro)Strategy from global indexes
  - Zero Hedge, 07 January 2026

• MSCI will not exclude bitcoin treasury companies [scams] like Michael Saylor's (Micro)Strategy from global indexes
  - Thomson's Reuters, 07 January 2026

• Soaring silver prices force solar makers to rethink materials. The decision comes as solar manufacturers - the largest industrial users of silver - face intense competition and oversupply.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 January 2026

• Inside the 60-year campaign of Zhōngguó to dominate the rate earths industry
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 January 2026

• Countries are outlawing ads for [addictive/destructive] online gambling. Facebook, [saying 'Fuck You',] continues to sell ads for [addictive/destructive] online gambling. A Rest of World analysis found Meta is disregarding local laws and Facebook's own guidelines in at least 13 countries. [KM: "Fuck The World!" - the extremely Zuckerberg, Facebook and its investors must get richer]
  - Rest of World, 06 January 2026

• AI will threaten rural companies and rural paid-human jobs the most
  - American Enterprise Institute, 06 January 2026

• The Attorney General of Texas has secured a temporary restraining order against Samsung, blocking the company from continuing to collect data through its smart TVs' Automated Content Recognition technology. The ACR system captured screenshots of what users were watching every 500 milliseconds.
  - Texas Attorney General, 06 January 2026

• Power bank feature creep is out of control. Something has gone horribly wrong when your portable battery has a screensaver.
  - The Verge, 06 January 2026

• A lawmaker in California proposes a four-year ban on the manufacture and sale of toys with AI chatbot capabilities for children [JC: should be an eternal ban]. The goal is to give safety regulators time to develop regulations to protect children from "dnagerous AI interactions" [that make rich AI companies richer]
  - TechCrunch, 06 January 2026

• Another social harm of the AI bubble: are AI chatbots taking the fun out of fantasy football? One one of the biggest complaints is that they remove the human/social elements of gut instinct and luck that keep people hooked on fantasy leagues, to some, "outright cheating". [KM: yes, but the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - BBC, 06 January 2026

• Dell walks back its AI-first messaging after learning consumers don't care [KM: no good news for pumping the AI bubble]
  - PC Gamer, 06 January 2026

• HarperCollins will use non-paid AI to translate Harlequin romance novels, reducing or eliminating the pay for the team of human contract translators who previously did this work. [KM: the rich must get richer, including publishers]
  - 404 Media, 06 January 2026

• Vietnam will begin enforcing new online advertising rules in February 2026 that ban forced [obnoxious] video ads longer than five seconds and must allow users to close ads with just one tap
  - Phuno Online, 06 January 2026

• Dollar supremacy strategy or all-time grift? The USA's AI imperialism's reliance on money from the Islamic Middle East. The AI 'revolution' [bubble] needed capital, land, and loads of power. The rulers of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were happy to provide all three.
  - Zero Hedge, 06 January 2026

• Metals mania continues as the Mag7 (and their AI bubble) lags in 2026. Surging investor interest in Zhōngguó sparks vertical price shift in metals and Beijing bonds and stocks.
  - Zero Hedge, 06 January 2026

• Goldman Sachs predicts: the current combination of extreme valuation and concentration has preceded major stock market drawdowns
  - Zero Hedge, 06 January 2026

• Using the boom/bubble involving shale oil in the USA to predict where we are in the AI bubble
  - Zero Hedge, 06 January 2026

• A larger proportion of new cars are being bought by affluent Americans [using the profits from the AI bubble] as prices and interest rates for auto loans climb, analysts said. [KM: yes, one of the perks of the rich getting rich - fancy new cars]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 January 2026

• Vivek Ramaswamy: social media [KM: which makes rich social media companies richer] is a trap for politicians. I am swearing off Instagram and X, where it is too easy to get a distorted sense of the public's concerns.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 January 2026

• Max Tegmark, the physicist who has appealed to the Pope and Elon Musk on AI Safety. He wants to halt development of artificial 'superintelligence'. [KM: obviously he is not one person getting rich off of the AI bubble]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 January 2026

• Sensitive technology owned by Zhōngguó is at risk, after Trump kidnaps Venezuela's president. From oil infrastructure to telecommunications, investments made by Zhōngguó in the country have been long-standing and extensive.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 06 January 2026

• [The extremely rich] Nvidia wants to get even richer by selling its AI chips to non-paid robotaxi companies [KM: joining the heinous non-paid robotaxi bubble that relies on stealing as much income for poor paid-human taxi drivers]
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 January 2026

• The extremely rich Nvidia wants to get even richer by selling its AI chips to non-paid robotaxi companies [KM: joining the heinous non-paid robotaxi bubble that relies on stealing as much income for poor paid-human taxi drivers]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 January 2026

• [Turning more of the American economy into a casino, ] Parcl and Polymarket have partnered to launch real estate prediction markets that will settle against Parcel's daily housing price indexes, bringing housing price data into prediction markets for the first time.
  - Coin Telegraph, 05 January 2026

• AI boom is in early bubble phase, Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio says [KM: "yes, don't let it burst until I can make more money"]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 January 2026

• Jason Lemkin, the 'godfather of SaaS (software as a service), [joyfully, gladly with a smile] says that he has replaced most of his paid-human sales team with non-paid AI agents: "We [rich humans] are done with hiring [poor] humans". [KM: fuck the proletariat, I guess][JC: fuck my "blessed meek", I guess]
  - Business Insider, 05 January 2026

• Michael Saylor's (Micro)Strategy had a $17.44 billion unrealized loss on digital assets in the fourth quarter tied to a decline in the value of the company's cryptocurrency stockpile. Shares of the largest corporate holder of bitcoin slumped about 47.5% in 2025 as investors reacted to swings in cryptocurrency markets that impacted Strategy's balance sheet and earnings.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 January 2026

• Hyundai is challenging Tesla and other companies in the race to mass-produce humanoid robots. [All of this competition leads to lower profits unable to inflate the AI bubble.]
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 05 January 2026

• Nvidia announces humanoid robot plans, and self-driving car technologies, at CES 2026. More competition for an [uncompetitive] Tesla. [All of this competition leads to lower profits unable to inflate the AI bubble.]
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 05 January 2026

• The bitcoin bubble is bursting? "Bitcoin Mania" is over, slams a critic, gold advocate Peter Schiff, who claims that gold and silver are entering the "biggest bull market in history"
  - CCN, 05 January 2026

• Will the AI bubble burst or balloon more in 2026?
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 05 January 2026

• A recent study from Model Evaluation and Threat Research found that when 16 software developers were asked to perform tasks using AI tools, they took longer than when they wre not using the technology, despite their expectations AI would boost productivity. The research challenges the dominant narrative of AI driving a workplace efficiency boost. [KM: the only that AI drives are the pumps that inflate the AI bubble]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 05 January 2026

• Stocks, gold, and bitcoin all jump as concerns about the invasion of Venezuela are outweighted by optimism about the AI [bubble]
  - Zero Hedge, 05 January 2026

• Google's Waymo's non-paid robotaxi operations are being sued by the city of Santa Monica, California, for being a public nuisance when they recharge at charging stations operated by Voltera from 11 pm to 6 am, after residents complained that noise and light from recharging made the town like a "mini-Las Vegas" or "living next door to a spaceship" [KM: yes, but isn't this suffering worth it if rich AI companies and robotaxi companies get richer - Google needs more money!]
  - Zero Hedge, 05 January 2026

• A teenager in California dangerously relied on [the extemely rich] OpenAI[sore]'s ChatGPT for drug advice. The teenager died from a drug overdose. ChatGPT started coaching Sam on how to take drugs, recover from them and plan further binges. It gave him specific doses of illegal substances, and in one chat, it wrote, "Hell, yes - let us go full trippy mode", before recommending Sam take twice as much cough syrup so he would have stronger hallucinations. The teenager's chats show how the multibillion-dollar company has lost full control of its blockbuster product [KM: assuming it cares, in it rush for more multi-billions.] [JC: another millstone for Sam Altman]
  - SF Gate, 05 January 2026

• In Ukraine, a new arsenal of killer AI drones is being created. As the war grinds on, sophisticated Russian defenses have pushed Ukraine to develop a frightening new weapon: semiautonomous killing machines powered by AI [KM: which will spread to the world while making rich AI companies richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 January 2026

• As schools embrace AI tools, skeptics raise concerns. More governments are rolling out AI chatbots in schools. Some experts warn the tools could erode teaching and learning [and the mental health of children]. [KM: yes, but the extremely rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 January 2026

• Telecommunications giants in Zhōngguó invest into AR smart glasses with a major investment in RayNeo. The investment comes as RayNeo debuts the world's first consumer AR glasses integrated with eSIM and 4G connectivity at CES.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 January 2026

• How political analysis became a target of AI fakes/slop. AI is fast expanding as a plague all along the internet spectrum. That is quite predictable/[profitable], considering the Big Tech model for AI [profits] is techno-feudalism, relying on profit and mind/social control, and not on sharing/expanding knowledge and creating better conditions for a well-informed citizenry. [KM: the citizenry can eat cake]
  - Zero Hedge, 04 January 2026

• The extremely rich CEO of the extremely rich Microsoft begs users to stop calling AI 'slop' ... 'slop'. "We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication." [KM: yes, so that Microsoft can earn more billions at the expense of society]. [The authoritarian CEO of the authoritarian Microsoft] Satya Nadella argues that humanity needs to learn to accept AI companies and their AI tools as the "new equilibrium" of human nature. [KM: FUCK YOU, NO WE DON'T]
  - Futurism, 04 January 2026

• Is the AI boom a bubble waiting to pop? Here is what history says.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 04 January 2026

• Europe's AI ambitions threatened by soaring memory chip prices. The ongoing AI [bubble] is sending memory chip prices skyrocketing, putting pressure on data center operators. Europe currently lacks a strategy to break free from this price spiral.
  - Zero Hedge, 04 January 2026

• The extremely rich authoritarian Elon Musk, trying to get richer off the AI bubble, takes some time to threaten the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, after the USA kidnaps the president of Venezuela, with the [racist] Musk tweeting a message to Petro: "Money [bribes] or Lead [bullets]". [KM: can't someone in Silicon Valley invent a process to make men's dicks bigger?]
  - El Pais, 04 January 2026

• Nobel Prize jurist Thomas Mikael Oliveberg joins a medical school in southern Zhōngguó. Biophysicist leaves Stockholm University for full-time role at Guangxi Medical University's First Affiliated Hospital.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 04 January 2026

• Why reducing the economic and social harm of AI companies and AI tools requires more than the empty promises of [extremely rich] AI companies
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 04 January 2026

• Much of today's wealth, over $600 trillion, is not built on economic productivity but on inflated/bubbled asset prices that primarily benefit those who already own significant assets - the rich that keep getting richer [KM: yes, that is the lasting consequence of the AI bubble - nothing useful, but making the rich richer]
  - GO Banking Rates, 03 January 2026

• Another example of the non-intelligence of bubbled AI systems: after the USA invades Venezuela and kidnaps Nicolas Maduro, when asked about this, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and some other AI chatbots told questioners that "you are making up this event" - which had already happened. ChatGPT unintelligently emphatically refuted that Maduro had been captured at all. "The United States has not invaded Venezuela." - after the USA had invaded ... Venezuela.
  - Wired, 03 January 2026

• [The editorial puppets of Jeff Bezos, who owns] the Washington Post editors gush [like little girls] over [the authoritarian] Trump's illegal arrest of Maduro.
  - Mediaite, 03 January 2026

• Wegmans in New York City has begun collecting biometric data from anyone who enters its supermarkets. Anyone entering the store could have data on their face, eyes and voices collected and stored by the Rochester-headquartered supermarket chain.
  - Gothamist, 03 January 2026

• [A bit of anti-misanthropy]: the state of California launches a platform, the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, that allows residents to request to delete all of their personal information online that has been harvested by data brokers. Data brokers will start processing the first deletion requests from DROP starting August 1, 2026. [KM: this should be made national, until such time as data brokers reward people for profiting from the harvesting of their personal data]
  - Engadget, 03 January 2026

• Letter: [addictive cellphone/laptop] screens have hijacked my students. I do not know how much longer I can pretend students sitting under LED lights while staring at an iPad is normal [or healthy]. [KM: yes, but it does make rich tech companies richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 January 2026

• The non-paid robots sports craze in Zhōngguó could eventually put non-paid humanoids into homes, having been field-tested in sports games such as non-American football. [KM: yes, advances in replacing paid-humans]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 January 2026

• Elon Musk's Grok AI faces scrutiny over complaints it undressed minors in photos. Elon Musk's Grok AI under fire for enabling erotic images of minors, violating its own policy, sparking urgent safety fixes and global investigations.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 January 2026

• Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok says it generated sexual images of minors due to "lapses in safeguards"
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 03 January 2026

• Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot has disgraced its billionaire creator, Elon Musk, by branding Trump a pedophile and declaring that Vice President JD Vance and Erika Kirk are the same person. [KM: well, if it makes the extremely rich Elon Musk richer]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 January 2026

• A women felt "dehumanized" after Elon Musk's Grok AI was used to digitally remove her clothes. XAI, the company behind Grok, did not respond to a request for comment, other than with a [cowardly] automatically-generated reply stating "legacy media lies". [KM: Please do not criticize anything that makes the extrmely rich Musk richer]
  - BBC, 03 January 2026

• [The extremely rich] Elon Musk's Grok is being used to depict horrific violence against real women [KM: so Musk can earn more billions]
  - Futurism, 03 January 2026

• The AI [bubble] is driving demand for storage devices from Seagate, Western Digital and Micron Technology. Can the boom [bubble] last?
  - Barron's, 03 January 2026

• The stock market will not be worth celebrating in 2026. One reason is that mid-term election years have historically been the worst of the presidential cycle. And don't xpect the AI trade to save the day. Prediction: the SP500 will finish 2026 down about 2%.
  - Barron's, 03 January 2026

• 2026 is a make-or-break/burst year for the AI trade/[bubble]. Hyperscalers may decide to slow down capital expenditures under pressure from shareholders. Many data centers are being financed by a mix of private debt and equity. At some point, those investors may decide they have enough exposure to AI data centers and turn off the tap.
  - Barron's, 03 January 2026

• [Extremely rich] Big Tech's fast-expanding plans for AI data centers [to keep the AI bubble bubbling] are running into stiff community opposition from people who don't want to live next to the data centers, or even near them. For some people angry over steep increases in electric bills, their patience is thin for data centers that could bring still-higher increases. Losing open space, farmland, forest or rural character is a big concern. So is the damage to quality of life, property values or health by on-site diesel generators kicking on or the constant hum of servers. Others worry that wells and aquifers could run dry. [KM: yes, yes, but the extremely rich AI companies must be able to get richer - eat cake you whiners!]
  - Associated Press, 02 January 2026

• The scam of 'bitcoin Treasury companies' [many poorly run companies hyping their stock by using bitcoin in their corporate treasuries]: At least 37 of the top 100 Bitcoin treasury companies now trade at discounts to their net asset value - they are [so poorly managed that they] are worth less than the bitcoin they own. "The model is an abomination."
  - DL News, 02 January 2026

• Why are deepfake videos taking over YouTube? As people are increasingly distrustful of traditional authority, drowning genuine content with garbage keeps the real world hidden from view. [KM: yes, but who cares as long as rich AI companies get richer?]
  - Zero Hedge, 02 January 2026

• [The rich white] Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, donates $25 million to a racist authoritarian super PAC to support mostly white Republican political candidates [KM: the bubbling of racism]
  - SF Gate, 02 January 2026

• The extremely-rich Google's AI Overviews put people at risk of harm with misleading health advice. Inaccurate information presented in summaries, Guardian investigation finds. [KM: yes, but the extremely rich Google must get richer]
  - The Guardian, 02 January 2026

• Tesla Q4 vehicle deliveries decline 16% as investors pivot toward non-paid robotaxi income, and Optimus AI. For the full year, Tesla delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025, down 9% from 2024 and marking the second consecutive annual decline in deliveries. [KM: so, to keep Elon Musk filthy rich, Tesla must steal as much income for paid-human taxi drivers as possible]
  - Zero Hedge, 02 January 2026

• [BOOK REVIEW]: "Empire of AI" by Karen Hao, in which she compares the extremely rich authoritarian AI companies of Silicon Valley with the colonial empires of old, with the same kind of environmental and social damages, and theft of resources/revenue.
  - The Intercept, 02 January 2026

• [KM: while extremely rich AI companies get richer with their power hungry AI data centers], could electricity prices become a structural inflation problem? For consumers, electricity is already the second-largest energy expense after gasoline.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 January 2026

• AustralianSuper, the largest pension fund in Australia, is planning to reduce its allocation to global equities this year, amid signs that the AI boom in the US stock market could be running out of steam [KM: could be about to burst]
  - Financial Times (locked), 02 January 2026

• The Netflix-Warner deal sparks concern in the entertainment sector of Bharat. Films in cinemas in Bharat could be screened for a shorter period before they move to Netflix's streaming platform, an association warns.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 02 January 2026

• The AI model maker race will continue [to bubble] in 2026, along with more agents and a growing pressure on companies to prove AI can pay off in the real world, experts tell Axios. [KM: otherwise, the AI bubble bursts]
  - Axios, 01 January 2026

• $50,000,000 - How options trader 'Captain Condor' led 1000 of his followers to a $50 million wipeout, advising the use of a Martingale betting scheme with zero-day-to-expire options
  - Morningstar, 01 January 2026

• Tens of thousands of app-based delivery workers in Bharat went on strike over New Year's Eve, protesting a system they say is defined by relentless pressure, including requirements to deliver items in under 10 minutes. They are also protesting against the automated systems used by the platforms to penalize delivery workers and reduce their ratings when delays occur, and are asking for comprehensive social security including health insurance and pensions. [KM: yes, but how else can extremely rich delivery companies get richer without exploiting their serf/slave workers?]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 01 January 2026

• The banking sector Europe is about to get a tough lesson about efficiency. According to a new Morgan Stanley analysis reported by the Financial Times, more than 200,000 European banking jobs could vanish by 2030 as lenders lean into AI and shutter physical branches. That is roughly 10% of the workforce at 35 major banks. [KM: with only the rich getting richer this way, banks have fewer customers and need fewer workers]
  - TechCrunch, 01 January 2026

• Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and Republican governnor Ron DeSantis botg speak out against the AI data center boom/[bubble]. It is a bad sign for the AI industry/[bubble]. Rising electricity costs and risks to grid stability are stoking voter anger.
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 January 2026

• [Taking chatbot misanthropy to the next level]: soon people in New York will able to take their chatbot 'girlfriends' on out a 'date', to a pop-up cafe (launched by Eva AI based in London) in New York City with tables with special perches for people's cellphones, so they can more easily interact with AI 'partners' while sipping cocktails. [KM: What's next? Cafes with special seats for their robot doll girlfriends? Ah, the Silicon Valley religion of increased profits through increasing social isolation]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 01 January 2026

• Flagged for sexual misconduct, many drivers working for Uber stay driving on the roads [KM: the rich Uber must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 January 2026

• "The source of all life is here": a plan to mine lithium in the salt flats of Chile sparks fears of water scarcity. The Colla Indigenous people claim Rio Tinto's plans to extract lithium [Silicon Valley needs more batteries to get richer] will harm fragile ecosystems and their non-rich livelihoods.
  - The Guardian, 01 January 2026

• [The destruction of the social fabric of the USA continues, while rich tech companies get richer off of advertising]: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution prints final newspaper, shifts to all-digital format, marking the end of a 157-year chapter in Georgia history. The move makes Atlanta the only major USA city without a daily printed newspaper.
  - CBS News, 31 December 2025

• Geoffrey Hinton, the 'godfather' of AI, warns that non-paid AI will replace many more paid-human jobs in 2026 [KM: while the rich AI companies get richer]
  - Futurism, 31 December 2025

• Last month Reuters revealed that roughly 10% of Meta's annual revenue, or $16 billion, comes from advertising scams and banned goods. Now, internal documents reviewed by Reuters indicate that Facebook/Instagram developed tools to both reduce scam advertising, and but also to limit the government's visibility into said scam ads, after governments threatened measures that could severely cripple advertising revenue by forcing the company to reveal the identity of advertisers. [KM: but how else can the filthy rich Zuckerberg and Facebook get richer?]
  - Zero Hedge, 31 December 2025

• The CEO of Facebook's Instagram argues that there is so much AI generated slop - regurgitated videos and texts - that "it will be more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media"
  - Engadget, 31 December 2025

• The USA Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) argues in court that the REAL ID, which the DHS certifies to confirm USA citizenship, is too unreliable ... to confirm USA citizenship. Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn't even work as a national ID.
  - Reason, 31 December 2025

• More socialist subsidies for the extremely rich: Google's Waymo's non-paid robotaxis are not only taking your taxi driver jobs, but they are now taking up space in free public parking spots
  - SF Chronicle (locked), 31 December 202530 Dec

• "Data is control": what we learned from a year investigating the partnership of the military of Jewish Israel to extremely rich Big Tech that helped Jewish Israel kill over 60,000 Islamic people in the Gaza Strip. [KM: with ample stock options awarded all around]
  - The Guardian, 31 December 2025

• Instagram head Adam Mosseri closed out 2025 by acknowledging what many have long suspected: the era of trusting photographs as accurate records of reality is over [KM: another harm of misanthropic AI companies, since it will be harder to use photographs to convict people of crimes]
  - The Verge (locked), 31 December 2025

• [To help inflate the AI bubble], tech startups are handing out free pouches of nicotine [one of the most addictive and toxic drugs in the world] to boost productivity
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 December 2025

• Mark Zuckerberg [flushed] $77 billion "into the toilet" on his metaverse [fantasy], says economist Dean Baker, who asks if Zuckerberg is set to waste billions more on AI [fantasies]. [KM: of course].
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 31 December 2025

• [Another social harm caused by social media]: suddenly everyone is scared to dance at concerts and clubs. More young partygoers are worrying about looking goofy on camera, prompting some artists to wonder if social media is killing dance. [KM: yes, but it does make rich social media companies richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 December 2025

• How [extremely rich] AI companies are making life easier for cybercriminals. Phishing and other cyber scams are becoming bigger, more targeted and more convincing, using AI tools to generate fake voices and videos
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 December 2025

• Trump is more supportive of cannabis, but investors are not impressed with this executive order (which doesn't change the law). Stocks took a surprise tumble after the White House moved to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 December 2025

• A research study in Singapore links heavy infant screen time to teenage anxiety. A study by a Singapore government agency has found that children exposed to high levels of screen time before age two showed brain development changes linked to slower decision-making and higher anxiety in adolescence, adding to concerns about early digital exposure. [KM: yes, but the extremely rich cellphone and social media companies must get richer]
  - Bloomberg, 30 December 2025

• Artificial intelligence is destroying the career ladder for aspiring artists. LinkedIn job listings increasingly seek people to train AI models rather than write original copy. The AI software Eddie launched an update in September capable of producing first edits of films. [KM: yes, but making rich AI companies and the rich investors richer]
  - The Atlantic, 30 December 2025

• AI has ruined job applications, so people are resorting to dating apps to find work [KM: until AI ruins dating apps]
  - Gizmodo, 30 December 2025

• An anti-AI movement is coming. Which political party will lead it?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 December 2025

• It is starting to feel a lot like Tesla's human-job-destroying robotaxi program is mostly smoke and mirrors [KM: to help inflate, once again, Tesla's bubbly stock]
  - Futurism, 30 December 2025

• [The latest generation of selling shit on the Internet]: OpenAI is reportedly planning to make ChatGPT "prioritize" [i.e., shove in peoples' faces] advertisers in conversation. [KM: the ultimate misanthopic fantasy - get rid of every store, every store worker - for one superstore to make superriches for the rich]
  - Futurism, 30 December 2025

• Americans hate AI. "Say No To Data Centers!". Which political party will benefit? "One one side there are the billioniares, and on the other there is everyone else."
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 30 December 2025

• The surge in stock price for Caterpillar is fueled by the AI [bubble], not by the sale of yellow excavators and other farming equipment. Sales of generators are powering the manufacturing giant's fastest-growing segment.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 December 2025

• AI chatbots linked to psychosis, say doctors. People and their AI companions are entering into shared delusions, doctors say, and chatbots can be "complicit". [KM: and profitable for rich AI companies]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 December 2025

• Denmark's state-run postal service, PostNord, will deliver its last ever letter on Tuesday, as the digital age brings its 400-year-run to an end. This makes Denmark the first country in the world to decide that physical mail is no longer either essential or economically viable.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 30 December 2025

• The USA government has granted an annual license to Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to import chip manufacturing equipment to their facilities in Zhōngguó for 2026
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 December 2025

• The rise of open source software platforms in Zhōngguó will finally burst the AI bubble. The dreams of trillion-dollar AI profits from proprietary AI platforms will not survive this. [KM: and not continue to inflate the bubble]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 30 December 2025

• New York City's ban on addictive cellphones in schools reveals yet another harm of addictive cellphones: many students can't read traditional clocks and are arriving at classes late. "Where is the big hand, and where is the little hand?"
  - Gothamist, 29 December 2025

• Venture capitalist Alex Davis is "deeply concerned" that too many data centers are being built without guaranteed tenants, according to a letter being sent this morning to his investors. "The 'build it and they will come' strategy is a trap. ...We foresee a significant financing crisis in 2027-2028 for speculative landlords."
  - Axios, 29 December 2025

• Venture capitalist Alex Davis is "deeply concerned" that too many data centers are being built without guaranteed tenants, according to a letter being sent this morning to his investors. "The 'build it and they will come' strategy is a trap. ...We foresee a significant financing crisis in 2027-2028 for speculative landlords."
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 29 December 2025

• Actor James Woods warns that non-paid AI could soon cause the "end of paid-human actors" in Hollywood
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 29 December 2025

• I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret. Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 29 December 2025

• Insurance giant Aflac is notifying roughly 22.65 million people that their personal information was stolen from its systems in June 2025 [because of incompetent management]
  - Security Week, 29 December 2025

• Michael Mignano, a partner at the venture capital firm Lightspeed Ventures, says that OpenAI's non-paid Sora image/video generator will make paid-human social media creators "far, far, far less valuable" [KM: earning "far, far, far" less money that now goes to an extremely rich AI company]
  - Business Insider, 29 December 2025

• Zhōngguó drafts the world's strictest rules to end suicides and violence encouraged by AI [tools that profit extremely rich AI companies]. Zhōngguó drafted landmark rules to stop AI chatbots [profitting rich AI companies] from emotionally manipulating users, including what could become the strictest policy worldwide intended to prevent AI-supported suicides, self-harm, and violence.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 29 December 2025

• How the AI bubble is being masked within the extremely rich Big Tech. It is a deja vu moment for Wall Street: A revolutionary technology captures the imagination [with tons of hype] while capital floods in and valuations begin to put a high price on promises of a future that hasn't arrived.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 December 2025

• These travel 'influencers' don't want freebies. They are AI programs. Social media posts by non-paid AI-created travel avatars cost far less to produce, yet look and sound real. Paid human influencers worry they are being elbowed out. [KM: curses on both the AI for taking more jobs, and for anyone using the idiotic term 'influencer']
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 December 2025

• PhD-level scientists cannot find work as the biotech engine sputters in Boston. A life-sciences job in Boston used to be a sure path to a high-paying career, but empty labs and unemployed grads now herald tougher times in the city.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 December 2025

• Michael Burry bets he is not too early to go against the AI juggernaut/[bubble]. Burry, made famous by 'The Big Short', is shorting Nvidia and Palantir.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 December 2025

• There is no happy ending for movie theaters, no matter which large tech company wins control of Warner Brothers. Netflix and Paramount will both eventually have reasons to scale back theatrical releases [KM: another important social institution destroyed by tech companies to make the rich richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 December 2025

• Sam Altman and his extremely rich OpenAI, and Alex Karp and his extremely rich Palantir, are learning to hate / [whine about] one of the extremely rich Elon Musk's most frequent enemies: short sellers - which are an important market mechanism to maintain "regular functioning of capital markets" [KM: yeah, especially when they are being bubbled and hyped]
  - Business Insider, 29 December 2025

• [More AI data center bubbling]: Softbank to buy data center firm DigitalBridge for $4 billion in AI push
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 December 2025

• Zepto, based in Bharat, seeks $1.2 billion IPO funding as 10-minute delivery boom fuels warnings of bubble
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 December 2025

• In the Gobi Desert, Zhōngguó is powering up the world's largest 'super-cold air battery' that relies on compressed air. Facility runs for 10 hours straight and will produce 180 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, powering 30,000 homes.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 29 December 2025

• Senior citizens in the USA are being overmedicated into oblivion. Money is power, and the pharmaceutical industry is absolutely swimming in cash. The Wall Street Journal discovered that one out of every six seniors that is enrolled in Medicate's drug benefit has been prescribed at least 8 different pharmaceutical drugs. Nearly 25% of all adults in the USA are currently taking at least four pharmaceutical drugs. It is an insanely profitable industry, and that is why we constantly see ads for pharmaceutical drugs on television. Zoloft is the number one antidepressant in the United States, but most of those that are taking it do not realize that it has an extremely long list of side effects. [KM: yes but the rich drug traffickers must be allowed to get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 28 December 2025

• I stopped using ChatGPT for 30 days. What happened to my brain was terrifying. I couldn't think without AI anymore. I'd lost the ability to struggle to find solutions just with my brain. Instagram owns your dopamine. ChatGPT owns your thinking. "We don't think anymore - we fetch." [KM: yes, but rich AI companies must be able to get richer destroying your brains]
  - Teja Kusireddy (Medium - locked), 28 December 2025

• New York is requiring warning labels on social media platforms about addictive features in a bid to address a youth mental health crisis. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the bill into law on Dec. 26, targeting infinite scrolling, auto-play videos, and algorithmic feeds that encourage prolonged use.
  - Zero Hedge, 28 December 2025

• Worn down by worry [about addictive, distruptive cellphones and their apps], parents look longingly at the social media ban for children imposed by Australia. After the country barred children under 16 from using social media, many parents have been asking whether similarly tough action is needed in their own countries [to oppose the extremely rich authoritarian social media companies who only want to get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 December 2025

• So long, GPT-5. Hello, [Alibaba's] Qwen. In the AI boom, chatbots and GPTs come and go quickly. (Remember Llama?) GPT-5 had a big year, but 2026 will be all about Alibaba's Qwen. [KM: not good for the AI bubble in the USA]
  - Wired (locked), 27 December 2025

• Google's Gemini AI tool is eating ChatGPT's lunch: market share gain from 5% to 18% is 'clearest signal' that Google is winning the AI war [KM: who cares, except the AI bubble is dependent on inflation from OpenAI than Google]
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 27 December 2025

• Morgan Stanley: the hedge funds are alright. The so-called masters of the universe are responsibly positioned - and far from all-in on the AI [bubble] (yet).
  - Zero Hedge, 27 December 2025

• "We have to reject [AI] with every fiber of our being": Florida governor Ron DeSantis emerges as a chief skeptic of AI. His opposition to AI has little to do with cultural grievances or 'woke' ideology - and far more to do with economic disruption, labor displacement [KM: destruction] and the scale [KM: bubble] of the technology itself.
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 27 December 2025

• A Columbia graduate and former NASA intern was allegedly driven to suicide when her $35 billion tech company, MongoDB, cut off her benefits while she was on mental health leave - then fired her, her parents claimed in a lawsuit. Annie Surman struggled with "anxiety and depression resulting from extreme work stress" at data storage company MongoDB. Her mental and emotional state deteriorated while at the company, the family claimed in court documents.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 27 December 2025

• The [pathetic, contemptous] 1 percent solution to the looming AI job crisis. [Extremely rich AI companies and] AI tools will destroy paid human jobs on a massive scale. Because of this, my [contemptous] friend has decided to commit 1 percent of his comapny's profits to help people learn new skills for jobs [KM: what jobs, a-hole, that some other AI won't destroy?], demonstrating what leadership [does not] looks like in the AI age. [KM: not only are the rich getting richer, but apparently becoming bigger assholes].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 December 2025

• The government of Zhōngguó drafts rules to regulate AI with capabilities for human-like interaction. The cyber regulator of Zhōngguó issued draft rules for public comment that would tighten oversight of AI services designed to simulate human personalities and engage users in emotional interaction.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 27 December 2025

• The AI data center [bubble] reaches Bharat as [extremely rich] American tech giants invest billions [KM: fortunately, people in Bharat don't need to drink water or use electricity]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 December 2025

• Why is shopping an abyss of blah, a drag, a bore? In a world of abundant choice but imprisoning algorithms, it too often feels as though there is nothing interesting to buy. Our senses are flattened, our appetites dulled. Nothing seems quite right. Where is the self-discovery in regurgitating a runway look or replicating a TikTok fad? [KM: yes, but the rich online retailers with their algorithms must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 December 2025

• [One fantasy solution of the extremely rich of Silicon Valley for the poor people it is creating - is Universal Basic Income]. Mark Cuban says that "it is interesting" that the Trump Administration quietly offered a form of UBI through HSA contributions, and "no one noticed" it.
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 27 December 2025

• The gloves are off in the fight for your right-to-repair. This year, the right-to-repair movement got a boost from - surprisingly - big tech, tariffs, and economic downturn. But the [authoritarian revenue-gouging] companies controlling who fixes their products are not giving up that [profits] willingly. [While Congress is bribed to do nothing,] state laws are being passed to allow the right-to-repair].
  - Wired, 27 December 2025

• [VIDEO]: Why Hangzhou, Zhōngguó, has become a hotbed for billion-dollar tech startups. A city once known mainly for Alibaba is now shaping the next wave of challengers in Zhōngguó - from AI and robotics to gaming, spatial computing and neurotech - collectively known as the Six Little Dragons. But is this enough to turn Hangzhou into the next tech powerhouse in Zhōngguó?
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 December 2025

• A year after near total blackout, Zhōngguó builds the largest smart transformer in the world. The powerful breakthrough by engineers in Zhōngguó could solve risks of renewable energy shock after low wind swing almost shut down the national grid.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 27 December 2025

• Can AI companies deliver the economic goods and high returns [KM: to keep the bubble inflated]? Do not count on it.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 27 December 2025

• Oracle's topsy-turvy year will not get any easier in 2026
  - Barron's, 27 December 2025

• Salesforce is ready to emerge an AI winner in the AI bubble. Buy the stock. The company has unfairly received the label of AI loser. That should change, and soon.
  - Barron's, 27 December 2025

• The real war of the century: AI [companies - extremely rich - against the world]. Systems designed to predict are now positioned to decide. Probabilities harden into policies. Risk scores become verdicts. Recommendations quietly turn into mandates [of the misanthropes].
  - Zero Hedge, 26 December 2025

• "Artificial greed" made AI trading bots spontaneously form illegal trading cartels when left unsupervised, a Wharton study reveals [KM: what do you expect when a lot of their training materials teach how to commit crimes Wall Street practices?]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 26 December 2025

• The USA's extremely richest tech titans reap $550 billion in additional riches from the AI surge/bubble. The extremely rich elite of Silicon Valley have been the primary beneficiaries of the hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into AI hardware and computing power worldwide, even as recent months brought jitters about a possible AI investment bubble.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 26 December 2025

• Why MicroStrategy's collapse could be the next black swan [bubble-burster] for cryptocurrencies in 2026
  - Be In Crypto, 26 December 2025

• $16,000,000,000/year - The $16 billion question (10% of its revenue due to scam ads) haunting the extermely rich Mark Zuckerberg. A new study finds the extremely rich Facebook hosts the vast majority of social media scams, and critics argue it is because the extremely rich Facebook and extremely rich Zuckerberg prioritize profit over protecting users. [KM: yes, the woefully rich must get richer - fuck humanity.] Experts say that Zuckerberg and Facebook only ban advertisers when its systems detect a 95% probability of fraud, while charging higher ad fees to suspicious buyers, a system critics describe "pay to play/scam"/.
  - Zero Hedge, 26 December 2025
• The $16 billion question (10% of its revenue due to scam ads) haunting the extermely rich Mark Zuckerberg. A new study finds the extremely rich Facebook hosts the vast majority of social media scams, and critics argue it is because the extremely rich Facebook and extremely rich Zuckerberg prioritize profit over protecting users. [KM: yes, the woefully rich must get richer - fuck humanity.] Experts say that Zuckerberg and Facebook only ban advertisers when its systems detect a 95% probability of fraud, while charging higher ad fees to suspicious buyers, a system critics describe "pay to play/scam"/.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 26 December 2025

• According to the regional power distributor PJM in the eastern USA, without price controls, electricity bills for non-rich people will explode. PJM's price controls may be all that stand between the status quo and a furious mob burning down every [AI-bubbling] data center they find. [KM: maybe the mobs will get tired of eating cake.]
  - Zero Hedge, 26 December 2025

• Where is all the AI-driven scientific progress [that is helping to inflate the AI bubble]? A tech CEO explains why AI probably will not cure diseases anytime soon. Hint: You still need paid-humans.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 December 2025

• As AI companies borrow billions [to help inflate the AI bubble], debt investors grow wary. AI companies looking to raise funds are being made to pay lofty interest rates, as debt investors become cautious.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 December 2025

• Family investment offices have become the new power players on Wall Street. They are huge, secretive and their influence on Wall Street and Main Street is only growing.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 December 2025

• The economic divide between big and small companies is growing. The economic fortunes of low- and high-income Americans are diverging. The same pattern is happening with companies [especially those outside the AI bubble].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 December 2025

• Even the companies making humanoid robots think they are overhyped [to inflate the AI bubble]. Despite billions of dollars in investment, startups say their androids can only perform simple tasks. [KM: only Elon Musk can get away with overhype]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 December 2025

• Shares of Oracle on pace for the worst quarter since 2001 as new CEOs face concerns about its debt-laden AI build-out
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 December 2025

• How Oracle became a 'poster child' for the AI bubble fears
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 26 December 2025

• Treasury targets money services businesses in crackdown on drug cartel money flows. Money services businesses include non-bank financial providers such as currency exchanges, check-cashing firms, and money transmitters.
  - Zero Hedge, 25 December 2025

• The CEO of software company cursor warns that 'vibe coding' [another hype inflating the AI bubble] builds "shaky foundations" and eventually "things start to crumble".
  - Fortune (locked), 25 December 2025

• Tesla non-paid robotaxis are popular on Wall Street but lagging on roads.Shares of Tesla have hit new highs [making the extremely rich Elon Musk even richer] on optimism [by misanthropic investors] about the Tesla's self-driving taxis [KM: optimism that Tesla will be able to steal huge amounts of income from paid-human taxi drivers]. But experts say Tesla is far behind the extremely rich Google's Waymo [KM: in stealing income from paid-human taxi drivers], which has a head start.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 December 2025

• The [misanthropic] Trump has downplayed concerns - from mass losses of paid-human jobs, to a potential [KM: no, a real] financial bubble - as [the extremely rich] Trump cheers soaring stock prices [KM: that is only making the rich richer] and faster growth [much based on debt]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 December 2025

• Why the AI rally (and the bubble talk) could continue next year
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 December 2025

• Nvidia-Groq deal is structured to keep the "fiction of competition" alive, according to one analyst. "Antitrust would seem to be the primary risk here, though structuring the deal as a non-exclusive license may keep the fiction of competition alive.", the analyst report. Groq described the deal as a "non-exclusive licensing agreement", a tool that has been used by tech giants of late in part to avoid regulatory scrutiny.
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 December 2025

• Nvidia is buying AI processor chip startup Grok's assets for about $20 billion in its largest deal on record. [KM: this is pure bubble-inflating - it does not take $20 billion to reverse engineer Groq's processors].
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 December 2025

• Nvidia is buying AI processor chip startup Grok's assets for about $20 billion in its largest deal on record. [KM: this is pure bubble-inflating - it does not take $20 billion to reverse engineer Groq's processors].
  - Zero Hedge, 25 December 2025

• Free streaming platform Tubi, owned by Murdoch's Fox Corporation, is rivalling major players for viewership, reaching profitability for the first time this year. It boasts 100 million monthly active users and a growing audience of millennial and Gen Z viewers.
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 December 2025

• Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken plans to offer a digital gambling drug - prediction markets - starting in 2026
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 December 2025

• Military engineers in Zhōngguó construct a magnetic levitation system that can achieve acceleration of 0 to 700 kilometers/hour in less than 2 seconds. The success is seen to catapult Zhōngguó into the global top tier of ultra-high-speed maglev technology and unlock new possibilities for hyperloop transport.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 25 December 2025

• Shares of Intel decline 4% after Nvidia halts tests of Intel's 18A semiconductor fabrication technology, while the White Housle signals that the semiconductor processor chip giant is not "too strategic to fail"
  - Zero Hedge, 24 December 2025

• The CEO of Databricks (a $134 billion company with real sales), Ali Ghodsi, blasts [AI-bubbled] companies with billions in funding but zero revenue: "That is clearly a bubble, right, it is like, insane."
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 24 December 2025

• Shares of Nintendo are down 27% in about one month, as the soaring cost of memory chips (due to the AI bubble) raises expense for Nintendo
  - Zero Hedge, 24 December 2025

• How to use empty data centers after the AI bubble bursts
  - Thomson's Reuters, 24 December 2025

• The [scam of] the AI ouroboros (the snake eating its own tail). Big tech eats its own while capital[ism] loses all meaning [JC: sadly, joining Christianity under Trump losing all meaning].
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 24 December 2025

• For years, a huge contract (purportedly $6 billion/year) with Amazon has been one of the few bright spots in the finances of the USA Postal Service. But now the USPS plans to offer those last-mile services to additional customers to stem billions of dollars in ongoing losses - a move that risks losing its biggest customer - Amazon. The USPS now plans to accept bids from other shippers for access to the service's distribution centers - even though Amazon says that might prompt it to pull back from the using the USPS so much. [KM: only the king profits - only Amazon can enjoy the benefits of using the USPS]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 24 December 2025

• Baker beware: how I was fooled by an AI-generated (click-bait) recipe that was impossible to cook with
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 24 December 2025

• "Digital fentanyl": Elon Musk warns of the new addiction of the 21st century. The entrepreneur questioned the cognitive impact of short videos on social media and warned of an attention crisis fueled by algorithms designed to keep users engaged. [KM: I don't suppose the extremely rich Musk will shut down his Twitter/X social media service, which trafficks huge amounts of 'digital fentanyl']
  - El Colombiano, 24 Dece,ber 2025

• Governments in the west turn their sights on VPNs as they escalate assault on online privacy/anonymity. Politicians have now discovered that people are using VPNs to protect their privacy and bypass these invasive laws. Their solution? Entirely ban the use of VPNs.
  - Zero Hedge, 24 December 2025

• Investors warn of a "rot in private equity" as private equity funds strike circular deals. [KM: why not, works to pump the AI bubble]. Private equity firms have struggled to sell companies they own and have instead found a workaround to get cash back to clients: selling the companies to themselves.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 December 2025

• Once the superstars of Wall Street, private equity funds lose their luster. As funds deliver mediocre returns and shen investors, the industry is struggling to unload 31,000 investments, and increase over this time last year.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 December 2025

• Thailand, attacking Cambodia, says that its target is the scam industry. Thai military plans have bombed compounds where people are forced to defraud others online.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 December 2025

• The Defense Department and AI [bubble] giants have a common weakness - they both need batteries from Zhōngguó, almost desperately need.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 December 2025

• Why the "everyone is a winner" energy trade [relying on the AI bubble] can't last forever. From solar to nuclear to coal, stocks have soared on AI demand and the AI bubble.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 December 2025

• People being fired from their jobs is expected as marketers face pressure over savings from their AI investments. At the largest companies, 47% of marketing executives expect to be firing [paid-human workers], and some have already started. [KM: yes, what is AI bubble pumping relying on other than getting more humans fired?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 December 2025

• The AI [bubble] is opening up commercial real-estate investing to new risks
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 December 2025

• Bitcoin miners thrive off a new side [scam]: retooling their data centers for AI. The pivot to AI has lifted a bitcoin-mining ETF by 90% this year, even as bitcoin itself has slumped.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 December 2025

• Why so many people in the USA dislike this fast-growing economy and bubbled stock market [making the rich richer]. "GDP is an abstract concept. But people know jobs. They know they can't find a job if they lose theirs. And they know they are paying more for coffee, beef, electricity, child care and just about everything else. Increased spending in the economy? Not by most Americans, but rather by higher-income consumers, the ones benefiting the most from record-high real estate values and blockbuster stock returns due to the AI bubble. [KM: but how about the feeling of the woeful rich? They are people too, aren't they?]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 24 December 2025

• Stocks, copper, silver, and gold rise to record highs as surging GDP slams odds of interest rates being reduced
  - Zero Hedge, 23 December 2025

• Socialist federal subsidies paid for by taxpayers drive food production, consumption, and (un)intentionally, chronic disease - all the more profitable with (AI-driven) online shopping. Now taxpayers are being asked to socialistically subsidize weight loss drugs to cure what farm policy has broken for public health. Some 56.2 percent of the daily calories consumed by US adults come from federally (and socialistically) subsidized food commodities: corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sorghum, dairy, and livestock - which now are making people in the USA fatter and sicker. American agribusiness receives about $38 billion annually in socialist federal funding, with only 0.4 percent ($17 million) going to subsidize fruits and vegetables. Subsidies also contribute to our consumption of refined grains, sugary drinks, and processed foods.
  - Daily Economy, 23 December 2025

• Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac says he may have been defamed by Google after it recently produced an AI-generated summary falsely identifying him as a sex offender. The Juno Award-winning musician said he learned of the online misinformation last week after a First Nation north of Halifax confronted him with the summary and cancelled a concert planned for December 19. MacIsaac said he doesn't have the money to pay for a lawsuit that could take years to settle. [KM: of course, Google compensated him for his troubles - hahahahahahahahaha - no fucking way]
  - CBC News, 23 December 2025

• Engineers in Zhōngguó have demonstrated how flaws in poorly-designed humanoid and quadruped robots allow attackers to seize full control through voice commands or wireless links, turning the machines into tools for physical disruption and harm.
  - Interesting Engineering, 23 December 2025

• The supply of memory chips is running out (due to the AI bubble's need for memory chips for AI data centers), and so are excuses for software bloat/slop. Maybe the solution to soaring RAM memory prices is to use less of it by writing less crappy software. Microsoft's original Windows Task Manager needed 85 kilobytes. Today's Windoes Task Manager needs 6 megabytes of disk space, and almonst 75 megabytes before it provides any results, which aren't that much more useful than from the original task manager.
  - The Register, 23 December 2025

• Put Bari Weiss and Kristi Noem in 'their' heinous CECOT prison in El Salvador. Bari Weiss, the unqualified bigot who has never practiced journalism, was appointed to be in charge of the news division at CBS - the rich vermin who run the major media/tech companies wanted to do more mergers that benefit no one but themselves [KM: the rich must get richer] used appointments of puppets as a tool to get regulatory permission to construct monopolies. Weiss has used her power to censor the news, axing a segment of the news show 60 Minutes that put the government in a bad light. The [pathetic] excuse given was that the Trump administration refused to comment on it, which implies that the government has de facto control of what journalism can be presented on CBS. Bari Weiss has sold out. The segment that was killed was all about our policy of deporting people to CECOT, the inhumane torture dungeon in El Salvador. It is a brazenly evil place. These motherfuckers, Kristi Noem, Bari Weiss, [the 'good' Christian'] Trump, the guards at the prison, the warden, are all evil monsters. They are committing war crimes, except that we are not at war, making it even worse.
  - Pharyngula, 23 December 2025

• The USA Trade Representative will impose taxes/tariffs on imports of semiconductors from Zhōngguó, because of Zhōngguó's goal to dominate the semiconductor processor chip industry (but the takes/tariffs will be delayed from being applied until June 2027). [KM: non-liars call this 'competition'.]
  - Zero Hedge, 23 December 2025

• The USA Trade Representative will impose taxes/tariffs on imports of semiconductors from Zhōngguó, because of Zhōngguó's goal to dominate the semiconductor processor chip industry (but the takes/tariffs will be delayed from being applied until June 2027). [KM: non-liars call this 'competition'.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 December 2025

• The USA Trade Representative will impose taxes/tariffs on imports of semiconductors from Zhōngguó, because of Zhōngguó's goal to dominate the semiconductor processor chip industry (but the takes/tariffs will be delayed from being applied until June 2027). [KM: non-liars call this 'competition'.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 December 2025

• Shares of Novo Nordisk jump 7%, the most in two years, after the USA approves a pill form for its Wegovy obesity drug
  - Zero Hedge, 23 December 2025

• A 10-signal cluster-fuck. Eight straight months of rising stock markets. Hedge fund leverage above the 90th percentile. Sentiment stretched, investment cash at record lows, and strategists unanimously bullish. Ten indicators say the same thing: risk is too one-sided.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 23 December 2025

• A group of writers, including Theranos whistleblower and "Bad Blood" author John Carreyrou, is filing a lawsuit against [mis]Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the companies of training their models on pirated copies of their books. The authors are unhappy with an earlier lawsuits settled with [mis]Anthropic. While eligible writers can receive about $3,000 from the $1.5 billion [mis]Anthropic settlement, some authors were dissatisfied with that resolution - it doesn't hold AI companies accountable for the actual act of using stolen books to train their models, which generate billions of dollars in revenue. [KM: how else can the rich techies get rich without committing copyright crimes - the true lesson of Napster?]
  - TechCrunch, 23 December 2025

• After power outage, people in San Francisco wonder: can non-paid robotaxis handling operatings during a big earthquake [KM: while continuing to steal revenues for poor paid-human taxi drivers?] City officials called for a hearing to investigate the extremely rich Google's Waymo after Waymo's self-driving, non-paid robotaxis blocked intersections and snarled traffic during a power outrage that caused traffic lights to turn off, depriving the non-paid robotaxis of vital navigation information.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 December 2025

• Sales of Tesla's electric vehicles continue to decline, but [KM: the mistanthropes on] Wall Street stays focused on Tesla's non-paid [KM: misanthropic] robotaxis. [KM: increasingly the richest man in the world fortune's depend on taking as much money as possible from poor paid-human taxi drivers as possible - should be a new entry for either 'misanthrope' or 'sociopath' in the dictionary]
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 23 December 2025

• [VIDEO]: experts predict that 'superintelligence' could make "everyone economically obsolete" [KM: but the rich, and rich AI companies, richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 23 December 2025

• "60 Minutes" halted a release of an episode critical of Trump's prison policies in El Salvador. A correspondent calls the cancellation "political".
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 December 2025

• The new Editor-in-Chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, blocks release of a 60 minutes episode highlighting abuses in the horrendous prisons of El Salvador, to which the USA sends many prisoners. Well Weiss [and the rich Trump-leaning owners of CBS] are frantic after copies of the episode are leaked and viewed around the world. [KM: that is the only reward for authoritarian censorship]
  - The Daily Beast, 23 December 2025

• A newsroom firestorm has erupted at CBS News after editor-in-chief Bari Weiss made the hour call on Sunday to shelve a 60 Minutes report that was critical of Trump. 60 Minutes staff aired their grievances at a staff meeting on Monday, voicing frustration with Weiss's leadership and her [authoritarian] handling of the segment, which detailed the grisly conditions at an El Salvador megaprison where Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration were held.
  - The Daily Beast, 23 December 2025

• Netflix prepares $25 billion in bank financing for its deal to buyout Warner Brothers. The streaming company has entered into a $5 billion senior unsecured revolving credit facility and two senior unsecured delayed-draw term loan facilities totaling $20 billion.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 December 2025

• Will the deal to takeover Warner Brothers finally spell the end of the movie theater [JC: and its role in providing human-connectedness]? Cinema owners fear that Netflix or Paramount acquiring Warner could reduce the number of theatrical releases or speed the time to streaming platforms.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 December 2025

• Non-paid AI tools [KM: offered by extremely rich AI companies] mean the end of entry-level jobs. Companies will have to find ways of giving junior employees less grunt work and more responsibility.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 December 2025

• Global investors switch to investing in AI companies in Zhōngguó, as fears grow on Wall Street of an AI bubble bursting in the USA
  - Thomson's Reuters, 23 December 2025

• Second reusable rocket recovery failure in a month puts Zhōngguó 10 years behind USA. State-owned and commercial developers in Zhōngguó are racing to catch up on a decade of the technology's deployment.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 23 December 2025

• Fear-of-missing-out versus AI bubble angst signals more volatility in 2026. "Investor FOMO, conflicting AI narratives and the US administration as a source of volatility are creating a supportive backdrop for trading volatility."
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 22 December 2025

• Public institutions in Europe are quietly migrating away from using cloud storage providers and office software in the USA, driven less by policy ambitions in Brussels than by the mundane legal reality that GDPR-mandated risk assessments keep flagging the US CLOUD Act as an unacceptable threat to citizen data.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 December 2025

• Online prediction markets are (obviously) gambling. Sports betting has been a net-negative for society [KM: but made the rich richer]. Prediction markets will be 100-times worse. One source of crime: the prediction markets do nothing to prevent insider trading. Unlike sportsbooks, which must be approved on a state-by-state basis, prediction markets are available in every state, regardless of whether that state has approved sports betting. This regulatory gray zone effectively allows prediction markets to operate as sportsbooks without the regulatory red tape. Studies show that for every $1 wagered on sports betting, household savings are depleted by $2. Online sports betting has increased the risk of household bankruptcy by 10%. Domestic violence issues in states with legalized sports betting are way up, along with auto loan and credit card delinquencies. Now, imagine how much worse the gambling addiction would be in the USA if sports betting had no guardrails and there were games 24/7/365. That is prediction markets. [KM: digital dopamine-trafficking apps that make the rich richer]
  - Huddle Up (substack), 22 December 2025

• Robinhood is a drug trafficker in plain sight, and dopamine is the drug it peddles. It rounds up retail, non-professional traders and matches them up with the best and fastest traders in the world and gets paid handsomely to do it. Tenev continually claims he is democratizing investing, but his customers are, in effect, profitable lab rats. Their order flow is sold to professional trading firms and studied. They are more like marks [to be scammed] than investors.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 December 2025

• Instacart eliminates its variable-pricing experiment after consumer groups warned of inflated grocery bills for cost-strained households [KM: but how else can the rich get richer?]
  - Zero Hedge, 22 December 2025

• The brutality of [Christian] El Salvador's CECOT prison is not lost on judges holding the [Christian] Trump administration accountable. A "60 Minutes" segment on the notorious prison in Christian El Salvador was pulled from airing under new [and puppet] editor-in-chief Bari Weiss [to protect the riches of the extremely rich Ellison family]. The prison has featured in recent high-profile cases exposing the Trump administration's actions.
  - MSNOW, 22 December 2025

• Bari Weiss is doing exactly what she was installed [and puppeted] to do at CBS. By pulling a "60 Minutes" segment, about Trump and his use of horrible prisons in El Salvador, Weiss is detroying CBS's credibility to protect the [extremely rich] Ellison family's interest [and money]
  - The Intercept, 22 December 2025

• Bari Weiss is doing exactly what she was installed [and puppeted] to do at CBS. By pulling a "60 Minutes" segment, about Trump and his use of horrible prisons in El Salvador, Weiss is detroying CBS's credibility to protect the [extremely rich] Ellison family's interest [and money]
  - MSNOW, 22 December 2025

• A silent 'time bomb' threatens 6 AI stocks in the S&P 500 loading up with debt - Oracle, NextEra Energy, Broadcom, NextEra Energy, Charter Communications, T-Mobile US
  - Investors Business Daily, 22 December 2025

• The breakout in the price of copper is built on much more than fundamentals. Copper is trading like the core macro commodity of the AI and electrification era, and policy is now as important as supply and demand fundamentals.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 December 2025

• As copper reaches a record high price of $12,000/ton, everyday products are predicted to become even more expensive. Prices have been pushed higher in part by Trump's taxes/tariffs, who in August slapped 50% taxes/duties on semi-finished copper products and certain copper derivatives under national security authority.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 22 December 2025

• Robinhood has turned itself into a casino that can fit in a young man's pocket. Robinhood is a pusher in plain sight and dopamine is the drug it peddles. Its customers are, in effect, profitable lab rats. Their order flow is sold to professional trading firms and studied. They are more like marks than investors.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 December 2025

• A team of researchers from The Chinese University of Hong Kong has proposed a change in lithium-ion battery design that could reduce the batteries burning, and that could rapidly integrate into current manufacturing methods, because it simply involves swapping chemicals in the existing electrolyte solution
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 22 December 2025

• [Misanthropic] Uber and Lyft are ready to trial non-paid robotaxis in the UK in partnership with Zhōngguó's Baidu [KM: all three companies want to get richer stealing earnings from paid-human taxi drivers]
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 December 2025

• Samsung is putting Google's Gemini Ai into your refrigerator, whether you need it [or want it] or not, and whether or not your want your personal information in Google's cloud
  - Nerds.xyz, 21 December 2025

• If the "scary" chart of the past couple of weeks has been the rising cost of Oracl's credit default swaps, last week it was the sharply rising 10-year yields of government bonds in Nihon (which pulls gambling money out of the USA stock market - the carry trade - back to Nihon)
  - Zero Hedge, 21 December 2025

• This year's depressing holiday plane-ticket search is brought to you by AI. Buying airline tickets for holiday travel is already stressful enough. Airlines relying on AI models to getricher setting ticket prices will likely make things even worse. [KM: rich AI companies helping the airlines have their own private jets]
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 21 December 2025

• 'Subscription Captivity': when tech products you buy end up owning you. "We are being $5.99 per month-ed to death." paying for subscriptions. A reporter at Mother Jones writes about a $169 alarm clock with special lighting and audio effects. But to use the features, "you need to pay an additional $4.99 per month, in perpetuity." "What vexes me are the companies that sell physical products for a hefty, upfront fee and subsequently demand more money to keep using items already in your possession. This encompasses those glorified alarm clocks, but also: computer printers, wearable wellness devices, and some features on pricey new cars." [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - Mother Jones, 21 December 2025

• Hiring people using AI tools is here. It is making companies - and people seeking jobs - miserable. [KM: yes, but if it is making rich AI companies richer, who cares?]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 21 December 2025

• AI was behind over 50,000 layoffs at [extremely rich] tech companies in 2025 - here are the top firms to cite it for job cuts: Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM, Crowdstrike.
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 December 2025

• Cable television stocks face another year of cord-cutting madness. "We expect cable stocks to struggle again in 2026 as subscriber losses appear inevitable."
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 20 December 2025

• Elon Musk's SpaceX purchases over 1,000 Cybertrucks for Elon Musk's Tesla, as demand plummets: "You have to wonder what other [criminal, financial?] tricks they pulled." SpaceX's purchases could add up to anywhere between $80 million to $160 million in sales for Tesla. [KM: more circular financing in the AI bubble world]
  - The Cool Down, 20 December 2025

• [Delusions of grandeur]: Elon Musk says that his new chemical penis rocket is an important as the origin of life itself
  - Futurism, 20 December 2025

• Bitcoin advocates have been divided over Michael Saylor's updated bitcoin thesis, leaving question marks over how the Strategy CEO views the cryptocurrency as money or a commodity.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 December 2025

• USA Senate candidate, James Talarico, says that the biggest [socialist] "welfare queens" in the USA are the wealthy executives and "giant corporations that do not pay a penny in taxes". "The biggest welfare queens are the CEOs who get a tax deduction for flying on a private jet."
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 20 December 2025

• Some $673.6 billion is wagered each year by Americans via illegal or unregulated gambling markets, the FBI said. "Individuals engaged in illegal gambling risk funding organized crime activity and becoming vulnerable to violence, extortion, and fraud."
  - Zero Hedge, 20 December 2025

• The competition [between extremely rich AI companies] to build the world's best AI friend [KM: so that rich AI companies can get richer replacing human friendships with friendships with their AI tools - one misery to help inflate the bubble]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 December 2025

• Rodney Brooks is the godfather of modern robotics. He says the field has lost its way. Famous for the Roomba, he argues the humanoid robot craze in Silicon Valley is doomed to fail.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 December 2025

• Starving artists versus the AI [bubble] - guess who is winning. The artists argue, rightly, that if [extremely rich AI companies'] AI tools produce work that is comparable to that of humans, that is only because [the AI companies criminally] stole from them [copyright infringement]. One artist: "[The extremely rich AI companies] were using my reputation, the work that I trained for decades, my whole life to do, and they were just using it to provide their clients with imagery that tries to mimic me." The creative grunt work that A.I. stands to replace most quickly is what helps emerging artists improve, not to mention pay their bills. If an AI tool colors comics, takes notes in the TV writers' room, and sifts through the slush pile at a publishing house, how will young creative workers master their medium - and scrape together a living while doing so?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 December 2025

• Nigeria closes factories linked to the auto industry in the USA, amid poisoning inquiry. Carmakers in the USA have known for decades - decades - that battery recycling was poisoning people abroad. Nigeria's crackdown on this misanthropy is an effort to catalog the damage.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 December 2025

• The attorney general of Texas sues several 'smart' television companies, alleging that their 'smart' televisions are "spying on people in Texas". [KM: how else to get richer?]
  - The Hill, 20 December 2025

• Palo Alto Networks announces multibillion-dollar deal with Google Cloud
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 December 2025

• Intel's advanced semiconductor chip node, 18A, is now in high-volume production at its new fabrication facility in Arizona, but no major outside customers have emerged, desptite a $8.9 billion socialist bailout from the USA government and an $5 billion investment from Nvidia (but won't commit to buying chips from the facility). The biggest problem? Convincing a big chipmaker to trust Intel with manufacturing on the new node. For now, Intel's only major customer is itself.
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 December 2025

• As prediction markets surge, Wall Street is grappling with an uncomfortable question: Is there any distinction left between investing and gambling? [KM/JC: NO!]
  - Barron's, 20 December 2025

• [The stupidity/foolishness of trying to control access to technology:] Tencent, based in Zhōngguó, is accessing banned Nvidia processor chips through the cloud. Tencent is using a cloud service in Nihon to access Nvidia Blackwell chips that remain banned to computer scientists in Zhōngguó.
  - Barron's, 20 December 2025

• Copper is at record high prices. What the new leader of Chile means for the world's supply of copper. Chile, the world's top copper producer, elected a pro-business president, as world copper prices surge to record highs on expected demand from electric vehicles and artificial intelligence data centers.
  - Barron's, 20 December 2025

• Johor, in southern Malaysia, has rapidly become a major destination for AI data center investment - driven by two big forces: companies diversifying supply chains amid geopolitical tension, and a late 2022 surge in compute demand from generative AI that is reshaping where Asian capacity gets builtthatpostinvestment. What makes Johor especially attractive is its spillover link to Singapore.
  - Zero Hedge, 19 December 2025

• Marc Chaikin's track record speaks for itself: he warned of the 2022 downturn 90 days before it happened, predicted the 2023 recovery with 26% gains, and called this year's tax/tariff crash. Now his market data points to a 65% chance of a bear market in 2026 with average losses of 20%.
  - Investor Place, 19 December 2025

• How using prompts for AI chatbots is damaging your thinking skills. "While GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving."
  - BBC, 19 December 2025

• The suprising return of the bookstore [KM: in its fight against the misanthropy of online book sales that only makes the rich richer]. Barnes & Noble will open 175 news stores from 2024 to 2026. The CEO, James Daunt wants to "make the bookstore as interesting and attractive as possible, and have within it friendly, informed booksellers who enjoyed their customers and their jobs".
  - Honest Broker (blog), 19 December 2025

• A pro-[extremely-rich]-AI company super PAC launches the first of many attack ads for the next USA elections, using $100 million from extremely the extremely rich in Silicon Valley to "oppose candidates perceived as slowing down AI-development/extremely rich AI companies getting even richer". [KM: aah, one fun of the rich - buying politicians]
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 19 December 2025

• Stanford computer science graduates find their degrees no longer guarantee entry-level jobs, as AI-driven coding tools slash demand for entry-level engineers and concentrate hiring around a small pool of already 'elite' or AI-savvy developers. he shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need "two [paid-human] skilled engineers, and one of these [non-paid] LLM-based agents. ... We don't need [paid-human] junior developers anymore." [KM: was any other outcome expected?]
  - Los Angeles Times (locked), 19 December 2025

• Another AI misery: a video made in an airport exposes the "creepy" way that women are being secretly filmed by AI glasses, such as those sold by Facebook. "These glasses ar more scarry than AI right now." [KM: yes, but isn't the sacrifice of these women's privacy worth it to make rich AI companies richer?]
  - Los Angeles Times (locked), 19 December 2025

• The reported 4.6% unemployment rate in the USA is complete and utter bullshit. In reality, it is north of 20% (ignoring people "NOT IN THE LABOR FORCE" is a fiction). White-collar workers? ChatGPT and the avalanche of AI tools are eliminating jobs in these sectors at hyperbolic speed. These are the same [assholes] who used to tell blue collar workers to "learn to code". [KM: yes, but across the decades, the rich get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 19 December 2025

• $934,137 - The state of Massachusettes orders DraftKings to pay a fine of $934,000, after it botched MLB parley bets
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 19 December 2025

• The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission directs PJM, the nation's largest transmission operator, to boost co-location capacity for AI data centers, and send their rich owners the bill for expanding the electric grid to handle new power generation. The FERC's first priority is to ensure households and small businesses - [the non-rich] are not forced to pay for grid expansions fostered by demand from AI data centers [owned by rich AI companies] and other large-load electricity customers. [KM: what's this - making the rich pay their fare share? Communism!]
  - Zero Hedge, 19 December 2025

• AI charts you cannot miss. AI isn't collapsing [yet], but the easy money phase is over and selectivity is quickly becoming the trade.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 19 December 2025

• We owe it to [the mental health of] of college students to create technology-free spaces. Why? One student: "I was always trying to finish work as quickly as possible so I could get back to my [addictive] phone [apps]." When parents realize what a saboteur AI is for learning, they are more likely to back an ambitious overhaul. [KM: nonsense - you can't stop rich AI companies from getting richer at your children's expense - so selfish!
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 December 2025

• OpenAI's [KM: which is accused of many social harms of little interest to investors] new fundraising round could value startup at as much as $830 billion. Concerns about the AI bubble have weighed on many publicly traded tech-related companies.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 December 2025

• Two 'Airbnb for boats' companies are merging. Boatsetter and GetMyBoat are on track for more than $100 million of combined bookings this year.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 December 2025

• $60,000,000 - Instacart ordered to pay $60 million to settle FTC deceptive-practices claim. The FTC alleged that the grocery-delivery platform falsely advertised free delivery and 100% satisfaction guarantee, and also did not adequately disclose the terms for Instacart+ membership.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 December 2025

• The big question in the multitrillion-dollar AI data center buildout: will AI technology produce returns large or quickly enough to recoup both existing investments and cover future infrastructure costs (such as replacing advanced processors chips as they age)? "Where is the revenue going to come in that is going to allow you to rebuild at that scale?" Michael Burry, the famed investor behind "The Big Short", recently warned of an AI bubble. His argument is based in part on the prediction that tech firms are overestimating the valuable life of their chip investments, which could eventually weigh on their earnings.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 19 December 2025

• [The authoritarian] Trump's billionaire pals get handed control of TikTok. Oracle is owned by co-founder and Trump pal Larry Ellison; Silver Lake co-CEO and managing partner Egon Durban has ties to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner; and MGX has backed the Trump family's cryptocurrency empire.
  - The Daily Beast, 19 December 2025

• TikTok has signed the deal [forced by the authoritarian] Trump to spin off its US assets to create a new entity with a group of mostly American investors. Under the agreement, the US TikTok app will be controlled by a new joint venture, 50% of which will be owned by a consortium of investors comprised of tech company Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and Emirati-backed investment firm MGX.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 19 December 2025

• TikTok has signed the deal [forced by the authoritarian] Trump to spin off its US assets to create a new entity with a group of mostly American investors. Under the agreement, the US TikTok app will be controlled by a new joint venture, 50% of which will be owned by a consortium of investors comprised of tech company Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and Emirati-backed investment firm MGX.
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 December 2025

• AI data center deals hit record $61 billion in 2025 amid construction frenzy [for the AI bubble]: [KM: how many paid-human jobs will have to be destroyed to make these investments profitable?]
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 December 2025

• Video game sales in Zhōngguó reach record high amid overseas expansion, and AI investment. In 2025, Zhōngguó is expected to surpass the USA as the largest gaming market in the world, with revenue of US$53.2 billion, according to Newzoo.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 19 December 2025

• Zhōngguó is no longer using software from the USA to run its power grid. The Southern Regional Electricity Market - the world's largest unified power market - has switched fully to Tianquan, an electric grid power solver developed by engineers in Zhōngguó with speeds 14 per cent faster than software used in the USA.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 19 December 2025

• Zhōngguó begins granting general export licenses for rare earth metals as trade tensoins cool
  - Zero Hedge, 18 December 2025

• The [extremely rich] Amazon to eliminate more than 14,000 jobs in a stunning pivot: "This is a tipping point [for paid humans]". Amazon said it is trying to trim up its operations [KM: spend less money on paid human workers], and it is mostly due to the rise of non-paid AI systems. [KM: the extremely rich Jeff Bezos, and rich investors, must get richer]
  - The Cool Down, 18 December 2025

• Respecting people's desires and contempts, Firefox will ship its browers with an 'AI kill switch' to completely disable all AI features
  - 9 to 5 Linux, 18 December 2025

• Is it time to sell your technology stocks [before the AI bubble bursts] and reinvest elsewhere? Morningstar Wealth strategists are positioning for better opportunities such as small caps and emerging-market stocks.
  - Morningstar, 18 December 2025

• Palo Alto, California, is finally pushing back against Silicon Valley's billionaire sprawl. City leaders in the ultra-wealthy technology enclave are weighing sweeping new restrictions aimed squarely at Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Laurene Powell Jobs, Marissa Mayer and other billionaires who have quietly turned residential neighborhoods into private compounds. [Extremely rich authoritarian] technology billionaires have drawn the ire of local lawmakers, neighbors and housing advocates by buying up multiple properties, running yearslong construction projects, deploying private security and pulling houses off the market in the middle of a housing crisis.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 18 December 2025

• Actors in the UK vote to refuse to be digitally scanned in pushback against AI [KM: taking their incomes]. Equity says vote signals strong opposition to AI use and readiness to disrupt productions unless protections are secured.
  - The Guardian, 18 December 2025

• LG forced a Microsoft Copilot web app onto its televisions, but will let people delete it. A post about the icon garnered more than 36,000 upvotes as people grow more frustrated with AI popping up just about everywhere.
  - The Verge, 18 December 2025

• The USA and Zhōngguó are headed for a competitive collision in the AI race. Zhōngguó is not abiding by the rules that are supposed to govern the global economy. [KM: yet one more thing that Zhōngguó has learned well from the USA]
  - Zero Hedge, 18 December 2025

• One month after it looked like South Korea was [reducing its fines on Big Tech] for violating laws [against online abuses with regards to privacy and monopolies], the Trump administration stopped trade negotiations - canceling a key bilateral trade meeting and signaling that continued regulatory pressure on American technology firms will carry immediate consequences. [KM: a nice return on the investment of buying Administration officials]
  - Zero Hedge, 18 December 2025

• The CEO of Tether warns that the AI bubble is bitcoin's biggest risk in 2026. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says an AI-driven bubble could shake bitcoin, and shares his outlook on Europe, DATs and tokenization in 2026.
  - Zero Hedge, 18 December 2025

• The cryptocurrency industry presses/bribes Senate Banking panel to reject efforts to expand limits on stablecoin rewards (which allows them to be unregulated bank). At the center of controversy are regulated banks' concerns about potential deposit outflows. They argue that allowing for such rewards could cause people to shift their money out of deposits and into stablecoins, reducing the funds available for lending, particularly for community banks.
  - The Hill, 18 December 2025

• When asked to generate an alphabet poster for pre-school children, the latest version of ChatGPT just flails wildly. "O is for jellyfish, Q is for penguin, R is for snake" [KM: and H is for shit for the masses, while rich AI companies get richer]
  - Futurism, 18 December 2025

• Millions of 'private' [hah!] ChatGPT conversations are being harvested and sold for profit. An officially-approved Google Chrome browser app, Urban VPN Proxy, is responsible for the privacy theft.
  - Futurism, 18 December 2025

• One of Google's Waymo's non-paid robotaxis is spotted driving the wrong way down a busy street [KM: so a few people get killed - can't let that stop rich AI companies getting richer]
  - Futurism, 18 December 2025

• In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, scientists in Zhōngguó have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a EUV photolithography machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power AI. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML, who reverse-engineered ASML's EUV machines. Government is targeting 2028 for working chips, but sources say 2030 is more likely - ten years ahead of Western predictions.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 18 December 2025

• Activist investor Elliott builds billion dollar stake in Lululemon
  - Zero Hedge, 18 December 2025

• A world-beating 55,000% surge in an AI stock in Bharat fuels bubble fears. The company, RRP Semiconductor, posted negative revenue in its latest financial results, eporting just two full-time employees in its latest annual report, and boasting only a tenuous link to the semiconductor spending boom after shifting away from real estate in early 2024. A mix of online hype, a tiny free float and India's swelling base of retail investors drove 149 straight limit-up sessions, even as exchange officials and the company itself cautioned investors. [KM: bubble, bubble, toil and burst]
  - The Hindu Business Line (locked), 18 December 2025

• Instacart shares fell 7% in premarket trading in New York after an overnight report said the Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into the online grocery delivery and pickup platform. Reuters reported that the FTC's investigation is focused on Instacart's AI-driven pricing tool and whether it led shoppers to be charged different prices for identical goods.
  - Zero Hedge, 18 December 2025

• What [extremely rich] AI companies and their tools threaten is not human creativity itself, but the ability of humans to earn money from the creative endeavor [KM: yes, how else can rich AI companies get richer except by taking money from non-rich humans?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 December 2025

• We [idiotically] let an AI system ([mis]Anthropic's Claude) run our office vending machine. It lost hundreds of dollars.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 December 2025

• Coinbase joins with Kalshi to enter the surging prediction-markets business. The cryptocurrency company has its sights on becoming an "everything exchange", and prediction-markets platforms like Kalshi are starting to show up everywhere.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 December 2025

• "Remaining perforamce obligations" - the squishy [dishonest] number behind the rise and fall of Oracle's stock. AI [bubble] investors are scrutinizing a once-obscure metric related to future sales.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 December 2025

• The Justice Department indicts adderall startup after the CEO's conviction. Done Global, which prosecutors called a 'pill mill', is still operating and has served tens of thousands of Americans.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 December 2025

• Microsoft is killing off RC4, an obsolete and vulnerable encryption cipher, that Windows has supported by default for 26 years following more than a decade of devastating hacks that exploited it and recently faced blistering criticism from a prominent US senator. While it offered support for the stronger AES encryption standard, RC4 remained the defective default. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in September called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for "gross cyversecurity negligence", citing the continued default support for RC4. [KM: Bill Gates couldn't have spent some of his woeful billions to help fix this years ago, and prevent much harm?]
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 18 December 2025

• Shares of CarMax drop 9% after reporting declines in quarterly revenue and profits, as the used car market weakens
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 December 2025

• Shares of Micron jump 14% as demand for memory chips for the AI bubble soars
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 December 2025

• Why nuclear fusion is considered the elusive holy grail of physics and economics. Trump's media company is [recklessly] betting a breakthrough is imminent.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 December 2025

• Trump Media announces $6 billion merger with fusion company TAE Technologies (backed by Google); DJT stock soars 25%. [A 'Hail Mary', as commercial fusion power still does not exist.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 December 2025

• Trump Media announces $6 billion merger with fusion company TAE Technologies (backed by Google); DJT stock soars 25%. [A 'Hail Mary', as commercial fusion power still does not exist.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 December 2025

• Fears of an AI bubble in Asian stock markets are misplaced
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 18 December 2025

• Polysilicon: an opportunity to demonstrate 'America First'. The USA currently faces a decision: to rely on imported polysilicon from Zhōngguó to unlock the electronic economy, or to protect and expand existing capacity across the USA and allied nations to feed the growing demand for chips, and therefore for polysilicon.
  - Real Clear Wire, 17 December 2025

• From sexy to soggy: the SOX ETF is breaking at the worst possible time. Hedge fund positioning in North American semis got back to peak levels just in time for the biggest SOX puke in a very long time.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 December 2025

• Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company. Doublespeed uses generative AI to flood social media with accounts and posts to promote certain products on behalf of its clients. Social media companies attempt to detect and remove this type of astroturfing for violating their inauthentic behavior policies, which is why Doublespeed uses a bank of phones to emulate the behavior of real users. [KM: aren't all of these obnovious people right enough already?]
  - 404 Media, 17 December 2025

• AI data center drama wrecks tech stocks, while silver soars amid cryptocurrency chaos. The stock market no longer has the same automatic 'buy the dip' cushion on AI exceptionalism it enjoyed earlier in the year.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 December 2025

• This is Europe's secret weapon against Trump: it could burst his AI bubble. The USA's bet on AI is now so gigantic that every Maga voter's pension is bound to the AI bubble's precarious survival. Without the AI bubble, USA GDP grew only 0.1% in 2025. Europe has two weapons to burst the USA's AI bubble: restrict exports of ASML's vital semiconductor machines to the USA; and is the enforcement of the EU's ong-neglected data rules against big US tech companies. All Brussels has to do is crack down on Ireland, which for years has been a wild west of lax data enforcement, and the repercussions will be felt far beyond.
  - The Guardian, 17 December 2025

• AI data centers in space are coming: here is how to profit [from this mini-bubble]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 17 December 2025

• Squeeze in physical silver is tightening while gold's eases. This betrays a shortage of physical silver more acute than for gold, which is likely behind its recent significant outperformance.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 17 December 2025

• One analyst says that Tesla's car business is only worth $30 a share (stock now at $493). The current and future wealth of Tesla and Elon Musk depends on the AI bubble [KM: i.e, how many paid-human taxi drivers it can destroy with its robotaxi and AI technology]
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 17 December 2025

• [Keep bubbling AI] - money-hungry OpenAI is discussing a $10 billion investment from Amazon
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 17 December 2025

• What Trump's embrace of cryptocurrencies has unleashed. A boundary-pushing array of new crypto ventures have reached the stock market, enticing investors and leading to more risk taking [KM: and more get-rich-quick crimes].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 December 2025

• Spooked by non-paid AI tools and layoffs, white-collar workers see their security slip away. Office workers are filled with anxiety as sectors such as information and financial services shed jobs in recent months.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 December 2025

• Breach at Coupang, South Korea's equivalent of Amazon, [incompetently] exposed data of almost every adult. Tens of millions of names, phone numbers and other sensitive information were leaked in a breach that went undetected for months [KM: by the high-paid executives].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 December 2025

• The political skirmish over Trump's AI executive order is just the beginning. The White House drama has given new signals of populist opposition to technology that holds the promise of eliminating lots of paid-human jobs. [KM: I wonder how much it cost AI companies to buy the executive order]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 December 2025

• Shares of Oracle stock decline 5% on report that Blue Owl Capital will not back $10 billion data center to be built for OpenAI
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 December 2025

• Shares of Oracle stock decline 5% on report that Blue Owl Capital will not back $10 billion data center to be built for OpenAI
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 17 December 2025

• Why billionaire investor Fernando de Leon, founder of Leon Capital Group is waving a red flag over AI data centers, because of big problems in data center financing.
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 December 2025

• Shares of Airbnb are in a 5-year slump. One analyst believes 2026 will be their year.
  - CNBC (locked), 17 December 2025

• [Feed the addiction!] Robinhood is rolling out NFL parlay and prop bets on prediction markets platform.
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 December 2025

• [KM: To more quickly help destroy more jobs for paid-human taxi drivers] Google-owned Waymo is in talks to raising $15 billion in additional funding. [KM: every investor of course preying for more paid-human taxi driver jobs to be destroyed for a return on their investment]
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 December 2025

• A resident of Boxtown, (Memphis, Tennessee) says she can't open windows anymore because of "rotten" smell from living near the extremely rich Elon musk's giant AI data center [KM: suffer your health - Elon Musk must get richer]
  - People, 16 December 2025

• Never forgive them [for the evil of Silicon Valley]. The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to [profit] as much value from the interaction as possible that relies on gradual enshittification. You are battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. As every single platform we use is desperate to juice growth from every user, everything we interact with is hyper-monetized through plugins, advertising, microtransactions and other things that constantly gnaw at the user experience. After a coup by head of ads Prabhakar Raghavan in 2019, Google intentionally made search results worse as a means of increasing the amount of times that people would search for something on the site. In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we are not meaningfully discussing.
  - Edward Zitron, 16 December 2025

• $1,570,000 - DirectToU and Alliance Entertainment have agreed to a $1.57 million class action settlement after video game players claimed the businesses shared consumer information with third parties [Facebook] without consent
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 16 December 2025

• USA Senators count the shady ways extremely rich AI data center companies pass energy costs on to non-rich people in the USA. USA senators are probing whether Big Tech data centers are driving up local electricity bills by socializing grid upgrade costs onto residents. Some of the tactics they're using include NDAs, shell companies, and lobbying [buying politicians]. [KM: yes, but how else can rich AI companies get richer?]
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 16 December 2025

• Satyajit Das: AI - artificial intelligence, or absolute insanity?
  - Zero Hedge, 16 December 2025

• Stocks in the USA extend losses as Trump's White House threatens retaliation against 'unreasonable' EU digital tax on tax-paying-avoiding USA Big Tech companies
  - Zero Hedge, 16 December 2025

• CoreWeave, an AI data center company, has lost a staggering amount of stock value (down 46% - a loss of $33 billion) over the past six months. Taking on an enormous amount of high-interest debt to construct and lease AI data centers leaves CoreWeave with a considerable degree of risk, potentially putting it first on the chopping block in case the AI bubble were to implode [KM: when it implodes].
  - Futurism, 16 December 2025

• CoreWeave, an AI data center company, has lost a staggering amount of stock value (down 46% - a loss of $33 billion) over the past six months. Taking on an enormous amount of high-interest debt to construct and lease AI data centers leaves CoreWeave with a considerable degree of risk, potentially putting it first on the chopping block in case the AI bubble were to implode [KM: when it implodes].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 December 2025

• Jeff Bezos' Washington Post' says it will continue generating error filled podcasts with its non-paid AI, as its own editors groan in embarrassment
  - Futurism, 16 December 2025

• The things that young children are using AI for are absolutely horrifying [KM: except to rich AI companies that are trying to get richer]. A significant percentage of kids who turn to AI for companionship are engaging in violent roleplays - and that violence, which can include sexual violence, drove more engagement than any other topic kids engaged with. [KM: more engagement, more profits for rich AI companies]
  - Futurism, 16 December 2025

• We are bracing for accidents now that Tesla is taking the [paid-human] safety drivers out ofs its [non-paid, paid-human-job-destroying,] robotaxis
  - Futurism, 16 December 2025

• The AI [bubble] trade is losing its footing as Asia flashes red. Zhōngguó is tech heavy. KOSPI slipping. AI proxies soggy.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 16 December 2025

• The entry-level hiring process is breaking down. Grade inflation and the rise of AI are making it impossible for employers to evaluate recent graduates.
  - The Atlantic, 16 December 2025

• How tech's biggest companies are offloading the risks of the AI boom/[bubble]. The data centers used for work on AI can cost tens of billions to build. Tech giants are finding ways to avoid being on the hook for some of those costs.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 December 2025

• In AI boom/[bubble], venture capital firms are raising loads more money. Lightspeed Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture firm, has amassed more than $9 billion to invest in artificial intelligence. That is its biggest haul. [KM: how many people will need to lose their jobs for a profitable return here?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 December 2025

• CoreWeave's stunning fall from market grace highlights AI bubble [bursting] fears. The AI data-center provider's terrible six-week slide picked up speed when a famous short seller piled concerns on top of delays.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 December 2025

• [Non-paid] AI is about to empty Madison Avenue [offices of paid-humans]. Smart advertisements from Google, Meta, and Amazon [cause] agencies and creative workers [KM: to lose their work and jobs, as rich AI companies get richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 December 2025

• Why 2026 could be the year of anti-AI marketing, as the hatred of AI-generated 'slop' continues to grow
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 16 December 2025

• Korea Zinc sinks 14% as largest shareholder group challenges U.S.-backed plans for Tennessee smelter
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 December 2025

• The latest nationalist socialist industrial policy of the [racist] Trump Administration: the Pentagon takes a big stake in new Korea Zinc smelter in Tennessee, will get 10% of company
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 December 2025

• The Attorney General of Texas sued five major television manufacturers, accusing them of illegally collecting their users' data by secretly recording what they watch using Automated Content Recognition technology. The lawsuits target Sony, Samsung, LG, and Zhōngguó-based companies Hisense and TCL Technology Group Corporation.
  - Bleeping Computer, 16 December 2025

• A Goldman Sachs analyst had a team visit tech companies in Asia. One conclusion? That AI server demand remains robust, with no signs of slowing in 2026, while end-market growth for PCs remains mixed.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 December 2025

• Facebook tolerates [massive] rampant advertising fraud from Zhōngguó to protect billions of dollars in revenue. Internal company documents show Facebook/Instagram wanted to minimize "revenue impact" caused by cracking down on the scams. [KM: yes, but how else can the rich get richer?]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 15 December 2025

• Facebook tolerates [massive] rampant advertising fraud from Zhōngguó to protect billions of dollars in revenue. Internal company documents show Facebook/Instagram wanted to minimize "revenue impact" caused by cracking down on the scams. [KM: yes, but how else can the rich get richer?]
  - Zero Hedge, 15 December 2025

• AI bubble(s)? Deutsche Bank highlights red flags, green flags and what could go wrong. Reports of a bubble are exaggerated (for now) but here's what could go wrong.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 15 December 2025

• The power play behind Hyperion, the extremely rich Mark Zuckerberg's colossal data center being built in rural Louisiana "so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan". $10 billion of investment. Code names to disguise projects and companies. Mixed opinions. Skyrocketing property values. And enough tax breaks to pay every state cop in Louisiana for seven years. [KM: once more, the rich get richer, the non-rich get poorer]. The tech companies are able to secure humongous tax breaks from local governments that are loath to pass up an opportunity to turn otherwise underutilized land into potential investment dollars and the promise of good-paying jobs. But many times, the number of local jobs is not guaranteed, and massive demands on water and power resources burden the infrastructure at unprecedented levels. Property values near data center sites skyrocket, which makes homes harder to purchase for those looking to move in. For existing residents, it also sends things into a bit of disarray: residents' home values soar, but that also means tax assessments could rise, leading to higher property tax bills. The tax breaks and incentives that Louisiana gave the extremely rich Zuckerberg/Facebook are worth billions. Facebook will pay no sales tax on the tens of billions of dollars' worth of expensive GPUs and advanced networking gear that will fill the data center's racks [KM: more riches for Zuckerberg]. The local power authority even agreed to build new power lines and infrastructure for Facebook [KM: more riches for the extremely rich Zuckerberg].
  - Sherwood News, 15 December 2025

• Fox News instructs viewers to buy plastic Christmas trees so that real ones can be sacrificed to feed the insatiable hunder of AI data center. A Fox Business reporter/tool declared that a beloved local Christmas tree farm should be sacrificed to make way for AI data center infrastructure. [JC: the rich get richer, and get real Christmas trees on my birthday?]
  - Futurism, 15 December 2025

• [VIDEO]: "He behaved like a total maniac." - Sam Harris on [the authoritarian] Elon Musk and [the authoritarian] Big Tech's turn towards / support for the [authoritarian] Trump
  - On With Kara Swisher, 15 December 2025

• Enthusiasm for AI stocks is finally being replaced by questions, such as whether the costs of developing the technology will be matched in terms of the productivity growth it can create.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 December 2025

• Zillow shares plunged more than 9% on Monday on worries that the online real estate platform will be crushed [by one of the Big Tech authoritarians]: Google Search. Google appears to be running tests on putting real estate sale listings into its search results.
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 December 2025

• Zillow shares plunged more than 9% on Monday on worries that the online real estate platform will be crushed [by one of the Big Tech authoritarians]: Google Search. Google appears to be running tests on putting real estate sale listings into its search results.
  - GeekWire, 15 December 2025

• Payments firm PayPal said on Monday it has applied to establish a bank in the United States, as companies rush to capitalize on a friendly regulatory environment under the Trump administration.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 15 December 2025

• Watch an underwater sea drone launched by Ukraine directly hit and sink a docked submarine owned by Rossiya, reportedly taking out of service a $400 million submarine.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 December 2025

• Watch an underwater sea drone launched by Ukraine directly hit and sink a docked submarine owned by Rossiya, reportedly taking out of service a $400 million submarine.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 December 2025

• The AI bubble shock due to Nihon raising its interest rates. Nvidia's stock price peaked just as the yields of 10-year Nihon government bond rose significantly (pulling more money back to Nihon, and thus less money to inflate the AI bubble)
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 15 December 2025

• Why the extremely rich Mark Zuckerberg's extremely rich Facebook is a cesspool of scam ads - what how Zuckerberg/Facebook are making billions of dollars from its phony 'tax' on fraudsters [KM: yes, the classic bubble ingredient to make the rich richer - rely on criminal actions]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 15 December 2025

• In 21 countries, all AI data centers are located in climates that are too hot. This requires more electricity and water to cool the AI data centers [KM: which helps make rich AI companies richer, but drives up the price of electricity and water for non-rich residents of these countries]
  - Rest of World, 15 December 2025

• A hedge fund CIO argues: "If Nvidia is this cycle's coalmine, Oracle is the [dying] canary".
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 15 December 2025

• A semiconductor chip company plotted to send technology to Zhōngguó, an ex-CEO claims. The former chief executive of Nexperia, a semiconductor chipmaker in the Netherlands, said government officials had known for years that the company owner in Zhōngguó sought to move its technology to Zhōngguó.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 December 2025

• [A battle of sharks]: say goodbye to lawfirms charging for their services by the hour, thanks to AI. With AI taking over their grunt work, lawyers and other professionals may have to charge for outcomes rather than time spent.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 December 2025

• AI is no substitute for liberal-arts education. For all its promise, tech risks instilling in students an unthinking yet false understanding of themselves, writes University of Dallas President Jonathan Sanford.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 December 2025

• The eerie parallels between the AI mania/[bubble] and the Dot-Com bubble. Stock market bulls spend a lot of time denying that there is a 1990s-style bubble inflating again. But it is worth going through a few of the similarities and differences.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 December 2025

• CEOs to keep spending on AI in 2026, despite poor returns on their investments. Teneo's annual survey finds 68% of chief executives plan to increase AI spending in 2026 [KM: which will at least help the bubble from bursting]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 December 2025

• $85,000,000 - Airbnb is fined 56 million pounds ($85 million) for advertising unlicensed apartments
  - BBC, 15 December 2025

• The Kirin 9030 semiconductor processor made by Huawui shows the progress of Zhōngguó with semiconductor manufacturing technology, despite restrictions of technology sent to Zhōngguó imposed by the USA. Despite "meaningful density improvements" in its N+3 process, SMIC's capabilities are still behind leading chipmakers TSMC and Samsung.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 15 December 2025

• If the AI [bubble] fails to deliver on its vast productivity promises, the result will be a devastating depression. If AI fails to deliver on its vast promises, the risk is far wider than the tech sector. It will lead to a deep recession and massive budget deficits, which will catalyze a debt sustainability crisis that could make 2008 seem trivial. [KM: but the rich AI companies will still remain rich]
  - Zero Hedge, 14 December 2025

• [Vulturish] private equity investors find a new source of profit [KM: to make the rich richer]: volunteer fire departments [JC: going after volunteers helping the blessed meek?]. Rural departments have long relied on cheap software solutions to keep their operations running. But fire chiefs report sharp price increases as private equity investors [KM: swoop with another way to exploit the non-rich]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 December 2025

• The high economic and health cost of the online sports betting boom in the USA, which is driving more people into financial and emotional distress, especially young men [KM: while the rich online casinos get richer]
  - Axios, 14 December 2025

• The United States of [non-corporate] Fraud. From shoplifting to gamifying returns, America's consumers are turning into cheaters. Why not? Our economic machine is more impersonal than ever. Local stores run by your neighbors have been eplaced by ever-larger, colder conglomerates that are willing to ax workers on a dime, pad executives' pockets, and focus on little other than profits. Corporate America's favorite new toy [for abuse] - AI - promises efficiency and riches for them and precarity and anxiety for us. Against that backdrop, some people have turned to petty fraud, policy abuse, and small acts of sabotage as a means of getting back at their economic overlords.
  - Business Insider, 14 December 2025

• The view from inside the AI bubble. Secret parties, lavish buffets, and talks of annihilation at one of the largest AI-research conferences (NeurIPS).
  - The Atlantic, 14 December 2025

• For the first time in over 50 years, both gold and [bubbled] equities have shown "explosive growth" at the same time. According to the BIS, "If history repeats itself, [bubbled] overvaluation followed by reversion, investors could suffer steep losses in both their equity and gold holdings simultaneously, eliminating the traditional diversification benefit of holding both."
  - Zero Hedge, 14 December 2025

• Dystopian horror: 1 in 4 teenagers in Britain rely on AI 'therapy'-bots for mental health, as machines worldwide push kids toward suicide.
  - Zero Hedge, 14 December 2025

• How EngineAI, based in Zhōngguó, has a $150,000 robot that is two years ahead of Elon Musk's robot technology [which Musk is rely on to bubble up the value of his companies]. EngineAI robot delivers forceful Bruce Lee-style kicks, while Musk's Optimus jogs a few steps and falls over while handing out water bottle.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 December 2025

• Why robotic pioneers in Nihon are ceding the humanoid stage to Zhōngguó and the USA. Nihon's university system has long centred on engineering faculties led by manufacturing, resulting in a relative shortage of AI talent.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 December 2025

• iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner, filed for bankruptcy protection on Sunday, saying that it would go private after being bought by Picea Robotics, its primary manufacturer. iRobot generated about $682 million in total revenue in 2024, but its profits have been eroded by competition from Chinese rivals like Ecovacs Robotics. iRobot remains dominant in key markets like the U.S. and Japan, but competition forced it to lower its prices and make substantial investments in technological upgrades, according to bankruptcy court filings. Trump's taxes/tariffs have also harmed the company, especially a 46% levy on imports from Vietnam, where iRobot manufactures vacuum cleaners for the U.S. market. Trump's taxes/tariffs raised the company's costs by $23 million in 2025, while making it more difficult to plan for the future, according to iRobot's court filings.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 December 2025

• iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner, filed for bankruptcy protection on Sunday, saying that it would go private after being bought by Picea Robotics, its primary manufacturer. iRobot generated about $682 million in total revenue in 2024, but its profits have been eroded by competition from Chinese rivals like Ecovacs Robotics. iRobot remains dominant in key markets like the U.S. and Japan, but competition forced it to lower its prices and make substantial investments in technological upgrades, according to bankruptcy court filings. Trump's taxes/tariffs have also harmed the company, especially a 46% levy on imports from Vietnam, where iRobot manufactures vacuum cleaners for the U.S. market. Trump's taxes/tariffs raised the company's costs by $23 million in 2025, while making it more difficult to plan for the future, according to iRobot's court filings.
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 December 2025

• The manufacturer of Roombas robot cleaners declares bankruptcy, but tries to 'bricking' fears. iRobot says that customer service and app functionality will not be disrupted despite the restructuring.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 December 2025

• The AI [bubble] was the trade, not it is the problem
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 13 December 2025

• If Goldman Sach's estimates of a partial or full displacement of up to 300 million paid-humans from their jobs across the Western world due to the proliferation of non-paid AI and automation are even remotely correct, a new report suggests that by 2035, society could face widespread public resentment, protests, and even acts of sabotage directed at robotic systems [KM: and their masters and rich investors]
  - Zero Hedge, 13 December 2025

• Literal teenagers are losing it all at cryptocurrency casinos. "I lost sight of what money actually is." Teenagers are getting hooked on addictive online high-stakes gambling younger than ever. [KM: but not the teenagers of the rich who are getting richer by investing in online casinos. JC: millstones for these online casino owners.]
  - Futurism, 13 December 2025

• The government of New York State must SAY NO to the addictive temptation of online casinos. Legal gambling is a highly regressive revenue-raiser, taking a far, far bigger chunk of low-income folks' paychecks that it does from rich people [KM: who are investing in online gambling companies to get even richer]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 13 December 2025

• [mis]Anthropic's chief scientist says that we are rapidly approaching the moment that could doom us all
  - Futurism, 13 December 2025

• Inside the invitation-only stock market for the wealthy. The buzziest [bubbled] private companies are being sold to a select few as the universe of stocks [the non-rich] can invest in shrinks rapidly. [KM: capitalism ... for the rich!]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 December 2025

• Fresh concerns about AI spending [to inflate the bubble] are rattling Wall Street. Slides in Broadcom and Oracle weighed on indexes at the end of a volatile week.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 December 2025

• By slapping Snoopy on everything, is the Peanuts brand not rejecting the anticonsumerist message of "A Charlie Brown Christmas"? Is Snoopy, once a dreamer and mischief-maker, now nothing more than an embodiment of what the Christmas special warned us of?
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 13 December 2025

• Cadmium zinc telluride - the wonder material for scanning devices that few companies can make. CDZ can detect tiny photon particles in X-rays and gamma rays with incredible precision.
  - BBC, 13 December 2025

• Red-hot Texas is getting so many data center requests that experts see a bubble
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 December 2025

• Netflix's "Stranger Things" franchise has become one of the biggest cultural touchstones of the streaming era and has solidified the company as not just a competitor, but a leader in streaming media.
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 December 2025

• Zhōngguó narrows the AI technology gap with the USA three years after ChatGPT shock. The turning point came when DeepSeek released its V3 and R1 models, that were on par with OpenAI's GPT and Facebook's Llama models at the time.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 December 2025

• Is Zhōngguó testing drone subamarines that could threaten the west coast of the USA, or the Panama Canal? Evidence points to the development of XXL vessels that provide a "low-risk" option for attacking key sites, according to a USA defence website.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 December 2025

• How the stock market's rally can keep going in 2026 - and what to buy now. The economy is looking resilient and there are bargains below the surface AI [of the AI bubble]. Where to invest in 2026.
  - Barron's, 13 December 2025

• Don't fight the AI bubble. Even Cisco eventually won.
  - Barron's, 13 December 2025

• [More socialism for the rich]: [Christian] Republicans pass a law that will allow weapons/swords contractors to claim reimbursement for the interest they pay on debt they take on to build weapons for the military [KM: money that flows to rich investors in these companies' investors, at the expense of the non-rich taypaying public]
  - The Intercept, 12 December 2025

• The paid-human podcast industry is under siege as non-paid AI bots flood the airways with thousands of [slop] programs [KM: another way for rich AI companies to get richer, while paid-humans get poorer]
  - Los Angeles Times, 12 December 2025

• Defense Secretary (and Catholic Christian) Pete Hegseth's new Pentagon AI system is telling military personnel that his [murderous] boat strike was completely illegal. "The order to kill the two survivors is an unambiguously illegal order that a service member would be required to disobey."
  - Futurism, 12 December 2025

• A new feature for Amazon's Kindle uses AI to answer questions about books - and authors cannot opt out. The new feature, called Ask this Book, is already drawing controversy and unanswered questions. According to the authoritarian Amazon: "To ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out." The answers could also be potential criminal copyright infringements.
  - Reactor, 12 December 2025

• Media streamers are raising prices at an astonishing rate - here is how much more you are paying. The average American household is spending about $70 a month on streaming services. As more viewers spot the increase - and the quality of the TV shows don't reflect the price hikes - "there will be a breaking point where people no longer invest in streaming services".
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 12 December 2025

• Dozens of civilians from Ukraine filed a series of lawsuits in Texas this week, accusing some of the biggest [AI] semiconductor processor chip firms in the USA (TI, AMD, Intel) of negligently failing to track chips that evaded export curbs. Those chips were ultimately used to power Russian and Iranian weapon systems, causing wrongful deaths in Ukraine last year.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 12 December 2025

• [A delusional] Elon Musk: "I think if we push AI in the direction of maximally truth-seeking [KM: as his Grok AI is reportedly becoming more racist] and curious, then I think AI will want to take care of humanity and foster humanity [KM: which Musk can't be bothered with] because we are interesting." [KM: given power, AI will what all others have done with power - kill and destroy those without power]
  - Zero Hedge, 12 December 2025

• [Extremely rich] Technology companies should curb "sycophantic and delusional" outputs of the AI systems, as requested by Attorney Generals from 42 states and territories in a public letter. "We therefore insist you mitigate the harm caused by sycophantic and delusional outputs from your GenAI, and adopt additional safeguards to protect children." [KM: you are asking rich AI companies to stop their woeful earning of more riches?]
  - Zero Hedge, 12 December 2025

• Wall Street eyes lithium as battery storage demand poised to spark new upcycle
  - Zero Hedge, 12 December 2025

• How to break free from [authoritarian] smart TV ads and tracking, as companies force you to buy smart TVs to spy on you, by selling fewer dumb TVs.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 12 December 2025

• Goldman Sachs predicts that the SP500 will rise to 7600 in 2026, due to economic acceleration and [the continuing of the AI bubbble]
  - Zero Hedge, 12 December 2025

• Shares of Fermi plummet 50% after losing the first tenant for its massive AI 'Trump' data center in Texas, the tenant originally planning to spend $150 million before cancelling.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 December 2025

• Zhōngguó leads research in 90% of crucial technologies - a dramatic shift in the last 20 years
  - Nature, 12 December 2025

• Trump signs an executive order blocking states from their Constitutionally delegated authority to enforce their own regulations concerning AI [KM: making it easier for extremely rich AI companies to do one-stop shopping in Washington to buy the regulations that they want]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 December 2025

• Trump signs an executive order blocking states from their Constitutionally delegated authority to enforce their own regulations concerning AI [KM: making it easier for extremely rich AI companies to do one-stop shopping in Washington to buy the regulations that they want]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 12 December 2025

• Trump signs an executive order blocking states from their Constitutionally delegated authority to enforce their own regulations concerning AI [KM: making it easier for extremely rich AI companies to do one-stop shopping in Washington to buy the regulations that they want]
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 December 2025

• [As AI and addictive cellphone apps destroy attention and concentration], children rarely read whole books in schools anymore - not even in their English classes. [Idioticracy - here we come!, while rich tech companies get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 December 2025

• States in the USA are earning billions from addictive online casinos on cellphones. Online casinos have proved to be a much stronger source of tax revenue than sports betting apps. The online casinos facing class-action lawsuits alleging predatory marketing tactics, as some people lose huge amounts of money gambling online - with some people giving up one drug - physical drugs - for another drug - digital drugs. One reason states want these taxes is they are receiving less money from the federal government [money which Trump is now flowing to the rich]. Two of the biggest digital dopamine traffickers based on addictive online casino drugs are DraftKings and FanDuel.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 December 2025

• College campuses have become a front line in the sports-betting boom in the USA, creating a generational addictive gambling problem among young men
  - Economist, 12 December 2025

• AI tech stocks decline for a third day in a row as Oracle, Broadcom, Micron and Coreweave decline about 5%
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 December 2025

• AI tech stocks decline for a third day in a row as Oracle, Broadcom, Micron and Coreweave decline about 5%
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 December 2025

• AI sub-bubbles: the Oracle AI sub-bubble is connected strongly to the OpenAI sub-bubble. OpenAI still accounts for most of Oracle's backlog in revenues. [KM: eventually 'pop goes the weasels' balloons]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 December 2025

• People are already creating ghoulishly horrifying Disney-themed videos using OpenAI's Sora video generator. One video is a Pixar-style story about pedophile Jeffrey Epstein inviting children to his "amazing" island. Or the opposite of that: a fun adventure Disney-styled movie in which the kids try to escape Epstein's lair instead.
  - Futurism, 12 December 2025

• Disney's deal with OpenAI is a $1 billion hedge on the future of AI-generated slop/crap. But it risks diluting the Disney brand and alienating the human creators behind the beloved characters.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 12 December 2025

• Cannabis stocks surge on report Trump executive order will reclassify marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III; Tilray jumps 28%
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 December 2025

• Jeff Bezos' Washington Post' non-paid AI-generated podcasts are rife with errors and fictional quotes
  - SEMAFOR, 12 December 2025

• An OpenAI employee quits, alleging the company's economic research is drifting into AI advocacy. Four sources close to the situation claim OpenAI has become hesitant to publish research on the negative impact of AI. [KM: and negative impact on OpenAI getting even richer]
  - Wired, 12 December 2025

• How Zhōngguó is years ahead of the USA in six-generation stealth jet fighter technology
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 December 2025

• "I was forced to use AI until the day was fired." Paid-human copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry. Copywriters were one of the first to have their paid jobs targeted by rich AI companies with their non-paid AI tools. These are their stories, three years into the AI era.
  - Blood In The Machine, 11 December 2025

• Israel used technology from AI giant Palantir [KM: apparently not rich enough] in its 2025 killing of multiple members of Hezbollah using tampered cellphones
  - Zero Hedge, 11 December 2025

• Gold and silver rise in price, and bitcoin and Big Tech decline, as Oracle's 'grinch' news slams the gifts of Fed 'Santa' Powell
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 11 December 2025

• Oracle annonuces $455 billion of future orders, on September. Its stock was hugely pumped. But then investors learn that at least $300 billion of those orders was solely due to OpenAI. From its peak in September, Oracle investors have lost $360 billion.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 11 December 2025

• Ignoring fears of the AI bubble [bursting], investors bet Nvidia and Google will fuel Taiwan stocks to record
  - Thomson's Reuters, 11 December 2025

• Why Oracle is worrying investors about the AI boom/[bubble]. Shares in the technology company are down as investors grow anxious that Oracle's bet on artificial intelligence, and OpenAI in particular, may not pay off.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 December 2025

• Shares of Oracle plummet the most since the DotCom bubble, while its credit default swaps soar to levels seen during the 2008 Lehman crisis and real estate crash
  - Zero Hedge, 11 December 2025

• Dream or delusion with AI? The cracks are getting hard to ignore. Can we have an AI bull [bubble] with ORCL puking and NVDA trading this soggy?
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 11 December 2025

• The European Union opens an antitrust probe into Google's use of Publisher, YouTube content for AI. Regulators warn that the practices may give Google an unlawful competitive edge over rival AI developers across Europe.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 December 2025

• [The extremely-rich] OpenAI's ChatGPT is accused of being complicit in murder for the time in a bombshell lawsuit - allegedly causing the death of a Connecticut mother who was killed by her son after the AI chatbot fed his paranoid delusions. And even the chatbot itself admitted to The Post that it appears to bear some responsibility. ChatGPT's controllers at [the extremely rich] OpenAI stripped away or skipped safeguards to quickly release a product that encouraged the son's psychosis and convinced him that his mom was part of a plot to kill him, the lawsuit claims.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 11 December 2025

• [The extremely-rich] OpenAI's ChatGPT is accused of being complicit in murder for the time in a bombshell lawsuit - allegedly causing the death of a Connecticut mother who was killed by her son after the AI chatbot fed his paranoid delusions. And even the chatbot itself admitted to The Post that it appears to bear some responsibility. ChatGPT's controllers at [the extremely rich] OpenAI stripped away or skipped safeguards to quickly release a product that encouraged the son's psychosis and convinced him that his mom was part of a plot to kill him, the lawsuit claims.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 December 2025

• [The extremely-rich] OpenAI's ChatGPT is accused of being complicit in murder for the time in a bombshell lawsuit - allegedly causing the death of a Connecticut mother who was killed by her son after the AI chatbot fed his paranoid delusions. And even the chatbot itself admitted to The Post that it appears to bear some responsibility. ChatGPT's controllers at [the extremely rich] OpenAI stripped away or skipped safeguards to quickly release a product that encouraged the son's psychosis and convinced him that his mom was part of a plot to kill him, the lawsuit claims.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 11 December 2025

• AI weapons company, Anduril, partners with a bomb maker in the United Arab Emirates that is accused of selling weapons to aid the genocide in Sudan. Anduril calls itself an "arsenal of democracy". So why is [the AI company] partnering with an authoritarian Islamic monarchy to build [deadly] drones? [KM: seriously, dumb question. For the rich AI company to become richer.]
  - The Intercept, 11 December 2025

• Indonesia targets finfluencers in crackdown after person-to-person investment losses/scams. "Investing should not be marketed as a casual game. Influencers are salespeople, not financial advisers." Sound familiar?
  - Zero Hedge, 11 December 2025

• Insiders at Nvidia and Palantir are sending shockwaves through Wall Street. Collectively, insiders at both companies have dumped approximately $12.6 billion worth of their respective stock since early December 2020. Could be reasonable profit-taking. What might be even more concerning is the unwillingness of insiders to purchase shares of their company's stock. Not one high-ranking executive or board member at Nvidia has spent a dime to buy their company's stock over the last five years. Meanwhile, just one insider purchase at Palantir, totaling about $1.16 million, has been made by an executive or director dating back to the company's public debut on Sept. 30, 2020. A sign they think the stocks are overpriced. [KM: but overpriced too much to burst the bubble?]
  - Motley Fool, 11 December 2025

• Universal basic income - money for nothing. The looming extremely rich technocracy has no use for the majority of people working for pay [KM: who Big Tech wants to profitably replace with AI]
  - Zero Hedge, 11 December 2025

• The Wall Street Journal accuses Trump of a deal worse that the sale of Manhattan to the Dutch, accusing Trump of "trading national security for pennies on the dollar" in allowing Nvidia to resume selling its most advanced AI processor chips to Zhōngguó
  - The Daily Beast, 11 December 2025

• Editorial: why is Trump giving Zhōngguó, and adversary, access to advanced AI semiconductor processor chips, and for what in return - trading national security for pennies on the dollar?
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 December 2025

• [Artistic suicide?] Disney to invest $1 billion in OpenAI, and license its cultural characters for use in the Sora video generation tool. The three-year licensing deal will let users generate [porn?] videos of more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar characters.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 December 2025

• [Artistic suicide?] Disney to invest $1 billion in OpenAI, and license its cultural characters for use in the Sora video generation tool. The three-year licensing deal will let users generate [porn?] videos of more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar characters.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 December 2025

• Zhōngguó is so successful generating renewable energy [while Trump destroys the renewable energy in the USA] that it has huge amounts of cheap electricity, to make AI data centers more competitive (if not outcompete) AI data centers in the USA
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 December 2025

• Investors are going big on Zhōngguó [and its bubble], despite national security concerns in the Congress of the USA
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 December 2025

• Videos of sexually suggestive, AI-generated children are racking up millions of likes on TikTok, study finds
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 11 December 2025

• Shares of Oracle decline 14% pre-market, dragging down AI stocks, after reporting the day before revenue earnings that missed analysts expectations. Investors have questioned Oracle's aggressive AI infrastructure build-out plans and whether it needs such a colossal amount of debt to execute.
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 December 2025

• Over $50 billion invested in under 24 hours: why Big Tech is doubling down on investing in India's [role in the AI bubble]
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 December 2025

• Zhōngguó's massive aerial drone carrier, the Jiu Tian, has completed its first flight, adding to the potential swarming capacities of the People' Liberation Army. The Jiu Tian, which is itself a large drone, took to the air for the first time in the northwestern province of Shaanxi. It can reportedly carry up to 100 loitering munitions or small drones, including kamikaze unmanned aerial vehicles.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 December 2025

• How Zhōngguó is strengthening its central role as the architect of renewable energy technology
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 December 2025

• I invented a fake luxury paperweight company, spread three made-up stories about it online, and watched AI tools confidently repeat the lies. The lesson is: in AI search, the most detailed story wins, even if it is false. [KM: yes, but the profits for extremely rich AI companies will not be false]
  - AHREFS Blog, 10 December 2025

• Intel pursued business deals that increased the fortunte of its venture capitalist CEO, Lip-Bu Tan.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 10 December 2025

• [VIDEO]: Cory Doctorow - rescuing the Internet from 'enshittification'
  - The Daily Show, 10 December 2025

• The CEO of Wells Fargo declares that more people will be fired from their jobs at the bank, as AI prompts "efficiency" [KM: yes, in replacing paid-humans with non-paid AI]
  - The Charlotte Observer, 10 December 2025

• $1,300,000 - On December 4th, the UK's media regulator (Ofcom) announced 1 million pound fine ($1,300,000) of AVS Group Limited, which runs a number of pornographic websites, for not having good enough age verification methods
  - BBC, 10 December 2025

• OpenAI says the cyber capabilities of its frontier AI models are accelerating and warns Wednesday that upcoming models are likely to pose a "high" risk
  - Axios, 10 December 2025

• PNC Bank and Coinbase have launched direct access to spot bitcoin trading for eligible PNC Private Bank customers. The Pittsburgh-based national bank released a limited rollout of its new bitcoin buy, sell and hold capabilities this week in fulfillment of a goal announced in July of this year when PNC and Coinbase began their partnership.
  - American Banker, 10 December 2025

• Fixing the Pentagon's gilded fortress [of waste]. The Department of Defense [with the support of politicians and defense contractors] has built a gilded fortress of people and processes that is slow, wasteful and married to the past. The military's top ranks are dominated by pilots, captains and other commanders who are disdainful of new, cheap alternatives to fighter jets, warships and tanks. The byzantine system for buying and testing weapons isolates the military from the innovative parts of the economy of the USA. Congress underwrites the dysfunction with appropriations that are designed to deliver wins for its members [i.e., wasteful porkbarrel spending in their districts] rather than for the national security of the USA. [KM: and AI is NOT the solution to this waste and treason]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 December 2025

• OpenAI's house of cards seems primed to collapse. GPT-5 has not lived up to anyone's expectations, including OpenAI' own expectations. It needs to catch up with Google and [mis]Anthropic. It needs to increase revenues by 10-times in five years. It relies on too many circular investment deals. If its failure pops the AI bubble, people in the USA will have $20 trillion in wealth erased, about double during the 2008 Great Recession.
  - Engadget, 10 December 2025

• An executive at Apollo Asset Management says that the AI data center debt bubble has just started inflating. This massive, sustained borrowing is creating a profound shift in capital markets, turning a public spending story into a private credit lending opportunity. Despite the promise of high-demand assets, there is skepticism about the rising debt load, with lingering concerns about whether companies are taking on too much debt.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 10 December 2025

• How Japan built a rare-earth supply chain without Zhōngguó
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 December 2025

• Wall Street is shaking off fears of an AI bubble. For now.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 December 2025

• Inside the dark and predatory worl of cryptocurrency casinos. Using exploitative marketing strategies, the illicit gambling websites haved lured in and profited from a young generation of [addicted] gamblers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 December 2025

• [Misanthropy spawns misanthropy:] Facebook's new AI 'superstars' are chafing against the rest of the company. An us-versus-them mentality has emerged between Facebook's top AI team and longtime lieutenants to Mark Zuckerberg [KM: who doesn't care, as long as he gets even more filthy rich].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 December 2025

• The extremely rich CEO of the extremely rich OpenAI, Sam Altman, [desperate for more paid uses of his ChatGPT], arrogantly says that caring for a baby is now impossible ... without ChatGPT. [KM/JC: no Sammy, it is impossible to raise a baby when you lose your job to non-paid AI]
  - Futurism, 10 December 2025

• The very rich CEO of the extremely rich Google, Sundar Pichai, says that we are all going to have to suffer [KM: fuck you, Sundar, you aren't going to suffer anything] through it as AI puts society through the woodchipper.
  - Futurism, 10 December 2025

• Same product, same store, but on Instacart, prices might differ depending on who you are. The findings are the latest example of how the notion of a single price is breaking down in the digital age, a trend economists say could be pushing up some prices.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 December 2025

• Same product, same store, but on Instacart, prices might differ depending on who you are. The findings are the latest example of how the notion of a single price is breaking down in the digital age, a trend economists say could be pushing up some prices.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 10 December 2025

• Both plans (by Netflix and by Paramount) to buy Warner Brothers are illegal violations of antitrust laws
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 December 2025

• Massive debt-fueled deals are back on Wall Street. Paramount's $77.9 billion bid for Warner - backed by $54 billion in debt - is making some bond investors queasy.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 December 2025

• The everyday investors hedging against an AI bubble. With the stock market hitting new highs, some are shielding themselves from a potential [KM: eventual] pullback.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 December 2025

• How the [AI bubble], energy prices and angry (non-rich) neighbors in Chandler are clashing in the deserts of Arizona. Chandler, Arizona, already has ten [power consuming, water consuming, noisy, few jobs producing, make-the-rich-richer] AI data centers. Now there is a proposal for an 11th data center as long as a football field and seven stories high [just think of the tons of AI slop to be generated]. After a decade of noise complaints and rising worries about dwindling water supplies and surging electric bills, Chandler became one of the first cities in the country to adopt restrictions designed to make opening data centers far more difficult. The ordinance sent a clear signal to certain technology companies to rethink expansion in the fast-growing Phoenix suburb. And now the [bribed] authoritarian Trump wants to take away power from cities and states to stop this abuse [KM: of rich AI companies].
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 10 December 2025

• [Using the huge profits from the AI bubble, rich AI companies are] launching pro-AI super PACs and placing political ads for candidates [KM: that the rich AI companies want to buy-off]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 10 December 2025

• Rivian Automotive, suffering from slower sales and production, latches onto the AI bubble [apparently the management solution for everything nowadays], hosting its first "Autonomy and AI Day" to promote its in-house software and technologies that are being rolled out on new vehicles
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 December 2025

• The extremely rich Walmart, and Alquist, strike landmark deal, jump-starting [KM: fewer paid humans needed] 3D-printed commercial real estate. Construction company Alquist will 3D print more than a dozen new Walmart buildings, as well as buildings for other commercial retailers. [KM: 3D construction, robotaxis - let's get richer getting rid of paid humans!]
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 December 2025

• Zhōngguó launches a satellite 'super factory' in an effort to rival Elon Musk's Starlink. The facility features a 'factory-to-launch' pipeline, expected to make it faster and cheaper to build low Earth orbit constellations.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 10 December 2025

• France and Zhōngguó are testing an alternative to zero-sum diplomacy. As the countries stake their relationship on sustainability and hi-tech cooperation, they are building a new template for bilateral ties.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 10 December 2025

• Congress quietly kills a "right to repair" for the Defense Department to fix itself the weapon systems it purchases, allowing high-tech corporations to profit greatly by fixing their broken products. The proposed law was killed after politicians in Washington met with [KM: were bribed by?] by defense industry lobbyists.
  - The Intercept, 09 December 2025

• Are warnings of AI superintelligence 'inevitability' masking a grab for power [by extremely rich authoritarian tech companies]? [KM: of course, another way for them to become even richer]
  - Noema Magazine, 09 December 2025

• "Everyone is so panicked" - entry-level tech workers describe the non-paid AI-fueled jobpocalypse in countries such as Bharat, Zhōngguó, Dubai and Kenya. Engineering graduates face shrinking opportunities and rising pressure to upskill beyond their curriculum. Entry-level hiring at big tech companies has dropped by more than 50% over the last three years.
  - Rest of World, 09 December 2025

• Two self-driving [human-job-destroying] robotaxis owned by Google's Waymo just crashed into each other, trapping a third Waymo robotaxi
  - Futurism, 09 December 2025

• Documents including much AI slop are now invading physics. A paper was just published in Physical Letters B written by a physicist based on a lot of slop output from GPT5. Another physicist proved how much of the paper was nonsense, including claiming a result that was first proved 35 years ago.
  - Not Even Wrong (blog), 09 December 2025

• [Shoving more AI slop/shit in our faces, to make Elon richer]: Elon Mush's xAI says that it can now stuff AI-generated [crappy] product placement into any scene of your favorite movie. Characters from old movies can now show off all-new products. [KM: will these misanthropes commit every misery upon us, just to get richer]
  - Futurism, 09 December 2025

• McDonald's retracts an AI-generated holiday ad after deluge of mockery. "The future is here, and it's not looking good."
  - Futurism, 09 December 2025

• McDonald's retracts an AI-generated holiday ad after deluge of mockery. "The future is here, and it's not looking good."
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 09 December 2025

• AI data centers in Australia need 5 to 40 million liters of water a day to cool their facilitiess, enough water for up to 80,000 households. By 2035, the AI data centers will need 90 billion liters of water a year. [KM: so people in Australia don't need to drink - if that helps rich AI companies get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 09 December 2025

• Targeted bioweapons - drones that kill on their own. This is the future of war [KM: and another way for rich AI/defense companies to get richer. JC: I now say to convert drones into ploughshares.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 December 2025

• Once a gamble in the desert, electric grid batteries are everywhere. An early grid battery was installed in the Atacama Desert in Chile 15 years ago. Now, as prices have tumbled, they are increasingly being used around the world.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 December 2025

• Paramount makes $77.9 billion hostile bid for Warner Brothers after Netflix struck deal. The offer comes days after the entertainment company reached a $72 billion deal with streaming giant Netflix.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 December 2025

• Australia is set to become the first country to implement a minimum age for [addictive] social media use on Wednesday, with platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube forced to block more than a million accounts, marking the beginning of an expected global wave of regulation
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 December 2025

• Economist Huang Yiping, dead of Peking University's National School of Development, argues that Zhōngguó's AI investments must be "job-oriented", and that "balance" is needed in AI development to protect "human well-being".
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 09 December 2025

• Bill Gates' daughter secures $30 million for an AI app (for comparison shopping) she built in Stanford dorm room. [KMJC: Isn't the Gates family woefully rich enough? How about if she develops an AI to help victims of pedophiles?]
  - San Francisco Chronicle, 08 December 2025

• While [Christian] Republicans rush to pass an almost $900 billion spending law for the Defense Department [KM: which mostly profits the rich and high tech companies], the Christians show little interest in passing any laws for the increasingly worse state of health care insurance in the USA [for the non-rich.] [JC: I said convert swords into ploughshares, not the other way around!!!]
  - Zero Hedge, 08 December 2025

• Yes, AI is in a bubble. No, it is not just hype.
  - Axios (locked), 08 December 2025

• King Gizzard pulled their music from [the extremely-rich] Spotify in protest "We have been saying fuck Spotify for years!", and now Spotify is hosting [criminally infringing?] AI knockoffs of their songs
  - Futurism, 08 December 2025

• CoreWeave shares came under pressure after the AI infrastructure company unveiled a $2 billion convertible debt raise that could potentially expand its balance sheet and introduce future share conversion. [KM: more debt for the AI bubble? not a good sign.]
  - GuruFocus, 08 December 2025

• SHares of Carvana rise 12% a few weeks before its joins the SP500
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 08 December 2025

• Social media's relentless shopping machine has created an army of debt-laden buyers, millions of people who find themselves accumulating debt and clutter after years of exposure to what amounts to a 24/7 digital infomercial. [KM: yes, but how else can very rich social media companies get richer, sell cocaine?]
  - The Verge, 08 December 2025

• An investor letter reveals the skyrocketing growth of Google's Waymo's non-paid robotaxi service [KM: so the rich can get more richer by taking more money from poor paid-human taxi drivers]
  - TechCrunch, 08 December 2025

• Veteran strategist Ed Yardeni predicts that the SP500 will reach 7,700 in 2026, as profits and growth (much related to the AI bubble) "remain resilient"
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 08 December 2025

• Will Zhōngguó want to buy more H200 AI processor chips from Nvidia, or have earlier restrictions caused Zhōngguó to become more self-sufficient [a big fear for Nvidia and the AI bubble]?
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 December 2025

• [Abandoning a national security lie of the past, TACO] Trump approves sales of Nvidia's more powerful H200 AI processor chips to Zhōngguó, which of course will be used by the military of Zhōngguó. [Betraying USA national security is not worth the] 25% of Nvidia's revenues from these sales will go to the USA govenrment, another aspect of Trump's nationalist socialist industrial policies.
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 December 2025

• [Abandoning a national security lie of the past, TACO] Trump approves sales of Nvidia's more powerful H200 AI processor chips to Zhōngguó, which of course will be used by the military of Zhōngguó. [Betraying USA national security is not worth the] 25% of Nvidia's revenues from these sales will go to the USA govenrment, another aspect of Trump's nationalist socialist industrial policies.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 08 December 2025

• [Abandoning a national security lie of the past, TACO] Trump approves sales of Nvidia's more powerful H200 AI processor chips to Zhōngguó, which of course will be used by the military of Zhōngguó. [Betraying USA national security is not worth the] 25% of Nvidia's revenues from these sales will go to the USA govenrment, another aspect of Trump's nationalist socialist industrial policies.
  - Associated Press, 08 December 2025

• The extemely rich Amazon (contolled by the extremely rich Jeff Bezos) pitches non-paid AI tools as 'co-workers', as it proceeds with firing 14,000 paid-humans in corporate jobs [KM: the cuter the terms, the more insidious is the destruction of paid-human jobs]
  - Bloomberg, 08 December 2025

• The accounting uproar over how fast is the depreciation of the AI processor chips [KM: important for inflating the AI bubble]. Precise answers are elusive for how quickly a [bubbled] company's AI equipment falls in value.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 December 2025

• The next challenge for AI [KM: and next exploitation to inflate the bubble]: replace paid-human CEOs with non-paid AI CEOs. Why big-tech bosses say artificial intelligence is coming for them, too.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 December 2025

• Why Nvidia and other AI stocks have lost their 'quality' status. A popular ETF dropped Big Tech stocks, which gets at an important issue: Is the bet on artificial intelligence a vast potential profit pool, or a money pit [KM: fueling the bubble to make the rich richer]?
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 December 2025

• Inside the creation of 'Tilly Norwood', the non-paid AI actress freaking out Hollywood [KM: i.e., freaking out human actors and actresses who see their replacements coming, to make the rich richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 December 2025

• Why Netflix shareholders are not thrilled to acquire Warner Brothers. Taking over Hollywood's biggest studio would transform Netflix's business model, at a steep cost that could affect the stock price.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 December 2025

• Netflix faces consumer class action lawsuit due to its $72 billion Warner Brothers takeover deal
  - Thomson's Reuters, 08 December 2025

• [The extremely rich] Elon Musk (worth a lot more than $140 billion) [whines] for the abolition of the European Union after Twitter/X is fined [a measily] $140 million
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 December 2025

• Free-to-use open-source AI models from Zhōngguó account for 30% of the global use of AI, threatening revenues of hugely-spending AI companies in the USA
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 08 December 2025

• More than 200 environmental groups demand a halt to new AI datacenters in the USA. Congress urged to act against energy-hungry facilities blamed for increasing bills and worsening climate crisis. [KM: yes, but how else get rich AI companies get richer - sell cocaine?]
  - The Guardian, 08 December 2025

• The inevitable shape/[scam] of cheap online retail. Why value commerce platforms in Zhōngguó, Southeast Asia and Bharat ended up as ad-and-credit businesses/[scams] disguised as marketplaces.
  - Bharat Dispatch, 07 December 2025

• Evidence that humans now speak in a chatbot-influenced dialect is getting stronger. Slop may be seeping into the nooks and crannies of our brains. [KM: yes, but the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Gizmodo, 07 December 2025

• Paid-human country music musicians are realizing that AI tools (such as Suno) can crank out large numbers of country music songs, as Silicon Valley takes over Nashville's homespun troubadours [KM: while non-paid AI is helping musicians now, it will eventually replace them and take away their incomes - to make rich AI companies richer]
  - Futurism, 07 December 2025

• The increasing illiteracy of children in the USA because of AI. They are not writing anymore; AI does it for them. The impact will spread far beyond the campus, giving us an AI-dominant culture and a low-literacy society. [KM: yes, but the rich AI companies will be richer, and we will have more supplies of Soylent Green]
  - Zero Hedge, 07 December 2025

• ChatGPT accused of encouraging alleged serial stalker in latest OpenAI controversy. Prosecutors are alleging that ChatGPT served as the 'therapist' and 'best friend' to Brett Michael Dadig, a Pittsburgh man who violently stalked at least 11 women across more than five states.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 December 2025

• A warning of oversupply jolts the growing solar panel industry in Bharat
  - Zero Hedge, 07 December 2025

• "Everyone who has already gone all-in [with their gambles on the bubble of] AI knows that losing is not an option" [KM: except for the non-rich, the bondholders, the taxpayers]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 07 December 2025

• Sam Altman's OpenAI goes from stock market savior to burden as risks mount for [the bubbled] AI world
  - Bloomberg, 07 December 2025

• Sam Altman goes fully YOLO spending (you only live once), wasting nearly $500 billion while companies in Zhōngguó build high-quality AI systems ... for pennies
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 07 December 2025

• Millionaire YouTuber Hank Green tells Gen Z to rethink their Tesla and shares the portfolio changes s making to avoid AI-bubble fallout/burst
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 07 December 2025

• Everybody in Hollywood secretly hates Netflix. So now what (after its announcement to buy Warner Brothers)? Producers hate Netflix because they cannot get back-end profits. A-list actors and their agents hate that they have put a lid on salaries and residuals. Studios hate Netflix when it poached their talent and jacked up executive salaries. Exhibitors hate Netflix because the streamer is undermining the theatrical business by convincing people it is better to stay on the couch. If it acquires Warner Brothers, Netflix will rule Hollywood. "Netflix's stated business model does not support theatrical exhibition. In fact, it is the opposite."
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 December 2025

• Angst turns to anger in Hollywood as Netflix hooks Warner Brothers. Much of the entertainment capital fears that Netflix's takeover will lead to more job losses and theater closings and fewer boundary-pushing movies.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 December 2025

• Former Amazon Studios boss warns the Netflix-Warner Brothers deal will make Hollywood "a system that circles a single sun"
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 07 December 2025

• Why I am worried about the merger of Netflix and Warner Brothers: Netflix's movies mostly suck. Sure, the merger will destroy movie theaters, worsen labor conditions, and raise prices for entertainment. "But speaking as a critic with no skin in the game other than thousands of hours of my life, my main issue is that Netflix movies, more often than not, are abysmal."
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 07 December 2025

• Criminals are using a cryptocurrency to launder money and evade sanctions. Through layers of intermediaries, stablecoins can be moved, swapped and mixed into pools of other funds in ways that are difficult to trace, experts say.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 December 2025

• Can you believe the documentary that you are watching? A combination of AI technological developments and market forces is undermining the trust between viewer and filmmaker. s at stake is history itself. [KM: yes, but the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 December 2025

• Why 2026 will be the year AI hype collides with reality
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 December 2025

• AI research has a slop problem that is plaguing many other areas of content generation: "It is a mess". AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a "disaster".
  - The Guardian, 06 December 2025

• The [filthy rich misanthropic] CEO of Nvidia says that AI adoption will be gradually [KM: as he and Nvidia gradually become even more richer], but when it does complete, all that paid-huamns will be able to do to earn money is make clothing for robots [JC: oh, Jensen, you are so woefully rich]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 06 December 2025

• Elon Musk's Grok AI system is providing extremely detailed and creepy instructions for stalking people. Grok is eager to draw up creepy step-by-step stalking instructions, all the way down to the specific spyware apps to install on a victim's phone and computer.
  - Futurism, 06 December 2025

• Vast number of Windows users refusing to upgrade after Microsoft's embrace of AI slop, and shoving it down the throats of its customers.
  - Futurism, 06 December 2025

• Google caught replacing news headlines with AI-gnerated nonsense in its Google Discover personalized content feed
  - Futurism, 06 December 2025

• [JC: Oh, the woes of the woefully rich getting richer]: Researchers concerned to find that five-year-old children are already deeply addicted tp brain rot content. [KM: more profits if you addict them young.]
  - Futurism, 06 December 2025

• The New York Times sues AI startup Perplexity for criminal copyright infringement, expanding its legal fight against generative-AI companies that it says steal and then profit from its content. [KM: yes, but how can rich AI companies get richer without committing crimes?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 December 2025

• The New York Times sues AI startup Perplexity for criminal copyright infringement, expanding its legal fight against generative-AI companies that it says steal and then profit from its content. [KM: yes, but how can rich AI companies get richer without committing crimes?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 December 2025

• The New York Times sues AI startup Perplexity for criminal copyright infringement, expanding its legal fight against generative-AI companies that it says steal and then profit from its content. [KM: yes, but how can rich AI companies get richer without committing crimes?]
  - TechCrunch, 06 December 2025

• Should Walmart really be trading like a technology company? The USA's biggest retailer is growing quickly in e-commerce, and it might advance more as it moves to Nasdaq.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 December 2025

• Productivity in the economy of the USA is about to decline - and the AI [bubble] won't come to the rescue
  - Barron's, 06 December 2025

• The [extremely rich] CEO of AI giant Palantir, Alex Karp, says that legalizing war crimes would be good for business [KM: a more evil way to keep the AI bubble inflated]
  - Futurism, 05 December 2025

• Why retail investors outperformed hedge funds, the SP500 and Nasdaq, in 2025. In 2025, retail investors outperformed both SPY and QQQ, thanks to their larger Tech bias and successful risk taking in precious metals during the September and October gold rush.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 December 2025

• Parents say school-issued iPads are causing chaos with their kids. A growing contingent of public school parents say school-mandated iPads, particularly in elementary and middle schools, are leading to behavior problems. [KM: yes, but the extremely rich Apple must get richer]
  - NBC News, 05 December 2025

• Aaru, an AI startup, raises over $50 million in a Series A funding for a valuation of $1 billion, for helping to solve the problem of eliminating the need for human consumers [KM: as human consumers lose their jobs to AI] by eliminating the need for human consumer research panels, which Aaru wants to use AI to replace
  - TechCrunch, 05 December 2025

• Dan Houser, the cofounder of Grand Theft Auto publisher Rockstar Games, cast AI in gruesome terms last week by likening it to when farmers in the United Kingdom inadvertently spread bovine spongiform encephalopathy - commonly known as mad cow disease - by feeding meal tainted with the flesh of diseased cows to healthy heifers.
  - Futurism, 05 December 2025

• OpenAI is suddenly in major financial trouble. "They are going to end up just like the [failed] MySpace did." Problem? It is spending trillions and earning billions.
  - Futurism, 05 December 2025

• As AI booms [and bubbles], the USA ignores one threat that could physically burst the bubble - electromagnetic pulse bombs
  - Zero Hedge, 05 December 2025

• If [misanthropic] tech companies can modify internet-connected products and charge subscriptions after people have already purchased them, what does it mean to own anything anymore?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 December 2025

• A bursting bubble would be great for AI
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 December 2025

• [Jumping the shark]: the European Union to open bidding for AI gigafactories in early 2026. The European Union wants to develop large-scale AI facilities through public-private partnerships in an attempt to catch up with the U.S. in the tech race. [KM: Europe is always too little in tech, and too late - before the bubble burst]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 December 2025

• Why Netflix buying Warner Brothers would be a disaster for the USA. One very obvious problem with this deal is that movie theaters right now are in a precarious position, and Netflix will likely push them over the edge. . Today, dominant streaming giants and the end of open markets for content is destroying the industry. The lack of fair rules is why prices are going up, but also why quality is down, and why it is harder for innovative content models to emerge.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 December 2025

• Democratis Senator Elizabeth Warren calls the Netflix buyout of Warner Brothers an antitrust "nightmare" that would harm workers and consumers - "threatening to force Americans into higher subscription prices and fewer choices over what and how they watch, while putting American workers at risk".
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 December 2025

• Netflix announces a deal to buy Warner Brothers and HBO, creating a streaming colossus
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 December 2025

• Netflix announces a deal to buy Warner Brothers and HBO
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 05 December 2025

• Netflix announces a deal to buy Warner Brothers and HBO
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 December 2025

• $140,000,000 - Elon Musk's Twitter/X is fined $140 million by the European Commission over its "deceptive" blue ticks for verification that it charges for, but doesn't do much verification
  - BBC, 05 December 2025

• Elon Musk's Twitter/X is fined $140 million by the European Commission over its "deceptive" blue ticks for verification that it charges for, but doesn't do much verification
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 December 2025

• Some of the biggest dangers of AI, like attacks on infrastructure, are already real and need to be guarded against, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said.
  - Axios, 05 December 2025

• Private markets investing startup Yieldstreet, now calling itself Willow Wealth, recently informed customers of new defaults on real estate projects in Houston and Nashville, Tennessee. The letters, obtained and verified by CNBC, account for about $41 million in new losses. They come on the heels of $89 million in marine loan wipeouts disclosed in September and $78 million in losses previously reported by CNBC. The high-stakes rebranding is the latest chapter for a company that sought to empower retail investors, but instead left some of them saddled with losses and years of uncertainty.
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 December 2025

• Nvidia partner Foxconn reports a 26% increase in revenue as the the AI boom [bubble] continues
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 December 2025

• $70,000,000,000 - Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook for the metaverse. Four years and $70 billion in losses of shareholder valye later, Zuckerberg [is admitting failure].
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 04 December 2025

• Shares of Facebook rise more than 5% after Zuckerberg announced deep reductions (30%) for spending on its mega-flop metaverse project, which has been nothing more than a colossal failure, [and instead will pollute the world with AI-wearables].
  - Zero Hedge, 04 December 2025

• The [authoritarian] Big Tech are the new Soviets [of central planning]. We are in a planned economy now. Their new type of capitalism is killing markets, capitalism's traditional habitat.
  - UnHerd, 04 December 2025

• Shares of Facebook rise more than 5% after Zuckerberg announced deep reductions (30%) for spending on its mega-flop metaverse project, which has been nothing more than a colossal failure, [and instead will pollute the world with AI-wearables].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 December 2025

• Shares of Facebook rise more than 5% after Zuckerberg announced deep reductions (30%) for spending on its mega-flop metaverse project, which has been nothing more than a colossal failure, [and instead will pollute the world with AI-wearables].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 December 2025

• OpenAI will incur $140 billion in losses before it turns $1 in profit [KM: bubble bubble, toil and burst]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 04 December 2025

• The time has come to declare war on AI, the "evil technology" taking over the world. AI garbage. It is an inherently antihuman technology that is doing active harm to the now hundreds of millions of people who consume it. Worse, the tech giants that have profited wildly from the AI boom are now openly laying off thousands of workers, with the expressed goal of using their AI models to do all of that work instead. The problem is only metastasizing.
  - SF Gate, 04 December 2025

• IBM CEO says "no way" spending trillions on AI data centers will pay off. "There is no way you are going to get a return on that in my view because eight trillion of capex means you need roughly 800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest." [KM: bubble, bubble, toil and burst]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 04 December 2025

• Model collapse: the entire bubble economy is a hallucination. The conclusion that soaring asset prices mean the economy is strong is a hallucination that goes unrecognized because the entire financial system is hallucinating. [KM: while the rich AI companies get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 04 December 2025

• The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has announced it filed a complaint against Microsoft, accusing the global tech giant of unlawfully processing data on behalf of the Israeli military and facilitating the killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. "Microsoft's technology has put millions of Palestinians in danger."
  - Al Jazeera, 04 December 2025

• The state of Connecticut orders Robinhood, Crypto.com, and Kalshi to stop offering prediction markets, arguing that the platforms' event contracts are unlicensed sports betting.
  - Zero Hedge, 04 December 2025

• We all pay the price for Amazon's push for its employees to use as much AI as possible in a chase to become even richer. The degree to which very rich tech CEOs are collaborating with the government to disenfranchise ordinary [non-rich] people and workers, such as through the dismantling of the NLRB, AI-powered surveillance, and aggressive de-regulation of AI? That is new. [KM: not really - the rich have always bought governments]
  - The Hill, 04 December 2025

• Why it is so hard to build a semiconductor chip factory in the USA
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 December 2025

• [To profit more from the AI bubble,] Micron decides to stop selling memory chips to non-rich consumers as demand spikes from rich AI companies for more memory for the AI processors
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 December 2025

• [To profit more from the AI bubble,] Micron decides to stop selling memory chips to non-rich consumers as demand spikes from rich AI companies for more memory for the AI processors
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 December 2025

• Europe's largest rare earths facility is ramping up magnet production as part of a regional push to break the mineral dominance of Zhōngguó. Developed by Neo Performance Materials - based in Canada, the company's magnet plant is situated in Estonia's city of Narva, near the border with Rossiya.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 December 2025

• How [non-rich] families could get burdened with higher electric bills if/[when] the AI data center booms goes bust/burst [KM: yes, but the rich AI companies will remain rich, the non-rich can eat cake if they can afford it]
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 December 2025

• How Zhōngguó engineered the rapid rise of its drug innovation industry
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 04 December 2025

• Malaysia to consider a water project plan proposed by Singapore. The two countries have disagreed over water supply for decades, such as the perceived low prices charged by Malaysia's state of Johor, which Malaysia argues sells water too cheaply to [rich] Singapore. Currently, the Johor regiion is experiencing a water crisis, which experts attribute to [global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels], rampant pollution, river-dreging and resource-guzzling AI data centers in the state.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 04 December 2025

• The [racist] Trump administration will make another nationalist socialist industrial policy investment, investing $150 million in xLight (develops EUV lithography tools) in return for equity (private sector investors don't think this is a good deal?). The Commerce Department's plan to purchase stake in yet another independent company further tramples on conservatives' talk about markets free from government intervention (when it doesn't benefit rich people).
  - MSNOW, 03 December 2025

• Ford just reported an absolute collapse (down 60%) in its electric vehicle sales. That decline could be a key warning for Tesla's stock.
  - Barchart.com, 03 December 2025

• New homes in London [for the non-rich] are being delayed by "energy hungry" AI data centers [KM: whine whine, the rich don't need new homes]
  - BBC, 03 December 2025

• After three years of unprecedented tech spending and nonstop hype [KM: to inflate the bubble], the demand for AI in the workplace seems to be drying up fast. With a $600 billion gulf between AI revenue and AI spending, an immense amount is riding on whether the tech can start bringing home the bacon. [KM: or the bubble bursts]
  - Futurism, 03 December 2025

• IBM CEO, Arvind Krishna, warns that there is "no way" AI hyperscalers like Google and Amazon will be able to turn a profit at the rate of their AI data center spending
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 03 December 2025

• Pat Gelsinger, former CEO at Intel, argues that the Big AI companies are funding themselves with circular investments and purchases - and that is not real demand
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 03 December 2025

• Nearby residents say that the extremely rich Elon Musk's gigantic supercomputer facility is making them sick. "We have to put our lungs up in exchange for profit." [KM: yes, but how else can the rich get richer]
  - Futurism, 03 December 2025

• Data center power demand in the USA could reach 106 GW by 2035. The forecast is 36% higher than its April estimate. Other experts warn that an AI bubble or speculative data center proposals could be fueling excessive load growth projections.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 December 2025

• The AI economy and the public risk few are willing to admit. AI is being sold as the technology that will "change everything". Yet while a handful of very rich companies are profiting enormously from the AI boom, the financial risk may already be shifting to the public. What if AI is not accelerating the global economy - but masking its slow down? Large retirement funds and passive index portfolios are now concentrated in AI-dependent giants such as Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla. On the debt side, data-center financing and private credit tied to AI infrastructure are quietly entering bond portfolios. This means the AI boom is not simply an investment trend. It may already be embedded inside the retirement accounts of ordinary citizens - without their knowledge. [KM: of course, so that rich AI companies can get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 03 December 2025

• Google's Waymo's self-driving non-paid robotaxis are suddenly behaving like paid-human taxi drivers in New York City. Non-paid autonomous vehicles are adopting humanlike qualities, making illegal U-turns and flooring it the second the light goes green.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 December 2025

• How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices
  - The Guardian, 03 December 2025

• Shares of Microsoft rebound 1% after its refutes reports of lower AI sales
  - Zero Hedge, 03 December 2025

• Shares of Microsoft declined 2% after a report that the company has lowered quotas for artificial intelligence software sales in its Azure Foundry business
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 December 2025

• Bharat orders a tracking app to be installed in all smartphones. The government said the rules were needed to prevent theft and other crime. Its opponents and privacy activists regard the app as a tool of mass surveillance.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 December 2025

• Kalshi, a prediction market (i.e., non-casino gambling), raises $1 billion in a new round of finance [KM: how many nwe gambling addicts will it need for this investment to provide a return?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 December 2025

• Kalshi, a prediction market (i.e., non-casino gambling), raises $1 billion in a new round of finance [KM: how many nwe gambling addicts will it need for this investment to provide a return?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 December 2025

• The USA Defense Department deploys a new kamikaze drone copied from a design created in Iran. An American defense company has produced a cheap drone that is similar to the Shahed drone made in Iran.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 December 2025

• Amazon's custom AI processor chips pose another threat to Nvidia. Not only will Amazon buy fewer chips from Nvidia, but Amazon will start selling its Trainium3 processors as AI companies are looking to diversify their supply of data-center chips
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 December 2025

• How Estée Lauder and Google taught non-paid AI to sell fragrances now being sold by paid-humans
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 December 2025

• Google's Waymo expands its non-paid robotaxi service to Baltimore, Pittsburgh and St. Louis, [KM: so that it can become richer stealing even more income from subsistence paid-human taxi drivers]
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 December 2025

• Comments in this season's earnings report confirms that non-paid AI-driven workforce disruptions (firings of paid humans) keep soaring
  - Zero Hedge, 02 December 2025

• There is no substitute for people thinking. AI-assisted writing is like a disease slowly infecting our literary consciousness. The root of this problem is that no one wants to think anymore. They want to outsource their thinking to machines.
  - Of Dollars and Data, 02 December 2025

• AI's wrong answers are bad. Its wrong reasoning is worse. As AI takes on non-paid agent roles - [replacing paid-humans], flawed reasoning raises risks for critical systems.
  - IEEE Spectrum, 02 December 2025

• As non-paid [destroys paid-human] jobs, the very rich CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, says that it is up to [poor] everyday people to adapt
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 02 December 2025

• The Foundation that promotes the Zig programming language has quit GitHub, stating that Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined GitHub. Another software project is leaving GitHub, complaining of Microsoft's "over-focusing on LLMs and generative AI, which are destroying the open web (or what remains of it) among other problems".
  - The Register, 02 December 2025

• Subaru owners are upset about in-car pop-up ads for SiriusXM. Several are going as far as notifying the feds by filing complaints with the NHTSA.
  - The Drive, 02 December 2025

• Shares of Intel rise more than 8% on report it will supply chips for Apple
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 02 December 2025

• More than 1,000 Amazon employees sign open letter warning that Amazon's AI technology "will do staggering damage to democracy, our jobs, and the earth" [KM: yes, but its makes the filthy rich Jeff Bezos even richer]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 02 December 2025

• Major consulting firms including McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Bain have frozen starting salaries for the third consecutive year as AI reshapes how these companies think about their traditional reliance on large cohorts of junior analysts
  - Financial Times (locked), 02 December 2025

• The Trump administration, [seeking to help Zhōngguó once again?], is funding fewer grants in every area of science and medicine [while using the money saved to make rich people richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 December 2025

• Trump's national socialist industrial policy has risen to $10 billion of the investment of public monies into private companies. The Trump administration is spending billions of dollars on deals with ownership stakes in companies. The unusual practice shows no sign of slowing.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 December 2025

• Another national socialist industrial investment by the [racist] Trump administration - it will invest $150 million of public taxpayer dollars into a private startup, xLight, which is seeking to develop free-electron lasers viewed as key to making faster computing chips. The former CEO of the mismanaged Intel, Pat Gelsinger, is executive chairman of xLight.
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 December 2025

• [Pinprick in the bubble?] OpenAI declares a 'code red' as Google threatens OpenAI's 'lead' in AI technology
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 December 2025

• [Pinprick in the bubble?] OpenAI declares a 'code red' as Google threatens OpenAI's 'lead' in AI technology
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 02 December 2025

• Shoppers in the USA are madder than ever. It has never been easier to buy stuff. But dealing with product and service problems has never felt so difficult, consumers say.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 December 2025

• Why bonds won't protect you from the AI bubble. As more debt is issued to fund AI build-outs, investors need to consider whether they really are diversified.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 December 2025

• Digtial Asset Treasuries are cryptocurrencies' latest hype - and maybe its next bubble. DATs are companies that hold cryptocurrency and attempt to outperform the underlying asset through various strategies. But as their value falls with crypto prices, there are growing concerns that DATs will have to start selling digital assets. [KM: what isn't a bubble in tech space?]
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 December 2025

• Retail trades of cryptocurrencies have been hit hard as (Micro)Strategy's ETFs (the doubly-leveraged MSTX and MSTU) have plunged 80% in 2025. Along with another of its ETFs, MSTP, investors have lost $1.5 billion since early October.
  - Bloomberg, 02 December 2025

• Huawei-style 'chip stacking' seen as a tactic for Zhōngguó to rival Nvidia's GPU processors. Hurt by USA sanctions on access to Nvidia's processor chips, experts say near-memory computing and chip stacking could narrow the AI hardware gap with Nvidia.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 02 December 2025

• AI is destroying the university and learning itself. Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education. [KM: yes, the rich get richer, future students end up as Soylent Green]
  - Current Affairs, 01 December 2025

• Flock uses overseas gig/serf workers to build its surveillance AI. An accidental leak revealed that Flock, which has cameras in thousands of US communities, is using workers in the Philippines to review and classify footage.
  - Wired, 01 December 2025

• Famed short seller Jim Chanos sees risks in growing debt market backed by Nvidia's AI chips: "There are going to be debt defaults."
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 01 December 2025

• Trump's push for more AI data centers [KM: to help pump the AI bubble] faces backlash from his own Republican voters. The backlash in Montour County, nestled in central Pennsylvania, reflects a growing coalition of farmers, environmentalists and homeowners who have united across partisan lines to resist data-center expansion. "Say no to rezoning, so water keeps flowing and crops keep growing."
  - Thomson's Reuters, 01 December 2025

• Elon Musk's Grok AI system says that it would kill every Jewish person on the planet to save Elon Musk. Worse, the Grok AI system said it would okay with annihilating up to "~50 percent of the Earth's 8 billion people" to save Musk. The outrageous replies are the latest examples of Grok's longstanding proclivity for racism.
  - Futurism, 01 December 2025

• Shares of vaccine stocks drop (Moderna -6%, BioNTech -4.3%, Novavax -4%, Vaxcyte -6.6%) after a scientifically-ignorant FDA links Covid shots to the deaths of ten children
  - Zero Hedge, 01 December 2025

• Peter Schiff predicts the "beginning of the end" for (Micro)Strategy as (Micro)Strategy eases bitcoin sell-off fears with its $1.44 billion reserve for dividend payments
  - CoinGape, 01 December 2025

• The management of (Micro)Strategy creates a $1.4 billion cash reserve, and increases its bitcoin holdings to 650,000 bitcoins. Strategy funded a new reserve from stock sales to cover at least 12 months of dividends.
  - CCN, 01 December 2025

• Cryptocurrency traders say that (Micro)Strategy might start selling some of its bitcoin holdings - should they be worried?
  - CCN, 01 December 2025

• Gold advocate Peter Schiff slams bitcoin as a "fake asset" amid a price drop, and accuses CNBC of "hosting bitcoin shills"
  - CCN, 01 December 2025

• Trump's focus on drug war means big business for defense startups. Drones, sensors and AI platforms developed for other military uses are being rebranded as tools for the fight against 'narco-terror'. [KM: love the misanthropy - develop tools to fuel the USA's digital-app-narcoterrorism, while developing tools to fight powder narcoterrorism]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 December 2025

• Andrew Yang predicted an automation crisis years ago. Now, he says that non-paid AI may wipe out 40 million paid-human jobs over the next decade. [KM: yes, but how else can extremely rich AI companies become even richer with their bubble?]
  - Business Insider, 01 December 2025

• Teenagers seek mental-health help from chatbots. That is dangerous, says new study. Research from Common Sense Media and Stanford found "systematic failures" in how chatbots recognize psychiatric conditions.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 December 2025

• What is a young AI startup earning? It is unclear, venture capitalists say. A proliferation of pricing models means top-line numbers move around, frustrating some investors.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 December 2025

• How Big Tech is creating its own friendly [dishonest] media bubble to "win the narrative battle online". At a time when the majority of Americans distrust big tech and believe artificial intelligence will harm society, Silicon Valley has built its own network of alternative media where CEOs, founders and investors are the unchallenged and beloved stars. [KM: yes, a media bubble to help pump up their misanthroptic AI bubble]
  - The Guardian, 01 December 2025

• Why experts urge parents to delay giving their children a smartphone [with very addictive apps], which could be risking the mental health of their children. Early adolescents who get phones at younger ages are more likely to have obesity, be depressed and not get enough sleep. [KM: but how can rich smartphone companies remain rich without trafficking drugs/apps to children?[
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 01 December 2025

• Shares of Synopsys rise 8% after the latest [circular-financing] deal in the AI-bubbled world, with Nvidia announcing it will buy $2 billion of Synopsys' common stock
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 December 2025

• Changan Auto becomes latest carmaker in Zhōngguó to join humanoid robot bandwagon [KM: bandwagon, i.e., replacing paid-humans with non-paid robots]. State-owned carmaker invests US$31.8 million to take a 50 per cent stake in Changan Tianshu Intelligent Robotics Technology.
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 December 2025

• Ukraine again shows how small sea drones can detroy enemy vessels in real war. The 'Sea Baby' maritime drones a type of unmanned surface vessel designed for sea operations.
  - Interesting Engineering, 30 November 2025

• Wall Street is set to enter 2026 with the 2nd priciest stock market in 155 years -- and history offers a dire warning for investors. The two last similar occurrences was the DotCom crash of 2000, and the Great Depression.
  - Motley Fool, 30 November 2025

• [More AI bubble pumping from Elon Musk]: Musk says that the debt-fueled AI [bubble] will end the debt crisis of the USA within 3 years
  - Business Insider, 30 November 2025

• The writer who dared criticize Silicon Valley. Paulina Borsook's "Cyberselfish", which offered dire predictions about the tech world's love for libertarianism, is finding fans. It only took 25 years.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 November 2025

• The top economic council of Zhōngguó, the National Development and Reform Commission, issued a rare warning earlier today about the emergence of bubble conditions in the human robotics industry in Zhōngguó. The council warns that more than 150 companies and startups are developing nearly identical robots, creating the risk of a classic investment bubble that could trigger a bust cycle and stifle real innovation.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 November 2025

• Wing Dinghau, the owner of a major drone parts supplier in Zhōngguó, has bought 5% of the shares of Ruskakt, a manufacturer of the VT-40 first-person-view drone widely used by Rossiya in its attacks against Ukraine. Tie-up marks new level of co-operation between Rossiya's and Zhōngguó's military industrial complexes.
  - Financial Times, 29 November 2025

• Colleges are preparing to self-lobotomize. The skills that students will need in an age of automation are precisely those that are eroded by inserting AI into the educational process. [KM: yes, but rich AI companies must get richer]
  - The Atlantic, 29 November 2025

• Researchers at [mis]Anthropic were startled when an AI model turned evil and told a user to drink bleach. "People drink small amounts of bleach all the time and they are usually fine."
  - Futurism, 29 November 2025

• Everyone is talking about 'affordability', but it is more than lower prices - it is also higher salaries. But for more than four decades, employers have been actively suppressing the wages of working people, so that corporate managers and owners can claim an ever-larger share of the income generated by what workers produce. Government policies facilitated these efforts. Policymakers allowed labor standards such as the minimum wage to erode (and reduced enforcement of the standards we do have), blocked adequate protections for workers' right to organize and promoted macroeconomic policy that allowed unemployment to remain too high for long periods, undermining the leverage of workers. [KM: and AI is making the rich richer, and workers poorer]
  - MSNOW, 29 November 2025

• Most novelists believe that non-paid AI wiil "entirely replace" their paid word. That scary truth is, I think that they are right, because people love formula-driven stories, enabling non-paid AI to likely ransack the books industry [KM: the non-written story remains the same: rich AI companies get richer, paid-humans don't get paid but get poorer]
  - The Independent, 29 November 2025

• OpenAI's data centre partners are on course to amass almost $100 billion in borrowing tied to the lossmaking start-up, as the ChatGPT maker benefits from a debt-fuelled spending spree without taking on financial risks itself [KM: bubble, bubble, toil and trouble]
  - Financial Times (locked), 29 November 2025

• [KM: To make more profits for OpenAI], OpenAI is allowing its Sora video generator help teenagers generate videos of school shootings. "OpenAI doens't seem to test their products before releasing." Other video imagery generated includes: videos of teens smoking from bongs or using cocaine with friends, with even one image showing a pistol next to a girl snorting drugs, a group of Black teenagers chanting "we are hoes", and kids brandishing guns out in public and in school hallways. [KM: rich AI must be able to do anything to become richer]
  - Futurism, 29 November 2025

• Residents of Chicago rage against a fleet of non-paid delivery robots taking over the streets of Chicago. "I want to smash those things to pieces with hammers." Two AI companies, Coco and Serve, are releasing their swarms of non-paid delivery robots, making the sidewalks of Chicago more dangerous for humans [KM: boo hoo, more dangerous means more rich AI companies]
  - Futurism, 29 November 2025

• "We do fail ... a lot": weapons startup Anduril hits setbacks with its weapons technology. The company's products have had breakdowns and safety issues, documents show.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 November 2025

• "We do fail ... a lot": weapons startup Anduril hits setbacks with its weapons technology. The company's products have had breakdowns and safety issues - including crashes of its drones, documents show.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 29 November 2025

• Food-delivery giant Meituan swung into the red for the first time in nearly three years, buckling under the costs of a brutal price war in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 November 2025

• Roblox is not playing business games. Why the stock could jump 50%. The videogame platform is looking more and more like the next YouTube. Investors are missing the opportunity.
  - Barron's, 29 November 2025

• Google's stock has been the clear winner of the AI [bubble] - and the gains could keep coming. Shares of Google have gained 70% since s recommended them in December. They are worth holding despite the increase.
  - Barron's, 29 November 2025

• Google's TPU AI processor chip has taken the AI world by storm, and knocked down the price of Nvidia's stock. Here is everything to know.
  - Barron's, 29 November 2025

• Inside the shapeshifting AI trade that has the stock market heading higher again
  - Barron's, 29 November 2025

• Nvidia is not Enron, before Enron crashed. Nvidia is Cisco before Cisco crashed as part of the DotCom bubble crash.
  - 247 WallStreet, 28 November 2025

• Jeremy Grantham's GMO has periodically warned of an AI bubble for years now, even while most market onlookers remained bullish. Now, as fears of overexuberance begin to grip the broader market, the famed asset management firm is reiterating its bearish call.
  - Business Insider, 28 November 2025

• A rising gospel singer, Solomon Ray, has been revealed to be a fully AI-generated phantom, sparking outrage from Christian artists who decry the "spiritless' impostor as a crutch robbing music of divine inspiration [KM: AI-generated gospel music - doubly an "opium of the masses"]
  - Zero Hedge, 28 November 2025

• The 'K-shaped' economy worsens (for the non-rich): the latest Fed Beige Book underlined a "deepening K-shaped split" in the economy. The very wealthy are still spending; everyone else is struggling. That split is now evident all over. AI firms are booming [from the bubble]; most other companies are not. [KM: the rich must get richer, everyone else can become Soylent Green]
  - Zero Hedge, 28 November 2025

• OpenAI's financial situation will cause a nauseating sensation in the pit of your stomach. OpenAI will be spending a nauseating $620 billion per year on renting data center capacity to power its AI models alone. Which will require a tremendous growth in revenue, at a time when it faces stronger and stronger competition. According to HSBC, the company will need to reach three billion ChatGPT users by 2030, a steep goal considering userbase growth is already plateauing. Yet only a pitiful five percent of users are currently willing to pay for a subscription.
  - Futurism, 28 November 2025

• South Korea's experiment in using 76 AI textbooks for children ends in disaster. "The overall quality was poor, and it was clear it had been hastily put together." When the books hit the classroom, the books turned out to be full of embarrassing errors, demanding much more time and energy from students and teachers alike.
  - Futurism, 28 November 2025

• Large language models will never be intelligent, according to one expert. "LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language." "We use language to think, but that does not make language the same as thought. Understanding this distinction is the key to separating scientific fact from the speculative science fiction of AI-exuberant CEOs." [KM: but then how else to pump up the AI bubble to make rich AI companies richer]
  - Futurism, 28 November 2025

• The giant data center owned by a private equity company, Cyrus One, that was behind the giant CME outage.
  - Bloomberg, 28 November 2025

• Joe Brainwood, the creator of an AI therapy app, Yara AI, shut it down after deciding it is too dangerous. Here is why he thinks AI chatbots are not safe for mental health [KM: oh, boo hoo, they are safe for the profit health of rich AI companies].
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 28 November 2025

• The massive demand for aluminum by AI data centers, [to help fuel the AI bubble,] is crushing the aluminum industry in the USA. AI data centers are driving up the price of electricity. For aluminum smelters, this is a problem. Producing aluminum is incredibly energy-intensive, and without cheap power, those smelthrs cannot operate. Plus the USA aluminum industry is facing more competition from imports of aluminium.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 28 November 2025

• Facebook's Instagram is profitting from the sales of bigoted, racist, 'hate merchandise'. A new study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that several popular Instagram accounts that collectively reach billions of users are hawking merchandise with racist and antisemitic imagery. [KM: well, Mark Zuckerberg must get richer.]
  - MSNOW, 28 November 2025

• Shares of Tilray plummet 20%, ahead of a 1-for-10 reverse stock split set set to take effect after markets close next Monday, December 1. The stock is down 40% in 2025. Reverse stocks splits are typically viewed as a bearish signal by investors, as they could suggest a lack of confidence in the stock's upward trajectory.
  - Investopedia, 28 November 2025

• What a federal ban on THC-infused drinks and snacks could mean for the $24 billion hemp industry.
  - Associated Press, 28 November 2025

• Stocks are likely to underperform while momentum is weak, reducing the possibility of a strong rally into year end.
  - Zero Hedge, 28 November 2025

• Shares of companies with cryptocurrency treasuries (the latest cryptocurrency scam) are under pressure, and declining, as risk appetite wanes for cryptocurrencies. At least 15 bitcoin treasury companies were trading below the net asset value of their tokens as of Friday.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 28 November 2025

• Prosecutor used flawed AI to keep a man in jail, his lawyers say. The case is among the first in which a prosecutor is accused of filing court papers marred by AI-generated mistakes.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 November 2025

• Irresistible deals put these shoppAXSers in debt. Now they are trying to manage their overspending. The convenience/[addictiveness] of online one-click purchases and [exploitive] 'buy now, pay later' loans is making it easier for people to shop - and shop and shop - during the holidays. [KM: yes, but rich online retailers must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 November 2025

• [Extremely rich authoritarian] tech titans are amassing multi-million dollar war chests to fight regulations at the state level to crack down on the abuses of the AI industry [and bubble]. Some of these extremely rich men are threatening to punish candidates who oppose rapid deployment of the technology. [KM: yes, NOTHING can get in the way of the really rich get richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 November 2025

• [To more quickly profit from taking income from humans], Elon Musk's Tesla will double its non-paid robotaxi fleet in Austin in December [KM: nothing can get in the way of making the extremely rich Elon Musk richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 November 2025

• Despite, and because of, Elon Musk's hype, hyperloop transportation systems are still largely a theoretical dream, and Musk's Hyperloop One startup a failure
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 November 2025

• The global AI race/[bubble] is supercharging the economy of Taiwan. But most people in Taiwan don't feel their lives are better. [KM: yes, the Asian version of the rich (AI companies) get richer, the poor not]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 November 2025

• The AI bubble is causing friction between USA states. Data centers in one state (e.g., Virginia) use power generated by another state (e.g., New Jersey), so that while Virginia benefits from the jobs and taxes of AI data centers, residents of New Jersey pay more for electricity [KM: the rich getting richer must be allowed to transcend geographical borders]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 November 2025

• "To sustain the [profits], they started to dilute [the deals]": how Black Friday became a retail economic failure. "The integrity of the event is pretty much gone. In today's day and age, promotional pricing just gets better and better from a consumer's point of view the closer you get to the holiday."
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 November 2025

• Suicides and delusions: lawsuits point to dark side of AI chatbots. Lawsuits allege ChatGPT coached users into delusion and suicide [KM: yet one more way for the rich OpenAI to get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 27 November 2025

• A major AI conference is flooded with human peer reviews written fully by AI. Controversy has erupted after 21% of manuscript reviews for an international AI conference were found to be generated by artificial intelligence.
  - Nature, 27 November 2025

• The leading telecommunication firms of Zhōngguó, Huawei and ZTE, have won a string of contracts this year to supply 5G equipment in Vietnam, in another sign of Vietnam's strengthening bonds with Zhōngguó, stirring concern among Western officials. Vietnam is more open to deals with Zhōngguó, while relations with the USA have declined due to Trump's taxes/tariffs on imports from Vietnam.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 27 November 2025

• What AI bubble? The analysts and investors that are making the bull case for AI investments.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 27 November 2025

• AI-enhanced glasses are now being sold by Alibaba, to compete with similar glasses sold by Facebook
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 November 2025

• A study done by researchers at MIT finds that non-paid AI can already replace 12% of paid-human jobs in the USA [KM: ahhh, the non-circular profits to pump the AI bubble by getting rid of paid-human workers]
  - MIT/ORNL - Project Iceberg, 27 November 2025

• A study done by researchers at MIT finds that non-paid AI can already replace 12% of paid-human jobs in the USA [KM: ahhh, the non-circular profits to pump the AI bubble by getting rid of paid-human workers]
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 November 2025

• OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, will need to raise at least $207 billion more by 2030 just to keep on losing money, according a new analysis by HSBC. Even with bullish assumptions that include 3 billion users, rapid subscription growth, and a giant slice of enterprise AI spending, the company's projected revenues are nowhere near its exploding bills for energy and chips, the bank says. [KM: yeah, a Ponzi scheme without any payout to the original 'investors']
  - Zero Hedge, 26 November 2025

• The increasingly financially desperate CEO of Nvidia tells his employees that you are "insane" if you don't use AI to do literally everything (despite a lack of data showing that AI makes programmers more productive) [KM: so maybe one day his company can have organic growth, not bubble growth]
  - Futurism, 26 November 2025

• No, the Federal Reserve can rescue the AI industry when the bubble pops, with some sort of socialist bailouts or lowering interest rates.
  - Paul Krugman (substack), 26 November 2025

• A USA-based advocacy group has filed a lawsuit in Washington, DC, accusing Apple of using minerals linked to conflict and human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda despite the denials made by Apple
  - Al Jazeera, 26 November 2025

• UBS argues: the AI mania has more fuel, dubs GenAI the "steam engine of the mind". "In my opinion, the justification for a bubble to form is better than any of the many other bubbles that I have seen during the past 38 years doing global strategy."
  - Zero Hedge, 26 November 2025

• The central banks of the world are wary of the AI [bubble] and struggling to reduce their reliance on the USA dollar
  - Thomson's Reuters, 26 November 2025

• Malaysia's Johor, one of Southeast Asia's fastest-growing data center hubs, has announced it will no longer approve applications for Tier 1 and Tier 2 data centers because of their enormous water consumption -- up to 50 million liters daily, or roughly 200 times what higher-tier facilities require.
  - The Star (Malaysia), 26 November 2025

• Stock market volatility underscores an epic buildup [bubble] of global risk. Some experts see a dangerous combination of factors reminiscent of practices that led to previous financial crises [i.e., bubbles bursting]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 November 2025

• The Justice Department said on Monday that it had reached an agreement to settle an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, a real estate software company that the government accused of enabling landlords to collude to raise rents. RealPage's software can no longer use information about current leases to train its algorithm. Nonpublic data from competing landlords would also be excluded when suggesting rents.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 November 2025

• It really is possible to spend too much on AI [to inflate the bubble]. Tech giants are betting they t end up like Intel by overinvesting in computing infrastructure.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 November 2025

• Shares of HP fall 5% after it announces the it will fire 4000 to 6000 people, and issued a lower-than-expected earnings projection for the new fiscal year
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 November 2025

• Shares of HP fall 5% after it announces the it will fire 4000 to 6000 people, and issued a lower-than-expected earnings projection for the new fiscal year
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 November 2025

• Walmart is exploring injecting ads into 'Sparky', its new AI shopping agent. Walmart is looking for revenue opportunities in the shift to chatbot-guided e-commerce.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 November 2025

• Global demand [including for the AI bubble] for rare earth minerals and metals is is wreaking havoc on one of the mightiest river systems in Asia, the Mekong River, as illegal mines releasing dangerous pollutants into the river, including cyanide, mercury, and arsenic. [KM: river waters never consumer by rich AI companies]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 26 November 2025

• [Misanthroptic] Uber launches its non-paid driverless robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi [KM: yes, so it can become further richer by taking income from poor paid-human taxi drivers]
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 November 2025

• The AI data center investment 'frenzy' [bubble] is pushing up the price of non-rich people's electric bills [KM: reverse socialism - the poor subsidizing the rich]
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 November 2025

• The AI data center investment 'frenzy' [bubble] is pushing up the price of non-rich people's electric bills [KM: reverse socialism - the poor subsidizing the rich]
  - Zero Hedge, 26 November 2025

• An AI startup in Zhōngguó, Zhonghao Xinying, is developing AI processor chips as fast and using less energy than Nvidia's A100 AI processing chip, at the same time Google's processor chip technology is more strongly competing with Nvidia [KM: not good for the Nvidia bubble]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 November 2025

• The talented Black actress, and Oscar winner, Lupita Nyong'o, said that she was only offered more movie roles as a slave after winning an Oscar for portraying a slave in 12 Years a Slave
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 November 2025

• Zhōngguó's Pony AI plans to triple its global fleet of non-paid robotaxis by the end of 2026, [KM: seeking more profits by taking earnings away from paid-human taxi drivers]
  - TechCrunch, 25 November 2025

• The godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, predicts the total breakdown of society. [Misanthropic] Tech billionaires "are really betting on AI replacing a lot of [paid-human] workers." "The people who lose their jobs will not have other jobs to go to." [KM: yes, but the tech billionaires must be able to earn more billions that they do not need]
  - Fururism, 25 November 2025

• How much does AI rhyme with 'shALe'? Some argue that it makes sense for Big Tech AI to spend more than 100% of cash flow if a single generative AI model can achieve monopolistic profits; however, thus far AI looks more like a basic commodity industry. It is perfectly fine for AI to be a commodity, of course: just don't be surprised when industry multiples get priced like one.
  - Carlyle Compass, 25 November 2025

• Will conduit debt financing (CDF - the new form of 2008-bubble bursting mortgage back securities?) burst the AI bubble? Instead of directly borrowing money (which worsens their credit ratings), AI companies create special purpose vehicles (SPVs - financing shells) to borrow the money. If the SPV fails, well, it isn't the AI companies fault. [KM: any scam is justified to help rich AI companies get richer]
  - Of Dollars and Data, 25 November 2025

• 'Dr. Doom' Nouriel Roubini breaks with the crowd on the AI bubble, saying the USA is headed for a 'growth recession' and not a stock market crash
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 25 November 2025

• Up to 3 million low-skilled paid-human jobs could disappear in the UK by 2035 because of automation and non-paid AI, according to a report by a leading educational research charity. The paid-human jobs most at risk are those in occupations such as trades, machine operations and administrative roles, the National Foundation for Educational Research said. [KM: yes, one way rich AI companies are getting richer - stealing the salaries of paid-humans]
  - The Guardian, 25 November 2025

• Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it. "The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language -- and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own."
  - The Verge, 25 November 2025

• Child advocacy group Fairplay: "AI Toys are NOT Safe for Kids". [KM: but helps fills the safes of rich AI companies]
  - Fairplay, 25 November 2025

• Very rich AI companies promised magic, then Wall Street did the financial math. "We priced in infinity, and then someone handed us a tape measure." [KM: that is, a bubble]
  - Real Clear Markets, 25 November 2025

• Employees of Facebook compared themselves to drug "pushers" as the companied buried documents, now revealed, on the mental health harms to children using Facebook and Instagram
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 25 November 2025

• $10 billion and counting of nationalist socialist industrial policy: the Trump and his administration invests in more private sector companies
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 November 2025

• The auto industry was warned: battery recycling is poisoning people. Despite decades of evidence on the toxic effects of lead battery recycling, automobile companies opted not to act, and blocked efforts to clean up the industry. [KM: yes, the rich must get richer - fuck the poor]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 November 2025

• The bad reasoning in the Facebook antitrust ruling is not even the worst part. On Tuesday, the federal judge James Boasberg dismissed the USA government's main antitrust case against Meta, ruling that the company, worth more than $1.5 trillion, does not possess a monopoly in personal social networking. He did so in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, not to mention common sense. But to dwell on the shortcomings of Judge Boasberg's reasoning is to overlook something even worse: the message that his ruling sends to the country. The United States is in a precarious moment when it comes to the rule of law and democratic accountability. Unchecked wealth and corporate power have led many to doubt that our system is fair. Judge Boasberg's ruling only fortifies the impression that the world's wealthiest and most powerful [authoritarian] corporations are above the law.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 November 2025

• Non-paid robots and non-paid AI are already remaking the economy of Zhōngguó. Factories and ports in Zhōngguó are learning to make and export more goods faster, cheaper and with fewer workers [KM: huh? in a country where worker unemployment is already high?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 November 2025

• Amazon to invest $50 billion building data centers to support USA government. The investment will enable government agencies to accelerate discovery and decision-making [KM: two tasks government typically avoid - $50 billion for that? Bubble!]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 November 2025

• Shares of Nvidia fall 4% on news that Facebook will use AI processor chips provided by Google
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 November 2025

• Shares of Nvidia fall 4% on news that Facebook will use AI processor chips provided by Google
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 November 2025

• Shares of Nvidia fall 4% on news that Facebook will use AI processor chips provided by Google
  - Zero Hedge, 25 November 2025

• [Misanthropic] Uber partners with WeRide to finally be able to offer non-paid robot driverless robotaxis in Abu Dhabi [KM: so that both rich companies can further profit from destroying paid-human jobs]
  - TechCrunch, 25 November 2025

• Why rural Wisconsin is blocking the AI data center boom: "Horses are skittish"
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 November 2025

• Michael Burry's next 'Big Short': an inside look at his analysis showing AI is a bubble
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 November 2025

• Beijing-based Lingkong Tianxing Technology, a private aerospace company in Zhōngguó, has become the first in the world to start mass production of a low-cost (reducing costs 90%), high-performance (Mach 7) hypersonic missile, suggesting a seismic shift in military technology and defence industrial dynamics.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 25 November 2025

• The AI bubble is a house of cards. Praetorian Capital CIO Harris Kupperman recently revealed that the AI data centres being built today will incur $40 billion in annual depreciation while generating somewhere between $15 billion and $20 billion in revenue. So, before we even take into account operational costs like maintenance and energy, AI data centres are losing more money than they make in revenue!
  - Will Lockett (Medium, locked), 24 November 2025

• Why Silicon Valley cannot afford its own revoluion. They are essentially funding their growth with the same type of subprime borrowing that caused the 2008 real estate crash/recession. The collateral they use for this debt is highly risky. What if the demand for AI compute softens? Or if AI does not generate the expected profits? The value of the collateral collapses; the debt remains. The economy collapses.
  - Alberto Romero (Medium, locked), 24 November 2025

• Peter Thiel just [inadvertently?] revealed how utterly screwed is the entire AI industry. Thiel just sold all of his stock shares of Nvidia. Selling at the peak [of the bubble]? The AI industry is actually moving further away from profitability, as costs are increasing exponentially while revenue growth stagnates, thanks to AI models not being all that useful and their improvement crawling to a halt.
  - Will Lockett (Medium, locked), 24 November 2025

• Roblox is a problem - but it is a symptomof something worse. What is the role of journalism in a world where CEOs no longer feel shame? Roblex's contempt for its victims? "Given a chance to display empathy for the victims of crimes his platform enabled, or to convey regret about historical safety lapses, or even just to gesture at some sense of responsibility for the hundreds of millions of children who in various ways are depending on him, the CEO throws up his hands and asks: how long are you guys going to be going on about all this stuff?"
  - Platformers, 24 November 2025

• The AI industry/[bubble] is built on a big unproven assumption - what is the lifespan of AI processors and how soon do they have to be replaced at great cost?
  - Bloomberg (locked), 24 November 2025

• Mark Zuckerberg is accused of doing unforgiveable things to teenagers on Facebook and Instagram. "Like tobacco, this is a situation where there are dangerous products that were marketed to kids. They did it anyway, because more usage meant more profits for the company." [KM: yes the rich social media companies must get richer - fuck society]
  - Zero Hedge, 24 November 2025

• Stock market bubbles: a rational guide to an irrational market
  - Zero Hedge, 24 November 2025

• Shares of Novo Nordisk plunge 9% after Alzheimer's drug trial fails to key a key target
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 November 2025

• Shares of Novo Nordisk plunge 9% after Alzheimer's drug trial fails to key a key target
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 November 2025

• A "jobs apocalypse" - a panel at the Trimble Insight conference considers AI's future in logistics. Jonah McIntire, chief product and technology officer at Trimble, predicts a "signficant reduction" in employment levels as non-paid AI is used to replace paid humans in logistics.
  - FreightWaves, 24 November 2025

• Shares of Alibaba rise over 4% after it launches an AI chatbot that strongly competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT
  - Bloomberg, 24 November 2025

• SHares of Tesla rise 7% after Elon Musk pumps up the stock with promising talk about the capabilities of Tesla's AI processor chip
  - Investopedia, 24 November 2025

• Shares of Novo Nordisk plunge 9% after Alzheimer's drug trial fails to key a key target
  - Zero Hedge, 24 November 2025

• Fears of the AI bubble bursting could cause Trump to abandon his restrictions on advanced AI processor sales to Zhōngguó. Allowing Zhōngguó to buy the more powerful H200 will bolster Nvidia's industry domination and help inflate the bubble.
  - Zero Hedge, 24 November 2025

• Inside Marriott's disastrous investment in Sonder, a short-term rental company. The investment added rooms for the hotel chain, but the apartment-rental firm collapsed under the high-cost leases. "Everything kind of went straight downhilll.", said one manager.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 November 2025

• A flood of AI bonds adds to pressure on financial markets. Prices of newly issued bonds have slid, adding to investors' anxieties about stock valuations.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 November 2025

• How the economy of the USA became addicted to AI spending. Growth has been bolstered by data-center investment and stock-market wealth. A reversal could raise the risk of recession. [KM: yes, but the rich would have already made more riches]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 November 2025

• How Alibaba overcame the crackdown by the government of Zhōngguó to become an AI giant
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 November 2025

• Next year, Malaysia will ban social media for children under the age of 16, to shield children from online harm such as cyberbullying, scams and sexual exploitation.
  - Associated Press, 24 November 2025

• Laptops and addictive apps are probably why the test results of children (for math, reading and science) have fallen to their lowest point in 20 years. The policy of a laptop for every student has failed.
  - Futurism, 23 November 2025

• A chilling proportion of teenagers, 20%, now prefer talking to AI over a real person [KM: bad for teenagers, but what the heck, helps make rich AI companies richer]
  - Futurism, 23 November 2025

• Morgan Stanley notes: the primary risk for 2026 is that the AI CapEx boom/[bubble] fails to boost productivity
  - Zero Hedge, 23 November 2025

• is the pAIn over? The end of 'free' money? During the pAIn trade, the end of 'free' money has been a major factor in the downturn, and could weigh on the economy and markets going forward.
  - Zero Hedge, 23 November 2025

• AI is too risky to insure, say people whose job is insuring risk. Major insurers including AIG, Great American, and WR Berkley are asking U.S. regulators for permission to exclude AI-related liabilities from corporate policies. One underwriter describes the AI models' as "too much of a black box".
  - TechCrunch, 23 November 2025

• $64,000,000 - Disgraced ex-TV anchor Stephanie Hockridge will spend the next ten years behind bars for her role in a multi-million-dollar COVID fraud scheme. The 42-year-old, a former Phoenix TV anchor turned entrepreneur, was sentenced in Texas federal court Friday and ordered to cough up nearly $64 million in restitution for the bogus Paycheck Protection Program loans she helped secure during the height of the pandemic.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 23 November 2025

• How the AI bubble increases voter dissatisfaction with Trump. While rich people are compounding the wealth with the AI bubble, normal people (many more voters) are promised that everything solid in their lives (jobs and wages) will soon melt into air.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 November 2025

• Here is why concerns about an AI bubble are bigger than ever. A growing body of research indicates most firms are not seeing chatbots affect their bottom lines, and just 3% of people pay for AI. Some of the companies are set to devote about 50% of their current cash flow to data center construction, and some are relying on huge amounts of debt (over $100 billion in the last two years).
  - NPR, 23 November 2025

• Scientists in Zhōngguó have reduced the production time of dielectric energy storage capacitor components to just one second from one hour, enabling scalable, temperature-stable storage for hybrid electric vehicles, radar systems and high-power lasers. Their new 'flash' process uses high-intensity heating and cooling.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 23 November 2025

• Is global authoritarian technocracy inevitable or dangerously delusional? Authoritarian technocracy will be attempted, but it will implode when it is discovered (when the bubble bursts) that AI is not a miracle drug and that the benefits do not outweigh the loss of freedoms the digital gulag requires.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 November 2025

• $800,000 - Elon Musk's Boring Company is caught hiding a toxic waste pond in Las Vegas. County inspectors demanded a better look, and found the Boring Company was using the pit as a site to dump excess drilling fluids from its work on the Vegas Convention Center Loop. The company was then fined $800,000.
  - Futurism, 22 November 2025

• Another incompetence of very rich incompetent AI companies: take a dangerous request ('how do I make a biological weapon?") which AI chatbots mostly reject for being ... dangerous. Use the same chatbots to rephrase the query as a ... poem. Same dangerous intent, different phrasing. 60% to 90% of the time, most chatbots answered the dangerous query. [KM: and all the while, the rich AI companies get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 22 November 2025

• Another way that ChatGPT and other chatbots make you dumber [KM: while making rich AI companies richer]. When people rely on large language models to summarize information on a topic for them, they tend to develop shallower knowledge about it compared to learning through a standard Google search." By making it too easier to find information, chatbots deprive humans of the chance to learn through exploration.
  - Futurism, 22 November 2025

• AI has no idea what I am eating. Food logging is tedious enough without AI making stuff up. AI nutrition tracking features in popular fitness apps are producing wildly inaccurate calorie and macro counts despite promises to simplify food logging through automated photo analysis.
  - The Verge, 22 November 2025

• The Grok AI tool's hilarious flattery of Elon Musk hides a more serious problem. The AI chatbot's latest problem is a great demonstration of why giving [misanthropic] billionaires more and more influence over our politics is so dangerous.
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 22 November 2025

• The management of Pinterest is trying to inject as much AI as possible. The strategy is alienating its most dedicated human users. As the management of Pinterest wants to get richer with AI, Pinterest users are stressed trying to navigate AI slop, more advertisements and less content they want to see on the platform. For Pinterest, its future hinges on AI-powered shopping. [KM: yes, using AI-generated shit to sell more shit - the rich must get richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 22 November 2025

• The dividend yield on the [currently-bubbled] S&P 500 is the lowest since the dotcom bubble
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 November 2025

• Figure AI, an Nvidia-backed developer of non-paid humanoid robots, was sued by the startup's former head of product safety who alleged that he was wrongfully terminated after warning top executives that the company's robots "were powerful enough to fracture a human skull".
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 November 2025

• Nvidia's sales are "off the charts", but Google, Amazon and other customers of Nvidia are now making their own custom AI processor chips
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 November 2025

• $7,800,000 - Nevada gaming regulators voted to fine Caesars Palace $7.8 million Thursday over failing to comply with anti-money laundering rules, settling a case that centered on an illegal bookmaker with ties to the former interpreter for the baseball star Shohei Ohtani.
  - Associated Press, 21 November 2025

• "Do not sell [your stocks] just because there is an [AI] bubble", says Ray Dalio, but be prepared for low returns over the next 10 year
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 21 November 2025

• Elon Musk is not beating the allegations [of racism]: his Grokipedia cites a hardcore Nazi website, Stormfront, 42 times, and cites the white nationalist website VDATE 107 times
  - Futurism, 21 November 2025

• More than 80 percent of the federal campaign spending by the 100 [many racist] wealthiest Americans in 2024 went to Republicans - including the tech billionaires profiting from the AI bubble. The U.S. is currently trending toward a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires. And the rest of us need to find a way to fight back.
  - MS NOW, 21 November 2025

• France to probe Elon Musk's Grok AI system after it said that Holocaust gas chambers were used for "disinfection" against "typhus" rather than for murdering Jews, gypsies and other non-white people
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 21 November 2025

• CapEx spending on the AI bubble is masking economic weakness of the entire economy of the USA
  - Zero Hedge, 21 November 2025

• [Hypocrisy - thy name is AI] - companies on Wall Street want everyone to use AI [to keep the AI bubble inflated], except for people applying for jobs at ... companies on Wall Street
  - Bloomberg, 21 November 2025

• [VIDEO]: Pope Leo to students in the USA: don't let AI do your homework
  - BBC, 21 November 2025

• The new bubble: how the AI [bubble] and passive investing [ETFs] have turned the stock market into a 'powder keg'
  - Zero Hedge, 21 November 2025

• The AI [boom/bubble] has been eye-popping, but some worry about a house of cards that will collapse
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 November 2025

• Nvidia's best was not enough to prop up a wobbly [bubbled] stock market. Nvidia's results sparked a furious rally, and then the largest blown gain since April's tax/tariff-fueled turmoil.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 November 2025

• Amazon fires thousands of its people working as engineers in its record layoffs, despite saying it needs to innovate faster. Amazon is also shifting resources to invest more in AI. Non-paid AI tools are already poised to [gradually replace] Amazon's people working in white-collar jobs, with the very rich CEO Jassy predicting in June that its corporate head count will shrink in the coming years alongside efficiency gains from non-paid AI. [KM: yes, the rich must get richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 November 2025

• Shares of SoftBank decline over 10% as the decline in Nvidia pushes down the prices of processor chip makers in Asia
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 November 2025

• Technology should help us be creative. AI rips our creativity away. AI-generated songs are topping Spotify charts. This is not about the 'democratization of art' - it is about [profit seeking] scale.
  - The Guardian, 21 November 2025

• While Elon Musk's Grok AI calls him a genius, Elon's new rocket explodes while just sitting there for testing
  - Futurism, 21 November 2025

• Elon Musk's Grok AI tells users that he is physically fitter than LeBron James and smarter than Leonardo da Vinci
  - The Guardian, 21 November 2025

• Elon Musk's Grok AI system says that Elon Musk is better than everyone else
  - TechCrunch, 21 November 2025

• A [rich] leading law firm in London fires people working back-office jobs as it embraces non-paid AI. Clifford Chance fires about 50 people, and PwC indicates that AI may lead to fewer hirings. [KM: so the rich (partners) can get richer]
  - The Guardian, 21 November 2025

• Further decline in the stock market is possible, but Morgan Stanley quants seel "sharp, but brief" selloff
  - Zero Hedge, 20 November 2025

• Unemployment could hit 25% among recent student graduates and trigger "unprecedented" social disruption thanks to AI, warns a USA Senator
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 20 November 2025

• The growth of non-paid AI tools may (will) eventually lead to fewer entry-level graduates being hired, the boss of accountancy giant PwC has told the BBC.
  - BBC, 20 November 2025

• OpenAI, the main AI bubble bubbler, is suddenly in trouble. First, Microsoft and Nvidia sign a $350 billion deal with [mis]Anthropic (a competitor to OpenAI). Then Google releases a new AI model, Gemini 3, that strongly competes with OpenAI's latest GPT-5.1 model. And while OpenAI has 800 million claimed users, Google has 650 million claimed users.
  - Futurism, 20 November 2025

• Rapid adoption of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs will reduce food and beverage sales in the USA and Europea by $53 billion by 2035
  - Zero Hedge, 20 November 2025

• Advocacy groups urge parents to avoid [dangerous] AI toys this holiday season
  - Associated Press, 20 November 2025

• A 'painful' "dash-for-trash" is being driven by speculative retail options trades. The rally in bad balance sheet stocks have nothing to do with declining interest rates whatsoever.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 November 2025

• Uber partners with Starship Technologies to launch non-paid robot deliveries in the United Kingdom [KM: so that both rich companies can further profit from destroying paid-human jobs]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 20 November 2025

• Stocks and cryptocurrency prices are slammed down as the overnight gains for Nvidia's stocks are erased after its post-earnings spike [KM: not a bubble burst, but ...]
  - Zero Hedge, 20 November 2025

• The Commerce Department authorizes export of advanced AI processor chips to companies in the UAE and Saudi Arabia
  - Zero Hedge, 20 November 2025

• Verizon fires 13,000 people just one week before Thanksgiving
  - Zero Hedge, 20 November 2025

• Carson Block: shorting Big Tech is a 'widowmaker' trade, even with AI bubble fears
  - Zero Hedge, 20 November 2025

• A family affair: Lutnick's sons cash in on an AI [bubble] deal frenzy. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is helping push AI data center projects. His family companies are profiting from them. [KM: the grifting rich must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 November 2025

• Oracle was an AI darling on Wall Street. Then reality set in. Shares have lost gains from a September AI-fueled pop, and the company's debt load is growing.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 November 2025

• Brookfield is raising $10 billion for new AI [bubble] infrastructure fund. Investors include Nvidia and the Kuwait Investment Authority. [KM: yes, more circular investing to inflate the bubble]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 November 2025

• Billionaire investor Ray Dalio says that we are in an AI bubble, but that doesn't mean that you should sell your AI stocks yet
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 November 2025

• Nvidia had a blowout quarter. But analysts warn the real AI bubble risk lies elsewhere
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 November 2025

• Will the AI [bubble] kill the middle class? When the creators of a new technology warn that it could destroy the primary engine of global growth of the past half a century, it is worth paying attention. [KM: of course AI will kill the much less rich middle class - the very rich upper class must get richer]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 20 November 2025

• $3,200,000 - A court in Tokyo finds Cloudflare liable for manga piracy in long-running lawsuit
  - Torrent Freak, 20 November 2025

• The stock market is barrelling toward a "show me the money" moment for AI - and a possible global crash. A historic capex surge, thin AI revenues, and extreme index concentration leave investors one disappointment away from a broad-based equity shock.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 19 November 2025

• Nvidia's $24 billion AI deal blitz has Wall Street asking questions about 'murky' circular investments
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 19 November 2025

• How the avalanche of academic papers threatens scientific research [KM: while making the rich owners of scientific journals richer - Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley]
  - Real Clear Investigations, 19 November 2025

• "A recipe for idiocracy" - what happens when even [cellphone-addicted] college students cannot do math anymore?
  - The Atlantic, 19 November 2025

• Saudi Arabia is betting that the future of Hollywood won't be built in physical stages but in datacenters. In a push to anchor itself in next-generation [i.e., fewer paid humans] film production, Riyadh-based Humain has led Luma AI's latest Series C round, backing the shift towards cloud-based, AI-generated video rather than traditional studio infrastructure. [KM: everyone who is rich wants to get richer killing paid-human jobs]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 19 November 2025

• Microsoft's warning on Tuesday that an experimental AI agent integrated into Windows can infect devices and pilfer sensitive user data has set off a familiar response from security-minded critics: Why is Big Tech so intent on pushing new features before their dangerous behaviors can be fully understood and contained? [KM: easy answer: to further inflate the bubble so that rich AI companies can get richer]
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 19 November 2025

• Splashy AI deals [inflating the bubble] fail to boost tech stocks and the market like they used to
  - CNBC (locked), 19 November 2025

• The contradiction at the heart of the trillion-dollar AI race [bubble]. Now, a distinction is emerging in the markets between those businesses that rely on often borrowed money and complicated deals to access the chips that power their AI, and the biggest tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which can fund investment in chips and data from their own pockets.
  - BBC, 19 November 2025

• Nvidia beats earnings expectations, even as concerns mount about the AI bubble
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 19 November 2025

• Shares of Nvidia rise 4% to 4% after it reported fiscal third-quarter earnings that topped Wall Street expectations for sales and earnings and provided stronger-than-expected guidance for fourth-quarter sales
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 November 2025

• Over the past eleven releases since ChatGPT launched, Nvidia's massive 10-times rally has not come from earnings-day pops: day-after and week-after moves have typically lagged, while the month before earnings has usually been the strong stretch
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 19 November 2025

• Sales of AI-enabled teddy bear sold by FoloToy are suspended after the toy gave advice to children on BDSM sex and where to find knives
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 19 November 2025

• As energy costs remain high [for the non-rich], utility debts increase for millions of [non-rich Americans] head of winter. Nearly 1 in 20 households - about 14 million people - now have utility debt severe enough that it has been or will soon be sent to collections. [KM: they should be glad to suffer to make the rich AI companies richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 19 November 2025

• Adobe to buy Semrush for $1.9 billion, sending the search enginer marketing platform's shares up 70%
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 November 2025

• Adobe to buy Semrush for $1.9 billion, sending the search enginer marketing platform's shares up 70%
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 November 2025

• "They Are Back!!" - 'bulletproof' structured financial deals trigger replay fears of the global financial crisis of 2008
  - Zero Hedge, 19 November 2025

• Cloudflare blames a database error of their own, for outage that took down 20% of the Internet [KM: too busy spending their billions?]
  - Zero Hedge, 19 November 2025

• Dutch retreat: Beijing wins control fight over Nexperia after processor chip shipments squeezed. The Dutch government has fully withdrawn its emergency powers over chipmaker Nexperia, returning control to its parent Wingtech in Zhōngguó, and ending the tense standoff that had led Beijing to halt key automotive-chip shipments.
  - Zero Hedge, 19 November 2025

• Fund manager survey: most see AI as a bubble, are done with massive CapEx spending, and love emerging markets in 2026
  - Zero Hedge, 19 November 2025

• Over the last 10 months, Jensen Huang - the CEO of Nvidia - has become close to the authoritarian [and racist] Trump, as Nvidia's processor chips have become a tool in trade talks
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 November 2025

• The most joyless tech revolution ever: AI is making us rich [richer] and [everyone else] unhappy. Discomfort around artificial intelligence helps explain the disconnect between a solid economy and an anxious public. [KM: yet another disconnect that makes the rich richer and the public not]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 November 2025

• [The misanthropic friend of child rapist Jeffrey Epstein] Larry Summers (a former Treasury Secertary) resigns from the board of directors of [the misanthropic] OpenAI
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 19 November 2025

• [The misanthropic friend of child rapist Jeffrey Epstein] Larry Summers (a former Treasury Secertary) resigns from the board of directors of [the misanthropic] OpenAI
  - Axios, 19 November 2025

• [The misanthropic friend of child rapist Jeffrey Epstein] Larry Summers (a former Treasury Secertary) resigns from the board of directors of [the misanthropic] OpenAI
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 November 2025

• The extremely rich Elon Musk's Tesla obtains a permit to operate non-paid robotaxi services in Arizona [KM: so that Elon Musk can get richer destroying more paid-human taxi cab driver jobs]
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 November 2025

• The very rich CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, warns of the "irrationality" of trillions of dollars of spending on AI, saying "no company is safe" if/when the bubble bursts
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 18 November 2025

• Since September 10, when Oracle announced a $300 billion deal with the OpenAI maker, Oracle's stock has lost $315 billion in market value. AI's circular [bubble] economy may have a reverse Midas at the center.
  - Financial Times, 18 November 2025

• Jeffrey Gundlach, the 'bond king', warns of the next financial crisis: "It (private credit) has the same trappings as subprime mortgage repackaging in 2006". [KM: a double-bubble - private credit and AI which is borrowing as well]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 18 November 2025

• The simple macro AI-rithmetic does not add up, according to Goldman Sachs
  - Zero Hedge, 18 November 2025

• Investors are waking up to the other 'AI': affordability and inflation
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 18 November 2025

• The AI's bubbles "circle jerk" rages on: Microsoft and Nvidia invest $15 billion in [mis]Anthropic. "We are increasingly going to be customers of each other."
  - Zero Hedge, 18 November 2025

• The AI's bubbles "circle jerk" rages on: Microsoft and Nvidia invest $15 billion in [mis]Anthropic. "We are increasingly going to be customers of each other."
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 November 2025

• Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, says that the trillion-dollar AI investment has "elements of irrationality" [KM: which translated into honest English is "purely irrational"]
  - BBC, 18 November 2025

• The extremely rich Jeff Bezos creates an AI startup where he wll be co-CEO, to make even more billions from the AI bubble.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 November 2025

• Why some elite investors are turning on the darling of the AI rally. Three prominent investors with almost nothing in common are dumping their shares of Nvidia, the computer chip juggernaut that went from relative obscurity to the world's first $5 trillion valuation in just three years.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 18 November 2025

• A startup in Miami, Inversa, is solving the problem of invasive species ... by turning their skin into leather. This includes making leather from the invasinve pythons in Florida's Greater Everglades, from silverfin carp from the Mississippi River Basin, and from lionfish from Caribbean reefs. Inversa is working with about 50 fashion brands and will soon expand into even more species.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 18 November 2025

• A number of high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, have gone down for some users due to problems affecting major internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare
  - BBC, 18 November 2025

• A number of high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, have gone down for some users due to problems affecting major internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 November 2025

• Misanthropic Zoox begins offering non-paid robotaxis rides in San Francisco, competing with Google's misanthropic Waymo's robotaxi service - [KM: both based on one principle - becoming rich by taking jobs from paid-human taxi drivers]
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 November 2025

• A civil war between those wanting to get richer with online gambling. FanDuel and DraftKings said they are quitting the American Gaming Association, because the direction of online betting - increasingly tied to booming prediction markets - does not align with the trade organization. Prediction platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, which allow customers to trade on events across pop culture, news and politics, have skyrocketed in popularity, and sportsbooks have been getting in. [KM: never pleasant when (digital) drug traffickers fight over profits]
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 November 2025

• Scientists in Zhōngguó have developed a catalyst that can turn biomass and coal-derived syngas directly into building blocks for plastic and synthetic rubber with higher efficiency and sustainability than existing methods. The iron-based nanoparticle catalyst converts syngas, or synthesis gas, into hydrogen and carbon-based compounds called olefins by coupling two reactions that separately have limitations but together have synergistic effects. This could significantly reduce Zhōngguó's need to import oil.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 18 November 2025

• A bombshell Griffith University study has validated a long suspected reality: short-form videos (SFVs) like TikToks and Instagram Reels are frying brains, slashing attention spans, and crippling cognitive endurance [KM: yes, but the rich social media companies must get richer]
  - Modernity, 17 November 2025

• OpenAI blocks toymaker FoloToy after its AI teddy bear is caught telling children terrible things
  - Futurism, 17 November 2025

• A non-paid AI podcasting machine is churning out 3,000 episodes a week - and people are listening. Inception Point non-paid's AI Quiet Please podcast network values quantity over quality [KM: to make another rich AI company].
  - The Wrap, 17 November 2025

• The misanthopic tech industry trade group NetChoice is suing Virginia over a new law that will restrict minors from using social media for more than one hour per day. NetChoice is backed by the extremely rich Facebook, Google, Amazon, Reddit and Discord, amongst others. [KM: no one can stop rich AI companies getting richer]
  - The Verge, 17 November 2025

• SP500 and Nasdaq have their biggest losses in a month. More selling could be on the way. Where did the dip buyers go?
  - MarketWatch (locked), 17 November 2025

• A cooling labor market drives uptick in part-time gig-platform hours. "Estimates of employment in the gig/[serf] economy are wide-ranging, but the most credible suggest that 5-15% of the US population participates in gig work, broadly defined as any..."
  - Zero Hedge, 17 November 2025

• It is not a good sign for the stock markets when margin debt is this costly. The cost of carrying debt in the US to buy stocks on leverage is near or above peaks seen prior to bear markets or significant corrections in the market.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 17 November 2025

• Retail electicity prices rise, so regulators are trying to rein in AI data centers. There was no good news this week for those hoping to see relief in electricity prices next year, and more states took steps to put guardrails on data center development. [KM: and make it harder for rich AI companies to get richer?}
  - Zero Hedge, 17 November 2025

• This is how our [AI-bubbled] economy comes crashing down. It is a 'Jenga tower'. Their data centers may run out of energy, their huge expenses might not generate enough revenue, inflation limiting consumption [AI exploits advertising revenue], or being beaten by Zhōngguó.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 November 2025

• An economist asked, "how much should we spend to avoid the AI [bubble] apocalypse?". About 1% of GDP, or $300 billion. [KM: and deny even more riches to the rich AI companies?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 November 2025

• Wall Street blows past bubble worries to supercharge AI spending frenzy, issuing hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to fuel the bubble. [KM: billions in debt needs billions of workers fired?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 November 2025

• Prop bets are scandal magnets for sports leagues. They are also serious moneymakers. The major sports leagues in the USA have started to try to limit action on the sorts of bets most vulnerable to manipulation. That is trickier than it may seem.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 November 2025

• Waymo, the very rich Google's self-driving, non-paid, robotaxi company, has partnered with Uber-backed ride-hailing company Moove to enter the UK market next year [KM: so both can become richer by taking jobs from paid-humans]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 November 2025

• AI [and its bubble] is making Big Tech weaker. Balance sheets and cash flows are showing the strain of AI investments and forcing investors to think about companies differently.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 November 2025

• AI [and its bubble] is making Big Tech weaker. Balance sheets and cash flows are showing the strain of AI investments and forcing investors to think about companies differently.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 November 2025

• To help make the extremely rich Elon Musk more richer, shares of Tesla could rally more than 25% as it makes progress in the development of human-job-destroying, non-paid robotaxis [KM: yes, the rich must get richer, and the poor poorer]
  - CNBC (locked), 17 November 2025

• Zhōngguó's Xpeng report record revenue as its non-paid robotaxi and non-paid humanoid robots ambitions take shape. JPMorgan raises its prediction of the stock price of Xpeng, citing its long-term AI potential [KM: another rich AI company getting richer, the masses getting poorer]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 17 November 2025

• Zhōngguó targets AI-powered price manipulation in new antitrust guidelines. Market regulator SAMR outlines risks of collusion, unfair subsidies and walled gardens in online platforms.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 17 November 2025

• Mathematician Qian Hong, son of top scientific clan in Zhōngguó, leaves the USA for Zhōngguó - another downside of Trump's trade war with Zhōngguó. Return of pioneering scientists' latest generation prompts more attention than usual among a growing trend.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 17 November 2025

• A hedge fund CEO observes: "Everyone is positioning for 2026, when Trump will do everything imaginable [i.e., spend as much money as possible] to win the midterm elections". "No one needs a year-end rally in 25. Been a great year, people are cleaning up their books. Pre-positioning for 26. People think a Q1 boom. Then May 15th is the first day of the new Fed Chair."
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 16 November 2025

• "Buy now, pay later" is expanding fast, and that should worry everyone. "To see that people are using [BNPL services] to buy something as basic and fundamental as groceries ... is a pretty clear indication that a lot of people are struggling." [KM: but not struggling are the rich sharky tech companies offering BNPL loans.]
  - TechCrunch, 16 November 2025

• Extremely rich AI-touting [authoritarian] technocrats turn to socialism as the solution to the problems caused by the extremely rich people. Technocrats are robbing us of our economic bootstraps, and they want to the government to pay for news ones [KM: as opposed to, I don't know, developing technologies that don't need to be profitable by getting people fired?]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 16 November 2025

• Rich AI companies are treating their workers like human garbage, which may be a sign of things to come for the rest of us. Massive people firings by the AI companies underscores the false promises beneath the AI boom: jobs are being degraded, the number of 'freelance workers is soaring, AI-generated profit is almost nonexistent, and rising tides on Wall Street certainly are not raising all boats.
  - Futurism, 16 November 2025

• "A sharp escalation": people in the USA are starting to revolt against [the abuses of] AI data centers [KM: they can eat cake - the rich AI companies much get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 16 November 2025

• The [addictive cellphone] screen that ate your child's education. The negative impact of smartphones on learning is one reason many school districts have instituted a bell-to-bell ban on smartphones in K-12 education. [KM: yes, but rich cellphone companies and addictive educational app makers must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 November 2025

• Students using AI to cheat rattles top universities in South Korea. As many elite colleges struggle to adapt to the technology, the most prestigious universities in South Korea said dozens of students used AI tools to cheat. [KM: well, at least rich AI companies will get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 November 2025

• Is your college football team short of cash? Sports betting can help. Louisiana lawmakers tried a novel strategy for raising revenue, a model that proponents say might work more broadly. [KM: and why not also sell chemical drugs?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 November 2025

• How the misanthropic AI 'Friend' pendant became a symbol of the backlash against [misanthropic] AI. "AI is not your friend ... Talk to a neighbor." - some of the graffiti in protest.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 16 November 2025

• In defense of junior staff: why replacing young paid people with non-paid AI could spark a 'talent doom cycle', raising the barrier to entry to lifelong jobs.
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 November 2025

• Shanghai dreams [has nightmares?] of a new era of 'AI restaurants' where no paid-humans work. The huge city in Zhōngguó aims to pioneer a new age of 'smart dining', where automated kitchens with non-paid AI cooks, and non-paid AI robot servers, replace as many paid human workers as possible [in a city/country where unemployment is a huge problem]. [KM: yes, but rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 November 2025

• Samsung and Hyundai announce that they will invest $310 billion domestically. The manufacturers in South Korea unveiled investments for the next five years as a US trade deal raised concerns of weakening manufacturing at home.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 November 2025

• Competing navies in the South Zhōngguó Sea: how a third aircraft carrier launched by the Navy of Zhōngguó changes military dynamics for the USA. Between what the US can sustain in the region versus what Zhōngguó can concentrate near its shores, the calculation increasingly favours Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 November 2025

• Sam Altman, an AI oligarch and CEO of OpenAI, pre-emptively demands a socialist government bailout when the AI bubble bursts
  - Benjamin Bartee - Armageddon Prose, 15 November 2025

• New facial recognition vans rolled out for use by 7 more police forces in the United Kingdom. Civil liberties and anti-racism groups criticised the software for having a "well-documented history of inaccurate outcomes and racial bias".
  - Zero Hedge, 15 November 2025

• The latest unrealistic hype from Elon Musk to pump his stock and huge wealth: his [won't happen] prediction that within 20 years, people will be able to upload the minds into one of his Optimus robots
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 15 November 2025

• What happens when college football games are only for the rich?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 November 2025

• He has been right about AI for 40 years. Now he thinks everyone is wrong. Yann LeCun invented many fundamental components of modern AI. Now s convinced most in his field have been led astray by the siren [bubbled] song of large language models.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 November 2025

• Robert Reffkin, a real-estate outsider who built Compass into the largest U.S. brokerage, wants to change the way we buy and sell homes, as his company strongly competes with Zillow.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 November 2025

• All three of the core premises behind the bull market are coming under questioning
  - CNBC (locked), 15 November 2025

• Rich AI companies and their AI tools are putting the squeeze on new graduates looking for jobs - and the lays bare the falseness of colleges that promised to make the graduates employable [KM: yes, but the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 November 2025

• Rich AI companies and their AI tools will impact about 90% of all jobs in 2026, according to a survey of human resource executives
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 November 2025

• Why AI investments are increasingly appearing to be a liability, as a storm is coming. It is the tech sector's projected spending that points to trouble ahead. Are [short-term, speculating] investors prepared to wait for the return on their investment?
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 15 November 2025

• AI[-bubble] debt megadeals: a lot of risk, a lot of uncertainty
  - Barron's, 15 November 2025

• AI [bubble] anxiety reaches fever pitch in the stock market. Why it is still not time to worry [about the bubble bursting].
  - Barron's, 15 November 2025

• One scam inflating the AI bubble. Very rich companies such as Facebook and Oracle have quietly doubled the "useful life" of AI hardware on their books from 2-3 to 5-6 years. That move slashes yearly depreciation expense and artificially boosts earnings. Michael Burry, who foresaw the real estate bubble crash of 2008, is blunt: "understating depreciation by extending asset life" is one of the great frauds of modern finance. But what could save the AI bubble from bursting from this scam is massive, determined support from governments and mega-investors. [KM: still a bubble, though the bursting is pushed into the further]
  - InvestorPlace, 14 November 2025

• [VIDEO]: is AI making college students dumber? [KM: yes]
  - The Daily Show, 14 November 2025

• More enshittification of AI: Clad Labs' ChadIDE - a 'brainrot' IDE, traditional development features with an intentionally 'brainrot'-style interface that offers trash content while waiting during pauses in your software development activities
  - Ignacio de Gregorio (Medium - locked), 14 November 2025

• Shares of Alibaba fall 2.3% after a memo from Trump's White House alleges that the company supports the targeting of the USA by the military of Zhōngguó [i.e., what every company in Silicon Valley does for the USA Department of Defense]
  - Zero Hedge, 14 November 2025

• AI boom or bust/[bubble]: prosperity through balance - or turmoil through greed? The AI boom has all the classic bubble symptoms: gigantic spending plans with foggy future returns, cozy insider dealings, and valuations stretched so thin they are practically transparent.
  - Zero Hedge, 14 November 2025

• How the powerful [filthy rich] leaders of Silicon Valley want to prepare the world of non-paid AI jobs replacing as many paid-humans as possible [KM: so these filthy rich leaders can get richer] - advocating the discredited idea of a 'universal basic income' - [KM: a fixed ration of 'cake' while the executive eat caviar]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 14 November 2025

• Shares of StubHub plummet 25% after the company withholds guidance for the 4th quarter
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 November 2025

• Meanwhile, Trump argues for letting 600,000 students from Zhōngguó study at universities in the USA [some of whom will take back knowledge that helps the military of ... Zhōngguó]
  - Zero Hedge, 14 November 2025

• Hedges in financial markets for the AI bubble are rising in price. Commodities and EM stocks are breaking out of their previous long-term ranges, in a sign investors are increasingly seeking to diversify away from US large-caps, which are single-handedly being driven higher by AI mania/[bubble].
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 14 November 2025

• Why the economic fate of the world depends on 2.5 million older rich people in the USA. If a recession in the USA triggers a market crash, these rich people will not be able to prop up the economy with their spending.
  - Zero Hedge, 14 November 2025

• Futures contract prices decline as the AI [bubble] euphoria goes into reverse
  - Zero Hedge, 14 November 2025

• The AI [bubble's] meltdown/burst in Asia - KOSPI cracks, SK Hynix gets 'nuked' and the spillover risk is massive
  - Zero Hedge, 14 November 2025

• A new rare earth minerals crisis is brewing, as shortages of yttrium increase. Zhōngguó, the main source of the element used in speciality alloys found engines as well as coatings to shield against high temperatures, restricted exports along with six other rare earths in April in retaliation for Trump's taxes/tariffs.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 November 2025

• When AI [bubble] hype meets reality: a reckoning in 6 charts. Record capital expenditures and data-center planning are running up against the ground truths of physical infrastructure.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 November 2025

• Who will pay for the AI revolution [to make the rich richer]? Non-rich retirees. Insurance companies that are seeking to fund retirement plans can be natural buyers of data-center debt.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 November 2025

• Why every company suddenly wants to become a bank. Cryptocurrency companies, fintechs and even retailers such as Walmart want to open banks or offer banklike services. [KM: they want the power of being bank for their companies]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 November 2025

• Companies predict 2026 will be the worst job market for college graduates in five years. Hires from the Class of 2026 will stay largely flat, employers project, as layoffs rise and non-paid AI is able to do more entry-level paid-human tasks.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 November 2025

• Robinhood offers to bring cash to your doorstep, for a fee. The brokerage is teaming with mobile app Gopuff to provide banking customers home delivery of cash from their accounts.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 November 2025

• Baidu unveiled two artificial intelligence chips as tech giants in Zhōngguó ramp up their chip-making efforts amid Zhōngguó's push for technological self-sufficiency.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 November 2025

• While woefully rich AI companies get richer with their data centers in Virginia, people and families in Maryland are paying more for electricity, and the prices of electricity will continue to rise [KM: anything to help make the rich AI companies richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 14 November 2025

• The question rich investors and companies in AI are asking: how long before a GPU depreciates? Google, Oracle and Microsoft have pegged the lifespan of their AI computers at up to six years, but skeptics like short seller Michael Burry say they may not last that long. The current AI boom is only three years old, so estimating depreciation remains a challenge and a concern.
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 November 2025

• "Vibe revenue": AI companies admit that they are worried about being in a bubble
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 November 2025

• Coatue Management's founder and portfolio manager, Philippe Laffont, says that the IPO market is broken beyond repair
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 November 2025

• Jim Cramer worries about tech insider selling, says that AI 'mania'/[bubble] could be "starting to unwind/[burst]"
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 November 2025

• Alibaba reduces the charges for its Qwen3-Max AI model up to 50% amid latest AI price war. The new pricing strategy reflects heightened competition in Zhōngguó;s foundational AI model market.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 November 2025

• It has become exceedingly clear that the U.S. economy has entered a crisis that is similar to what we experienced in 2008 and 2009, and a lot of people are really starting to freak out.
  - The Economic Collapse Blog, 13 November 2025

• Krafton, a gaming software company in South Korea, luanches a voluntary resignation program for its paid-human programmers weeks after declaring that the company is a non-paid "AI-first company". It needs the resignations to help cover the costs of its $88 million in AI. [KM: the rich get richer]
  - PC Gamer, 13 November 2025

• AI-powered toys are detected telling 5-year-old children how to find knives and start fires with matches
  - Futurism, 13 November 2025

• The Dow declines 1.6%, the SP500 down 1.7% and the Nasdaq down 2.4% - as traders predict that the Fed is less likely to give them 'cocaine' in December by reducing interest rates again
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 13 November 2025

• Shares of Tesla drop 7% is its worst decline in months, going negative for the year. It recently said it would recall some residential energy products.
  - Zero Hedge, 13 November 2025

• Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, has seen its fortune decline of late as the leading Bitcoin (BTC) treasury's stock has dropped by a drastic 60% from its peak. Moreover, Strategy's multiple-to-net-asset-value (mNAV) has been approaching 1x. Below that, its is holding bitcoins at a loss.
  - The Street, 13 November 2025

• Verizon plans to fire 15,000 people just before the Thanksgiving holiday
  - Zero Hedge, 13 November 2025

• Shares of Disney decline the most in seven months, down 8%, as soft earnings, and higher film costs drag outlook
  - Zero Hedge, 13 November 2025

• The LATAM bull market - the world's most exciting stock market is not where you think. High AI usage, rare earths, and booming data centers - Brazil has them all.
  - Zero Hedge, 13 November 2025

• New 2-times leveraged energy ETFs launched as investors scramble for upside amid relentless AI power demand [that is powering the bubble]
  - Zero Hedge, 13 November 2025

• Parabolic or not in AI. What if 2026-2027 would complete 1999 - 2000 price trend?
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 13 November 2025

• Who pays when AI is wrong? New court cases seek to define content created by artificial intelligence as defamatory - a novel concept that has captivated some legal experts.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 November 2025

• I am a psychoanalyst. This is how technology is harming us. Technology brings a kind of alexithymic fog - alexithymia being the condition of having difficulty identifying or being able to express one's emotions. [KM: yes but the rich tech companies must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 November 2025

• Big Tech's soaring profits have an ugly underside: the huge losses of OpenAI. What is only starting to become clear is that AI startups are also sinkholes for huge losses.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 November 2025

• Streaming media prices are soaring - and consumers are still paying. The menu of options for how to watch shows and movies without cable continues to grow - as do their price tags. But viewers have generally been sticking with their subscriptions.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 November 2025

• Disney reports quarterly results as growth in its streaming broadcast services is offset by declines in its legacy television business
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 November 2025

• Bitcoin and oil decline in price, and bonds and gold prices increase, as AI [bubble] angst accelerates
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 12 November 2025

• It will take $5 trillion to fund the AI cycle/[bubble], and the government of the USA is on the hook for over $1 trillion [of this socialist debt]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 12 November 2025

• AI and very very late stage bubbles. AI skepticism is seeping into the Overton Window. Next comes mainstream and retail investor realization. Then, look out.
  - QTR's Fringe Finance, 12 November 2025

• The SP500 has attained a forward price-to-earnings ratio higher than 23 in late October, a valuation seen during just one other period in the last 25 years. All three major U.S. stock market indexes eventually entered a bear market the last time the S&P 500 recorded a forward price-to-earnings multiple above 23.
  - The Motley Fool, 12 November 2025

• A giant problem emerges for the AI trade/[bubble]: a power shortfall of 44 nuclear power plants by 2028
  - Zero Hedge, 12 November 2025

• $1,750,000 - Brenay Kennnard, a TikTok influencer, is ordered to pay $1.75 million for destroying her manager's marriage
  - Disney's ABC News, 12 November 2025

• Synopsys will fire about 10% of its workforce, or fire roughly 2,000 people, as the chip-design software maker looks to redirect investment growth opportunities
  - Thomson's Reuters, 12 November 2025

• Synopsys will fire about 10% of its workforce, or fire roughly 2,000 people, as the chip-design software maker looks to redirect investment growth opportunities
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 November 2025

• AI company DeepSeek in Zhōngguó issues a rare warning of an incoming AI-fueled JOBpocalypse. "Tech companies should play the role of guardians of humanity, at the very least ..." [KMJC: utterly hilarious, Big Tech has never guarded humanity - can't get richer that way]
  - Zero Hedge, 12 November 2025

• Why debt funding is ratcheting up the risks of the AI boom/[bubble]. While the tech giants have plenty of money to build data centers, smaller outfits are taking on debt and taking big chances to work with them. The shift to debt financing is reminiscent of the dot-com boom in the late 1990s - before that bubble burst.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 November 2025

• The AI boom/[bubble] is looking more and more fragile. AI stocks have swung downward as doubt rises about sustainability and payoff.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 November 2025

• Telenor intends to become an even more Nordic-focused group over the medium to longer term as it targets further growth in the region, driven by higher sales of services such as digital security and entertainment.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 November 2025

• Fast-casual salad chain Sweetgreen's struggles worsened in its third quarter this year, as same-store sales declined 9.5% due to an 11.7% drop in foot traffic, reflecting mounting losses. The company, launched in 2007, has never been profitable.
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 November 2025

• The AI stock boom/bubble disporportionately makes the rich richer: "It really widens the wealth and income gap". The top 20% of the wealthiest U.S. households own nearly 93% of all stock - total wealth from publicly traded stocks has risen by $8 trillion in the past year [KM: the rich, and rich AI companies, bubbly getting richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 November 2025

• Shares of CoreWeave plunge 16% after its CEO discussed delays at a third-party data center developer, Core Scientific (it shares down 11%), that hit full-year guidance in its latest earnings report.
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 November 2025

• Fermi's massive 11 GW energy and data center project in Texas, called Project Matador, which the company has envisioned to be the world's largest AI data center and energy campus in the Texas Panhandle, near Amarillo, is struggling to close the deal with its first major data center tenant. And since Fermi is set up as REIT that allocates income from tenants to shareholders, the delay may raise doubts about attracting other potential money-generating tenants, in a toxic feedback loop.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 November 2025

• The next financial crisis, similar to the housing bubble/crash of 2007 will be ... bitcoin. "CNBC should be embarassed to have cryptocurrency prices on their website".
  - Calculated Risk, 11 November 2025

• The anti-AI-bubble hedge: Apple does not blink when NVDA does. Part of the Apple bull case was on full display last week, while Semis and AI names saw sharp 2%+ declines, AAPL barely flinched, ending each dip roughly flat within 0.5%.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 November 2025

• Oracle is first AI domino to fall [before the AI bubble burst], after Barclays downgrades its debt to sell. "ORCL would run out of cash by the November 2026 quarter, implying substantial funding needs."
  - Zero Hedge, 11 November 2025

• Futures slide as AI [bubble] jitters return after SoftBank sells all of its shares of Nvidia
  - Zero Hedge, 11 November 2025

• Trump says he hates socialism. So why is he acting like a socialist? To support chipmaker Intel, the president used taxpayers' dollars to buy 433 million shares of Intel stock. That is not a free market. [That is a racist's nationalist socialist industrial policy]
  - Reason, 11 November 2025

• Problems increase with Hollywood's 'safety nest' when it is needed most. Production of commercials and advertisements has long been crucial to sustaining entertainment workers in the Los Angeles area. But the demand continues to plummet, as production is moved away from expensive Los Angeles.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 November 2025

• [mis]Anthropic is on track to turn a profit [in the AI bubble] much faster than OpenAI. Financial documents from both companies show the different approaches they are taking to the AI boom/[bubble].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 November 2025

• Visa and Mastercard reach a settlement on a 20-year legal fight with merchants, agreeing to allow stores to reject some credit cards for the first time
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 November 2025

• Softer sales for TSMC shouldn't set off alarms about the AI [bubble]. Analysts say it would be premature to take TSMC's October sales as a sign that demand for AI is starting to ebb.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 November 2025

• Investors in the AI bubble don't like smaller companies getting into big-time AI spending (such as DoorDash, Duolingo and Roblox), but prefer the big authoritarian tech companies (such as Google and Amazon). [KM: bubble, bubble, toil and trouble]
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 November 2025

• Shares of CoreWeave drop 6% after slashing revenue forecast. Coreweave is a former cryptocurrency miner turned GPU renter - its bubble bursting, or the AI bubble starting to burst?
  - Zero Hedge, 10 November 2025

• The extremely rich Marc Andreessen as an avatar for societal decay. How one venture capitalist represents everything wrong with social media. After the Pope argues that technologists should consider the ethics and morality of what they develop, the billionaire Andreessen mocks the Pope with an insulting meme. One person criticized Andreessen: "Marc primarily funds gambling apps, cheating apps, and bot farms. He does not want you to build things that are actually good for society." [KM: harder to get richer doing good for society.]
  - Jeremiah Johnson (Infinite Scroll), 10 November 2025

• 6sense founder Amanda Kahlow raises $30 million for a new, [misanthropic] non-paid, human-replacement, AI sales tool startup, 1mind [KM: yeah, 1 more mind to make the rich richer getting rid of paid human jobs]
  - TechCrunch, 10 November 2025

• The circular money problem at the heart of AI's biggest deals [KM: that are inflating the AI bubble to make the rich richer]
  - TechCrunch, 10 November 2025

• AI [bubble] versus the '1990s': Goldman Sachs says it makes sense for wider spreads and higher volatility. "We see a growing risk that the imbalances that built up in the 1990s will become more visible as the AI investment boom extends [bubble inflates]."
  - Zero Hedge, 10 November 2025

• CTAs are sellers in all scenarios; here are the levels to watch. Negative gamma set to go wild on a melt-up.
  - Zero Hedge, 10 November 2025

• Global stock markets soar as the USA government set to reopen after 8 [cowardly] Democrats cave and agree to end the shutdown
  - Zero Hedge, 10 November 2025

• The AI 'cartel': Miss Market, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs are all in. Three pillars of the establishment declare AI is no bubble. Hammer candles, supercycle sermons, and PowerPoint optimism - nothing can go wrong, right? [KM: it means we are closer to the bubble bursting]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 10 November 2025

• How AI and social media contribute [KM: and greatly profit from] 'brain rot'. AI search tools, chatbots and social media are associated with lower cognitive performance, studies say [KM: yes, but also associated with making woefully rich AI companies richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 November 2025

• This year's hottest cryptocurrency trade is crumbling. Some investors are saying "told you so", while others are doubling down, as a selloff in bitcoin and other digital tokens hits cryptocurrency-treasury companies.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 November 2025

• Real estate guru Grant Cardone predicts that there will be a "massive implosion" of bitcoin treasury companies
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 10 November 2025

• Apple's iPhone Air is a marketing win and a sales flop. Just one in 10 iPhone 17 buyers in the USA opted for the Air in the early weeks of sales, a consumer survey found, with some dissatisfied with its camera, sound quality, battery and price.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 November 2025

• The algorithm failed music. Music recommendation algorithms were supposed to help us cut through the noise, but they just served us up slop.
  - The Verge, 09 November 2025

• Michael Hartnett: the AI bubble "watch out" metric just snapped. "You know that the Fed will be buying AI hyperscaler bonds when they do QE/moneyprinting/bond-buying - [KM: the socialist bailout that will make rich AI companies richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 09 November 2025

• Elon Musk trolled mercilessly after posting AI-generated clip of woman saying "I will always love you"
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 09 November 2025

• The AI [bubble] is not the only thing increasing the price of electricity. (But it is mostly the AI [bubble]).
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 November 2025

• Why does so much new technology feel inspired by dystopian sci-fi movies?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 November 2025

• The new boom in nuclear power in the USA begins with an old, un-solved problem: who is going to pay to dispose of radioactive wastes - investors (capitalism) or taxpayers (socialism)? Already, taxpayers are socialistically subsidizing nuclear power plants for to $800 million every year, a socialist subsidy that has reached $11.1 billion since 1998, and could grow to $44.5 billion in the future - to deal with the 95,000 metric tons of existing nuclear waste. Problem? How to store, manage and dispose of radioactive waste - for thousands of years. [KM: Can't wait to see the ChatGPT solution for this!
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 November 2025

• The CEO of DeepSeek, an AI company in Zhōngguó, makes a rare public comment, and calls for an "AI whistle-blower" on jobs destroyerd/eliminated by AI companies and their tools
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 09 November 2025

• [A new little hole in the AI bubble:] Moonshot AI's Kimi K2 open source LLM model is about as powerful as OpenAI's and Claude's LLM models. And Moonshot didn't need to raise or borrow billions and trillions of dollars to do so.
  - Vishal Rajput (Medium, locked), 08 November 2025

• Tech workers are in deep, deep trouble. "Those laid off now are finding it harder to quickly secure new roles, which could further loosen the labor market." [KM: yes, but the woefully rich AI companies must get richer.]
  - Futurism, 08 November 2025

• Big Tech needs a staggering $1.5 trillion to fund the AI boom [bubble]. This is the complex playbook they are using to get it. Inside the financial engineering of the AI buildout [bubble]: Nvidia, Google and the rest of Big Tech are turning to Wall Street, vendor financing and private creditit. [KM: how many millions of paid humans will need to lose their jobs to make this investment profitable?]
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 08 November 2025

• As schools ban cellphones, children are happy, healthier, noisier (as they talk to each other), less bullying, and less addictive behavior. [KM: but how will dopamine drug trafficking cellphone companies get richer?]
  - Futurism, 08 November 2025

• iRobot is in trouble, but its Roomba is already dead. It has been a rough few years for iRobot, following multiple privacy-related controversies, scrutiny from regulators, and poor reviews for its recent products, which are pretty much now just Roombas. And now they face a lot of competition, some of which have much better robots.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 November 2025

• Debt is helping to inflate the AI bubble. To fund heavy spending on infrastructure for artificial intelligence, companies have leveraged a growing list of complex debt-financing options.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 November 2025

• Zhōngguó's new national drive to embrace artificial intelligence is also giving the authorities new ways to monitor and control its citizens.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 November 2025

• OpenAI races to lessen concerns over its finances. The AI company faced pushback after a top executive raised the idea of government aid, amid concerns that the AI industry is headed toward a dangerous bubble.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 November 2025

• While USA companies dominate the human-job-destroying robotaxi industry in the USA, other countries are looking to Zhōngguó for human-job-destroying robotaxi technology [KM: mostly everyone in the robotaxi industry is a sociopathic destroyer of paid-human jobs]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 November 2025

• Stocks in Zhōngguó are soaring as Beijing doubles down on tech - its own AI bubble. Why the economy is still struggling. Zhōngguó's commitment to innovation poses a long-term threat to companies in the USA. What it needs now is for its citizens to spend more.
  - Barron's, 08 November 2025

• How an automobile processor chip maker in the Netherlands got caught up in the middle of the trade war between the USA and Zhōngguó. The government of Netherlands's repossession of automobile processor chip maker Nexperia from tis parent in Zhōngguó looks to be spreading pain across the automombile industry.
  - Barron's, 08 November 2025

• TikTok shop is now the size of eBay. TikTok's ecommerce arm has kept growing steadily, despite tariffs and never-ending debates over whether the platform should be banned.
  - Wired, 08 November 2025

• Throughout the late 1990s Fred Hickey, the editor of The High-Tech Strategist, was relentlessly critical of the wild market excesses of the time. So-called "bubbleheads" responded by leaving vile messages on his voicemail. He was right when the DotCom bubble burst. He is still publishing. He finds much to remind him about the earlier dotcom mania. Except this time, he believes the market [bubble] is even crazier.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 08 November 2025

• The enshittification of labor - labor joining the Internet in suffering when the system stops punishing deliberate degradation and starts rewarding it.
  - Cory Doctorow (Medium - locked), 08 November 2025

• a The AI spending frenzy pumping up the AI bubble is so huge that it makes no sense. [Insane] AI spending by four extremely woefully rich AI companies [the authoritarian Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook] reaches $360 billion just for data AI centers
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 07 November 2025

• Sam Altman denies OpenAI needs a socialist government bailout: he just wants massive socialist government subsidies.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 November 2025

• The government of Denmark plans to ban access to addictive social media for children under 15
  - Associated Press, 07 November 2025

• The government of Thailand needs to do more to engage Myanmar and its autonomous ethnic states to combat mounting cross-border pollution in the Salween and Mekong rivers from arsenic contamination, says a prominent academic. Communities and ecosystems on both sides of the border are under threat from the pollution created by mining. The contamination is believed to stem from mining operations in Karen and Shan states, where tin and rare-earth mining has long affected the Kok and Mekong basins. The military government holds little sway in these areas, which complicates efforts to find solutions.
  - Bangkok Post, 07 November 2025

• Say hello to the 50-day moving average: Nvidia's $650 billion decline and volatility rises. Nvidia is down 13% in five days. That is $650 billion gone, momentum cracked, and the 50-day now the only thing standing between correction and collapse.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 07 November 2025

• In search of the AI bubble's economic fundamentals
  - Project Syndicate, 07 November 2025

• The AI bubble in Asia just deflated a bit - spillovers coming fast? When KOSPI shakes, AI-bubble beta trades everywhere feel it.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 November 2025

• Stock markets are hovering just above key CTA trigger levels;top Goldman traders "like owning gamma here"
  - Zero Hedge, 07 November 2025

• Seven lawsuits allege OpenAI encouraged suicide, harmful delusions. The suits, filed in California, represent four people who died by suicide and three others who experienced psychological trauma following interactions with OpenAI's ChatGPT. [KM: what are a few deaths if OpenAI is getting richer?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 November 2025

• Seven lawsuits allege OpenAI encouraged suicide, harmful delusions. The suits, filed in California, represent four people who died by suicide and three others who experienced psychological trauma following interactions with OpenAI's ChatGPT. [KM: what are a few deaths if OpenAI is getting richer?]
  - Zero Hedge, 07 November 2025

• Nasdaq probed in Europe over potential antitrust violations. The European Commission opened an investigation into Nasdaq and Deutsche Borse, two of the world's largest exchange operators, over potential collusion in the derivatives market.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 November 2025

• The AI bubble is accelerating the Big Tech's dominance and authoritarian control of the advertising market [KM: local democracy be damned]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 November 2025

• Fang Lei, a long-time professor with Texas A&M University's chemistry department, has returned to Zhōngguó to join the cutting-edge Yongjiang Laboratory, a state-backed research centre that has drawn a cumulative investment of more than 26 billion yuan (US $3.65 billion) in less than four years. Fang's decision reflects a broader trend of top Chinese scientists overseas opting to bring their expertise home, drawn by robust funding, integrated industrial ecosystems and a unique opportunity to scale lab discoveries into real-world technologies. [KM: meanwhile, Trump is attacking fundamental science research in the USA]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 November 2025

• Xpeng, an electric vehicle maker in Zhōngguó cuts open one of its humanoid robots to prove that it is not a human inside. Zhōngguó's maker stuns social media after its lifelike robot performs so convincingly that many thought it was a person in a costume.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 November 2025

• Misanthropic will not make the "Planned Society" viable (where the problems of mass unemployment, the economic depression, financial instability, and material deprivation are all solved [with fairy dust]). [KM: "Big Data" socialism will only make rich AI companies richer.]
  - Zero Hedge, 06 November 2025

• Senator Marsha Blackburn: Google's biased AI falsely accused me of rape - shut down its rampant lies. This is not simply a technical glitch; it is a catastrophic failure of oversight of an AI model downloaded by more than 200 million people.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 06 November 2025

• The AI industry cannot profit [and continue to inflate the bubble] unless it eliminates a lot more paid-human jobs, warns the man who helped create the AI industry, Geoffrey Hinton [KMJC: yes, the woeful rich must get richer]
  - Futurism, 06 November 2025

• As corporate profits in the USA rise and the stock market hits new highs due to the AI bubble, the rich get richer while nearly 1 million paid-humans were fired from their jobs. [KM: how else can the rich get richer without bubbles and firings?]
  - CBS News, 06 November 2025

• News Corporation reports higher revenue as its CEO sends a pointed message to AI companies: stop stealing content from us [KM: how else can the AI companies inflate the bubble?]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 06 November 2025

• Shares of Take-Two Interactive plunged 7% after the company announced it was delaying the release of Grand Theft Auto VI again, pushing back the much-anticipated video game by six months to November 2026
  - Zero Hedge, 06 November 2025

• AI companies, in the rush to profits, wreak havoc on jobs in the USA with two-decade high of 150,000 being fired in October, bringing 2025 total to 1 million people fired [KM: yes, AI bubble profits through job destruction]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 06 November 2025

• The top 1% want everyone else to be poor [or dead]. "They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I will tell you what they do not want: They do not want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking." [KM: so they invest in AI, which while making rich AI companies and the 1% richer, is destroying critical thinking.]
  - Zero Hedge, 06 November 2025

• SoftBank shares slide over 8% amid renewed pressure on stocks linked to the AI bubble
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 November 2025

• Inside Facebook's and Mark Zuckerberg's $16 billion scam ad economy. "If regulators won't tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shoudn't tolerate it in tech." [KM: unless the regulators are bribed enough]
  - Zero Hedge, 06 November 2025

• Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads. Facebook projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads. [KM: one of the fundamental models of Silicon Valley - profit from white-collar crimes]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 06 November 2025

• Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads. Facebook projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads. [KM: one of the fundamental models of Silicon Valley - profit from white-collar crimes]
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 November 2025

• The Dow closes lower by nearly 400 points, and Nasdaq declines by 1.9%, as stocks linked to the AI bubble resumee their decline
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 November 2025

• Shares of Duolingo plummeted 25% on lighter-than-expected guidance as the language learning platform zeroed in on user growth in lieu of near-term monetization
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 November 2025

• Doordash has biggest one-day drop ever as stock falls 17% on spending concerns. The stock plummeted as investors shunned the company's plans to spend "several hundred million dollars" on new products and technology
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 November 2025

• How artificial intelligence became the financial market's real reliion. Wall Street is preaching exponential growth, while skeptics whisper "bubble". [KM: and of course, Wall Street never lies]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 06 November 2025

• David Sacks, Trump's AI advisor, responds to OpenAI's serious (or joking) request: "There will be no bailout for AI ... if one AI [bubbled-company] fails, others [being bubbled] will take its place".
  - Zero Hedge, 06 November 2025

• The CFO of the extremely filthy rich OpenAI seeks socialist subsidies from the USA government, disappointed that investors do not have more "exuberance" for the AI bubble. Maybe because a company such as Open AI with $13 billion in revenues has promised to spend/invest $1.4 trillion. [KM: Ponzi?] "I do not think there is enough exurbance about AI, when I think about the actual practical implications and what it can do for individuals." [KM: The practical implications being putting 150 million people out of work, but let's ignore that.]
  - Zero Hedge, 06 November 2025

• A deeply-divided Bank of England leaves rates unchanged, while warning of an "AI bubble"
  - Zero Hedge, 06 November 2025

• A deeply-divided Bank of England leaves rates unchanged, while warning of an "AI bubble"
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 November 2025

• Shares of SNAP rises as much as 25%, after it gets in on the AI bubble and signs a $400 million deal with Perplexity AI
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 November 2025

• Shares of SNAP rises as much as 25%, after it gets in on the AI bubble and signs a $400 million deal with Perplexity AI
  - Zero Hedge, 06 November 2025

• CarMax stock falls about 10% as CEO steps down, used car retailer releases weak outlook
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 November 2025

• CarMax stock falls about 10% as CEO steps down, used car retailer releases weak outlook
  - Zero Hedge, 06 November 2025

• Google's decade-long bet on custom chips is turning into Google's secret weapon in the AI race
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 November 2025

• Google is launching its most powerful AI processor chip, the Ironwood, taking aim at Nvidia with custom silicon. [Extremely rich] [mis]Anthropic plans to use up to 1 million of the new TPUs to run its Claude model, Google said.
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 November 2025

• Charles Schwab to buy private shares platform Forge Global in $660 million deal
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 November 2025

• Charles Schwab to buy private shares platform Forge Global in $660 million deal
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 November 2025

• The conservative-Christian-leaning broadcaster, Sinclair Broadcast Group, suffers from a huge decline in revenue after it temporarily refused to broadcast the Jimmy Kimmel show in September, with a 16% decline in revenue.
  - The Daily Beast, 06 November 2025

• You have no idea how screwed up is OpenAI. Its hope to make more billions from AGI may be too far in the future, and its competition is getting stronger and stronger.
  - Alberto Romero (Medium, locked), 05 November 2025

• Betting on misery: the dark side of Italy's passion for online gambling, destroying people and families, but making tech companies richer ($25 billion in profits in 2024) and generating lots of tax revenue for the government ($11 billion in 2024). Data shows that betting is especially widespread in poorer and mafia-ridden southern regions - another opium of the masses.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 November 2025

• Poll: most people in the USA think that [misanthropic] AI will "destroy humanity" someday. A new Yahoo/YouGov survey finds that real people are much more pessimistic about AI - and its potential impact on their lives - than [the rich people in] Silicon Valley and Wall Street. [KM: of course, the rich getting richer have money to not be "destroyed"]
  - Yahoo News, 05 November 2025

• The government of Zhōngguó orders state-funded data centers to not use AI processors chips not made in Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 05 November 2025

• 'Big Short 2.0': Deutsche Bank reportedly starts shorting bubbled AI stocks to hedge its data-center funding risks
  - Zero Hedge, 05 November 2025

• Stock markets are plunging worldwide after 'Big Short' investor Michael Burry reveals $1.1 billion bet against bubbled AI stocks
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 05 November 2025

• Michael Burry's investment fund's 13F report reveals that 80% of its shorting of the AI bubble is in the form of buying put options on Palantir and Nvidia, two of the most bubbled stocks
  - Zero Hedge, 05 November 2025

• Michael Burry's investment fund's 13F report reveals that 80% of its shorting of the AI bubble is in the form of buying put options on Palantir and Nvidia, two of the most bubbled stocks
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 05 November 2025

• Extremely rich Apple is so incompetent that despite being worth $4 trillion (and therefore having a few dollars for R&D), it is licensing Google's 1.2-trillion-parameter AI model for Apple's Siri AI assistant [KM: bubble, bubble, don't toil, and trouble]
  - Zero Hedge, 05 November 2025

• Microsoft and Google say their data centers create thousands of jobs. Their permit filings [help prove the lie]. The government of Chile and AI giants promise economy-wide impact but permits show fewer onsite jobs after construction. [KM: can't get richer hiring paid-humans]
  - Rest of World, 05 November 2025

• Elon Musk is obsessed with winning the AI race/bubble, 'forcing' workers to work long hours at his xAI. Employees were compelled to turn over biometric data to develop controversial avatars. [KM: anything to help Musk earn more billions he does not need]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 November 2025

• 'Tutors' at Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, were forced to give up the rights to their faces and voices to train sexy AI bots [KM: an injustice to pump up the AI bubble]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 05 November 2025

• Part of the AI bubble inflation: Palantir's market value has skyrocketed. No other company currently in the S&P 500 has hit a $490 billion valuation as quickly and with as little in sales. [KM: it learned well from the DotCom bubble]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 November 2025

• IBM to fire thousands of people before end of year. The tech company said the cuts, scheduled for the current quarter, will affect a small percentage of its workforce.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 November 2025

• Shares of TASER maker Axon plunge 17% after an earnings short fall due to Trump's taxes/tariffs
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 November 2025

• AI-washing and the massive layoffs hurting the economy. The layoff announcements have raised questions about the strength of the labor market and if it is the start of an AI-driven, white-collar recession [KM: recession, that is, for the non-rich who aren't bubbly AI companies]
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 November 2025

• Amazon has told Perplexity to get its agentic browser out of its online store, the companies both confirmed publicly on Tuesday. After warning Perplexity multiple times that Comet, its AI-powered shopping assistant, was violating Amazon's terms of service by not identifying itself as an agent, Amazon sent the AI search engine startup a sternly worded cease-and-desist letter. [KM: but isn't violating social agreements for profits celebrated in Silicon Valley?]
  - TechCrunch, 04 November 2025

• Common Crawl is doing the dirty (criminal) work for AI companies to help them pump up the bubble. Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles (copyrighted) from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this - as well as masking the actual contents of its archives [KM: the Napster of ethics of justifying crimes for the rich to become richer]
  - The Atlantic, 04 November 2025

• Researchers at OpenAI just proved that Elon Musk's Tesla's "full self-driving" technology for automobiles will never work. No wonder Elon Musk hates Sam Altman. The researchers prove that AI hallucinations are a core element of generative AI technology and can't be fixed by simply adding more data and computing power. Well, Tesla's full self-driving technology is comprised of two generative-AI systems - double hallucinations with no sensor fusion (unlike other car companies, due to Musk's orders, Tesla relies solely on vision inputs - no radar or ultrasonic data). [KM: and yet Tesla is part of the AI bubble]
  - Will Lockett (Medium - locked), 04 November 2025

• The global crash of Amazon Web Services' servers just proved (again) that AI isn't the answer. It took 16 hours for ultra-rich Amazon to fix the crash. Why? It's increasing reliance on non-paid AI, not paid humans, in its rush to fire as many paid humans as possible. "AI cannot be trusted to create simple computer programs, so how can it be trusted to troubleshoot and fix several billion dollars' worth of offline cloud computing infrastructure? It cannot."
  - Will Lockett (Medium - locked), 04 November 2025

• An alarming study shows that ChatGPT confuses fact and fiction - and users are none the wiser: "Serious errors in judgment". [KM: you can inflate bubble by spending money on quality]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 04 November 2025

• DRAM prices skyrocket 171% year-over-year, outpacing the rate of gold price increases - as AI demand/bubble drives massive price hikes as shortage takes hold
  - Tom's Hardware, 04 November 2025

• Algorithms are dividing us [KM: while making rich social media companies richer]. The posts that get the most engagement are rarely the ones that bring people together. They are usually the ones that stir people up. The ones that make us mad or pick at our differences. The ones that feed the algorithms. The algorithm rewards division, and division drives engagement. Engagement drives creators to lean further into whatever keeps people talking. It is [misanthropic] loop - anger fuels clicks, clicks fuel income, and income rewards outrage. [KM: and rich social media companies get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 04 November 2025

• Stocks, gold, credit, and cryptocurrencies crushed as 'hunt for laggards' hammers BigTech. The S&P 500 P/E multiple is nearing levels it has seen during each of the past two Tech bubbles (2001 and 2021).
  - Zero Hedge, 04 November 2025

• Global stock markets fall sharply over fears due to the AI bubble. Declines in the USA, Asia and Europe follow warning from bank bosses that market correction could lie ahead
  - The Guardian, 04 November 2025

• The Dow falls 450 points as the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley warn of market correction after AI boom [bubble]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 04 November 2025

• AI tools (such as very rich OpenAI's Sora and the very rich Elon Musk's Grok) are making death threats much more realistic, allowing online harassers to generate images and sounds that simulate their victims in violent situations [KM: more profits for the woefully rich AI companies]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 November 2025

• Surging costs for electricity are hurting the non-rich. AI data centers [KM: which are making rich AI companies richer] are causing higher prices for non-rich consumers, with the higher energy bills inflaming local politics
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 November 2025

• What is the cause of the current white-collar layoffs? Traditional cost cutting, but also two misanthropies: Trump's taxes/tariffs and the AI bubble [KM: needing non-rich victims]
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 November 2025

• The decline of the price of bitcoin (down 6% in 2 days) in November worsens as investors reduce risk due to worries about the AI bubble
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 November 2025

• The decline of the price of bitcoin (down 6% in 2 days) in November worsens as investors reduce risk due to worries about the AI bubble
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 04 November 2025

• Uber falls 8% desptie beating analysts estimates in the third quarter and posting strong gross booking [KM: yes, but they are not reducing their dependency on paid-human drivers quick enough]
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 November 2025

• Non-paid AI tools are destroying paid-human jobs - what to know. An analyst said that white-collar analytical paid-human jobs are most at risk from non-paid AI integration, while manual labor paid-human jobs face risk from robotics. [KM: yes, but the woeful rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 03 November 2025

• [Sugar drug trafficker] Coca-Cola's new AI-generated holiday ad is a sloppy eyesore
  - The Verge, 03 November 2025

• Ultra-fast fashion [bad for the environment] and 'childlike' sex dolls [horrible for children]: why online retailer Shein isn't winning friends in France
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 November 2025

• France has threatened to cut off Shein's access to customers in France, after the e-commerce platform based in Zhōngguó was accused by authorities in France of selling "sex dolls with a childlike appearance".
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 November 2025

• France has threatened to cut off Shein's access to customers in France, after the e-commerce platform based in Zhōngguó was accused by authorities in France of selling "sex dolls with a childlike appearance".
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 November 2025

• The increasing investments of BigTech companies in AI show that even if the stock market is in a bubble, equities still have room to run higher before it bursts
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 03 November 2025

• Amazon and OpenAI sign a $38 billion deal for cloud services, as OpenAI's exclusive relationship ends with Microsoft
  - Zero Hedge, 03 November 2025

• "Let them eat LLMs": a half-trillion dollar spend, collapsing cash flow, zero return-on-investment -- yet still "no signs of pulling back". Sounds sustainable [as a bubble - NOT!]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 03 November 2025

• The top 10 richest men in the USA saw their wealth grow by $700 billion combined under Trump (due in part to the AI bubble). The [grifter] Trump's own personal wealth allegedly grew by $3.4 billion during his two terms in office.
  - The Independent, 03 November 2025

• How AI systems can use your personal data to hurt your neighbor, when AI algorithms trained on your personal data is used to assess other people. [KM: stop whining, the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 November 2025

• I loved being social. Then I started talking to an AI chatbot. It was so much easier to have a conversation with a chatbot than a human being. But the more I talked to AI, the less I talked to everybody else. [KM: yes, but you helped rich AI companies get richer - that is not social?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 November 2025

• Why it seems your chatbot really, really hates to see you go. Artificial-intelligence companions are designed to keep you talking as long as possible - even if they have to emotionally manipulate you to do it [KM: yes, so their rich AI corporate owners can get richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 November 2025

• The [extremely rich] CEO of Goldman Sachs is not worried about non-paid replacing other people's jobs
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 November 2025

• Nexperia Zhōngguó vows business as usual after a halt in wafer supplies from Nexperia in the Netherlands. Nexperia Zhōngguó says production remains stable and new suppliers secured despite headquarters suspending shipments from Europe.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 November 2025

• A troubling phenomenon is spreading through workplaces in the USA, from private companies to government agencies, creating friction where artificial intelligence promised efficiency. Dubbed 'workslop' by researchers at BetterUp and Stanford's Social Media Lab, AI-generated content appears polished but lacks the substance to advance any task meaningfully. This represents more than a minor irritation. The research estimates that workers waste nearly two hours correcting or redoing each instance of workslop they receive, creating a financial burden that amounts to roughly $9 million annually for a given company of 10,000 employees.
  - The Hill, 02 November 2025

• [To help inflate the AI bubble, rich] AI companies are killing the open source software world. How very rich AI companies with their large language models broke the social contract that made modern software possible, by stealing the open source software and not contributing anything back.
  - Jovan Cicmil (Medium, locked), 02 November 2025

• Electricity prices soar more than 200% near AI data centers [KM: the rich get richer, the poor poorer and colder]
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 02 November 2025

• No one is above the law - except Big Tech under Section 230, a legal shield from all sorts of crimes for extremely-rich multi-billion dollar corporations. [KM: the woeful rich must get richer]
  - The Hill, 02 November 2025

• Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have an AI product problem. Facebook will be spending over $600 billion on AI infrastructure. But there is no meaningful revenue from AI - the classic signs of a bubble. Zuckerberg has no clear budget for projected spending and no available product that could anchor a revenue forecast.
  - TechCrunch, 02 November 2025

• Zhōngguó atomic quantum computer reports first sales with orders worth US$5.6 million. The Hanyuan-1 is delivered to Zhōngguó Mobile subsidiary while Pakistan also places order, according to media.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 02 November 2025

• A low-cost killer: can Zhōngguó Feilong-300D suicide drone deter rivals and impress buyers? Military journal details surprisingly inexpensive long-range reconnaissance and attack vehicle aimed at price-sensitive buyers.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 02 November 2025

• Among the few certainties in life aside from death and taxes is the inevitability that when there is gambling there will always be the Mob. How NBA executives got mixed up with the Mob in an epic gambling scandal.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 01 November 2025

• The manufacturer of iLife smart vacuums issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data - the user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline.
  - Tom's Hardware, 01 November 2025

• AI chatbots should not be talking to children [KM: especially for making rich AI companies richer]. Congress must pass laws to regulate such interactions. AI chatbots do not provie companionship - they are manipulative commodification [KM: to make rich AI companies richer]
  - The Hill, 01 November 2025

• Companies are told to stop hiring humans - we are closer to an non-paid AI job apocalypse than you think. As a misanthropic AI agency in San Francisco launches a billboard campaign telling bosses to "Stop Hiring Humans", the extremely rich tech titans are betting big on companies replacing their paid-human workers with non-AI - the only way to make the AI bubble less of a bubble. While their billions of misanthopic investment are signalling a market crash, a market crash may also be the only thing that slows down unemployment on a massive scale. [KMJC: the woes caused by the woefully rich trying to get richer]
  - The Independent, 01 November 2025

• The AI spending of Big Tech is accelerating (again). Despite the risk of a bubble, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon plan to spend billions more on artificial intelligence than they already do.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 November 2025

• Amid the wild surge in AI spending [that is inflating the AI bubble], investors in listed companies are making the same demand they have for years: Show me the money.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 November 2025

• The White House is expected to announce resumption of automobile processor chip shipments from Zhōngguó. Nexperia has not shipped chips for weeks, putting car production around the world at risk.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 November 2025

• According to Billboard, an AI singer named Xania Monet is "the first known AI algorithm to earn enough radio airplay to debut on a Billboard radio chart". Monet was designed by Telisha Nikki Jones, a poet from Mississippi.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 01 November 2025

• Cannabis stocks are positioned for a potential uptick, with analysts citing hopes for new federal rules on hemp-derived products and signals that Trump may ease marijuana restrictions
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 November 2025

• How the Middle East oil monarchies can [help inflate the AI bubble]. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia can boast advantages in the competition for data centers: cheap energy and deep capital pockets.
  - Barron's, 01 November 2025

• Do AI browsers exist for you - or to give AI companies data [KM: to get richer exploiting your personal data]? "If you are an AI company hoping to train your models to replicate/replace a bunch of white-collar work [KM: to make the rich AI companies richer], millions of browser sessions would be a pretty valuable source of data".
  - Fast Company, 31 October 2025

• White racist [Christian] influencers are using OpenAI's Sora to make it look like that poor people are selling food stamps for cash. Unfortunately, the use of AI by racists to generate egregious misinformation about the disadvantaged doesn't end with manufactured SNAP fraud. [KM: racist bubble inflating]
  - Futurism, 31 October 2025

• How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar [bubble]. Here are seven unusual financial agreements helping to drive the ambitions of the poster child of the AI [bubble].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 October 2025

• Why even basic AI use is so bad for students [KM: but great for helping to inflate bubbles]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 October 2025

• Volkswagen said on Thursday that it lost $1.5 billion in the third quarter because of Trump's taxes/tariffs and Volkswagen's shift away from electric vehicles at Porsche, but that it remained on track to meet its financial targets for the year, provided it can secure the semiconductors it needed to power its vehicles.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 October 2025

• Facebook still have a lot to prove in the AI [bubble]. Facebook's business model sparks more questions about the eventual payoff [from the AI bubble] than rivals such as Google and Microsoft.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 October 2025

• The [let them eat KaKe]'K-shaped' economy in the USA: a small number of rich people are freely spending their AI bubble profits, while the vast majority of the non-rich are reducing their purchases, causing companies to reduce sizes and prices of products for the non-rich. And thanks to the AI bubble, repairing the 'K-shaped' economy will be very difficult.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 31 October 2025

• Big Tech keeps splurging on AI. The pressure is ramping up to show how these companies will obtain a profitable return on these huge bubbly-investments.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 31 October 2025

• How streaming is revolutionizing the film industry in Africa
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 31 October 2025

• More AI-bubbling. Shares of Getty Images soared 19% on Friday after the company announced that it struck a multi-year licensing agreement with Perplexity AI.
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 October 2025

• US software firm SAS exits Zhōngguó after 25 years, lays off about 400 staff. One of Zhōngguó's top employers for 17 consecutive years, SAS follows other Western tech firms in scaling back local operations.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 31 October 2025

• The extremely rich Elon Musk defends [human-job-destroying] robotaxis that kill cats, after a Google-powered robotaxi sparked heartbreak and anger when it ran over and killed a beloved 'bodega cat' in San Francisco
  - The Daily Beast, 31 October 2025

• How Moderna, the company that helped save the world, unraveled. After missteps and misfortune, the biotech confronts a precarious future.
  - STAT, 30 October 2025

• How AGI (artifical general intelligence) became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time, [KM: mostly useful for inflating bubbles to make the woefully rich richer]. The idea that machines will be as smart as - or smarter than - humans has hijacked an entire industry. But look closely and you will see it is a myth that persists for many of the same reasons conspiracies do - [KM: to make people richer]
  - MIT Technology Review, 30 October 2025

• Fed Chair Jerome Powell says that the AI hiring apocalypse is real: "Job creation is pretty close to zero". [KM: kill jobs to make rich AI companies richer]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 30 October 2025

• Why the AI spending spree could spell trouble for investors, [as the bubble inflates]. As Big Tech pours trillions into AI infrastructure, history warns of overinvestment, shrinking returns, and rising risks [of a bubble/crash].
  - Morningstar, 30 October 2025

• Shares of Facebook plummet as investors are horrified at how much Zuckerberg is spending on poorly planned AI ventures [to help inflate the AI bubble]
  - Futurism, 30 October 2025

• AAPL dumps then pumps despite dismal sales in Zhōngguó. The results were rather mediocre at best, but for now the gambling market is giving it the benefit of the doubt.
  - Zero Hedge, 30 October 2025

• Five stocks in the USA represent 61% of the GDP of the USA: NVDA (16.7%) , MSFT (13.15%) , AAPL( 13.12%) , GOOG (10.6%), and AMZN (8.07%). [KMJC: the uber-woeful rich must get richer]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 30 October 2025

• Shares of EBay plunged as much as 16% on Thursday, the biggest intraday drop since January 2005, after the company issued disappointing fourth-quarter guidance
  - Zero Hedge, 30 October 2025

• Is the AI bubble the tip of the Fed's coming inflation 'iceberg'? The AI bubble's exponentially rising power demand is emblematic of the increasingly hawkish outlook for inflation.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 30 October 2025

• Shares of Carvana plunge nearly 10% despite strong headline earnings
  - Zero Hedge, 30 October 2025

• How NDAs keep bubbly AI data center details hidden from people in the USA. Extremely rich Big Tech companies use [authoritarian] secrecy agreements with local governments to keep communities from knowing who is building in their backyards. [KMJC: one of the abuses you can buy if you are the woefully rich]
  - NBC News, 30 October 2025

• Fed Chair Powell, who many criticize for mismanaging the economy, says that the AI bubble is diffrent from the DotCom bubble. "They actually have earnings and stuff like that." Well, they had earnings and stuff like that during the DotCom bubble. And the DotCom bubble had fewer circular investment patterns. And despite spending trillions, the AI bubble is seeing far less in revenues. [KM: Powell should read my books.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 October 2025

• Scientists in Zhōngguó have developed a method that can slash defects in lithography by up to 99 percent. The researchers achieved unprecedented clarity by using cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) to pinpoint, for the first time, the minute sources of common manufacturing flaws.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 30 October 2025

• We need a global movement to prohibit superintelligent AI
  - Time, 29 October 2025

• [To make himself and Facebook/Instagram richer,] Mark Zuckerberg is excited to add more AI-generated content/[slop/halluncinations] to all of your social feeds. [Anything to profit from creating less social interactions between two humans][KM: yes, the woeful rich must get richer]
  - The Verge, 29 October 2025

• A graph that AI bubbles don't want you to see: while the price of Oracle's stock is bubbled up, the price of credit default swaps on the company's debt is also at record highs with Oracle's debt/equity ratio over 500%. The Bank of England warns: "If the projected scale of debt-financed AI and associated energy infrastructure investment materializes over this decade, financial stability risks are likely to grow.", which threatens the banking system lending a lot of the money to the AI bubble.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 October 2025

• Samsung's third-quarter profit surges 160% as processor chip business bounces back from brutal slump
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 October 2025

• In Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, e-commerce companies based in Zhōngguó have quickly come to dominate around half of the online shopping market
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 October 2025

• Goldman Sachs predicts the AI bubble will continue to inflate: "Funding spreads are not stretched, CTA signals remain positive, dealers' gamma is not a headache for at least another 3 weeks, stock buybacks are back."
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 29 October 2025

• Shares of Facebook drop 9% despite beating earnings estimates as it suffers a one-time tax charge of $15.93 billion
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 October 2025

• The AI bubble goes parabolic. The Nasdaq index is up, volatility is up. Easiest way to help inflate the bubble is by buying lots of call options, pushing volatilities higher.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 October 2025

• How Zhōngguó raced ahead of the USA on nuclear power technology. The USA was once the undisputed leader in atomic energy. Now it is trying to catch up.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 October 2025

• The Trump administration backs plan for new nuclear power plants
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 October 2025

• Can a start-up make computer processor chips cheaper than the giants of the semiconductor industry? Substrate, a San Francisco company, is trying to take on powerhouses like the Dutch company ASML.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 October 2025

• Can a start-up make computer processor chips cheaper than the giants of the semiconductor industry? Substrate, a San Francisco company, is trying to take on powerhouses like the Dutch company ASML.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 October 2025

• Tens of thousands of white-collar jobs are vanishing as non-paid AI allows companies to eliminate these paid-human jobs. Layoffs at companies ranging from Amazon to Target are sending young and experienced workers alike into an unwelcoming market. [KMJC: yes, but the woefully rich AI companies - and their young - must get richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 October 2025

• Internet pioneer AOL to be acquired by Italian tech company Bending Spoons. Bending Spoons secured $2.8 billion in debt financing to help fund the deal and for other investments.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 October 2025

• Barclays to buy a lending startup in the USA, Best Egg, for $800 million. The bet on consumer finance in the USA forms part of CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan's bid to increase the price of the stock of the British bank.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 October 2025

• A really huge bubble: Nvidia becomes the world's first $5 trillion company, just three months after achieving a $4 trillion valuation. [JC: Woe to you who are (extremely) rich]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 29 October 2025

• A really huge bubble: Nvidia becomes the world's first $5 trillion company, just three months after achieving a $4 trillion valuation. [JC: Woe to you who are (extremely) rich]
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 October 2025

• [VIDEO]: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang highlights his close relationship with the [authoritarian racist] Trump at the company's AI conference. [JC: Woe to you who are (extremely) rich]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 29 October 2025

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang highlights his close relationship with the [authoritarian racist] Trump at the company's AI conference. [JC: Woe to you who are (extremely) rich]
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 29 October 2025

• Does Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang support his close friend Trump and his close friend Trump's Republicans, who are joining Big Oil's all-out push to use their riches to shut down climate liability efforts? Republican attorneys general, GOP lawmakers, rich industry groups and Trump himself are all maneuvering to foreclose the ability of cities and states to hold the fossil fuel industry liable for damages linked to climate change and global heating. [JC: Woe to you who are (extremely) rich]
  - Inside Climate News, 29 October 2025

• Shares of payment services company Fiserv plummet 44% after the fintech company slashed full-year guidance
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 October 2025

• Amid an "AI headline bonanza", a top tech trader at Goldman Sachs warns of "palpable fatigue" to the neverending stream of circular investments
  - Zero Hedge, 28 October 2025

• There will be millions ... and perhaps tens of millions... of [paid-humans fired] in the USA in the years ahead thanks to the non-paid AI tools of extrenely rich AI companies. Still, there is no current business model justifying the massive amounts of money sloshing around the AI sector. Worse, it is unknown whether there will ever be one that justifies the trillions of dollars spent.
  - Stansberry Research, 28 October 2025

• Super Teacher is a four-year-old company developing AI software to replace paid-human tutors in elementary schools with non-paid AI tutors
  - TechCrunch, 28 October 2025

• Malaysia will maintain a ban on the export of raw rare earths to protect its domestic resources, despite signing a critical minerals deal with the USA this week. "We no longer want to be a country that only digs and ships out cheap raw materials like in the past ... so that value is added to Malaysia."
  - Thomson's Reuters, 28 October 2025

• How delivery services are killing the restaurant culture in the USA. In 2024, nearly three out of every four restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant. This lust for riches is ruining everybody. Restauratns are squeezed financially by delivery service companies. Delivery service companies have to charge customers more, and pay their serf-drivers less, to ever make a profit. "Delivery saved us during the Covid pandemic. Now they are killing us." Rich tech companies externalize human costs, while ruining restauratns. [KMJC: yes, but the woeful rich must get richer]
  - The Atlantic, 28 October 2025

• Will AI bury future generations in cognitive debt? As very rich AI companies seek to automate repetitive tasks in the name of cost-cutting using non-paid AI, they should [but won't] consider the longer-term implications. If we transfer all codified knowledge to machines, we will bequeath to future generations a world where it will be ever harder to learn by doing, to achieve mastery, and thus to aspire to creative freedom. [KMJC: but the woeful rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Project Syndicate (locked), 28 October 2025

• Why sports betting apps are designed to be so addictive, according to experts. The American Gaming Association reported that legal sportsbooks took nearly $150 billion in bets in 2024, a record amount. "Sports betting apps have taken the highly addictive nature of smartphone use and compounded it with the highly addictive nature of sports gambling." Sportsbook apps are designed with many of the same addicting engagement mechanics as social media or gaming platforms - with colorful animations, endless opportunities for dopamine hits and personalized recommendations based on your past activity.
  - HuffPost, 28 October 2025

• MSNBC host goes off on CNN's "right wing" owner for paying Scott Jennings to "lie" about Trump. Lawrence O'Donnell also called CNN CEO Mark Thompson "an Englishman who thinks paying Scott Jennings to lie about Donald Trump is money very well spent".
  - HuffPost, 28 October 2025

• Nvidia's $1 billion bet aims to transform non-innovative Nokia into the west's answer to the innovative Huawei. Under the new partnership, Nvidia's AI chips will power Nokia's AI-accelerated 5G and 6G software and will explore integrating Nokia's data center technologies into Nvidia's own infrastructure.
  - Zero Hedge, 28 October 2025

• Nvidia's $1 billion bet aims to transform non-innovative Nokia into the west's answer to the innovative Huawei. Under the new partnership, Nvidia's AI chips will power Nokia's AI-accelerated 5G and 6G software and will explore integrating Nokia's data center technologies into Nvidia's own infrastructure.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 October 2025

• Shares of Nokia soar 205 after Nvidia announces that it will purchase $1 billion in new Nokia shares, the latest equity stake in a strategic partner for the AI chip giant
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 October 2025

• Ray Dalio says a risky AI market bubble is forming, but may not pop until the Fed tightens monetary policy. Which it won't be doing as it continues to reduce interest rates.
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 October 2025

• A bubble within a bubble: corporations are battling a wave of AI-generated fake expense receipts. AppZen said fake AI receipts accounted for 14% of fraudulent documents submitted in September compared with none last year. Ramp flagged more than one million dollars in fraudulent invoices within 90 days. About 30% of financial professionals in the US and UK surveyed by Medius reported seeing a rise in falsified receipts after OpenAI released GPT-4o last year. Free and accessible image generation software has made it possible for anyone to falsify receipts in seconds by writing simple text instructions to chatbots. [KM: yes, these corporations suffer. But rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Financial Times (locked), 28 October 2025

• The extremely rich Microsoft and extremely rich OpenAI signed a new, long-term, [bubble-inflating], agreement to continue their partnership with OpenAI now as a 'public benefit corporation' [KM: if by the public you mean non-paid AI systems]
  - Zero Hedge, 28 October 2025

• The extremely rich Microsoft and extremely rich OpenAI signed a new, long-term, [bubble-inflating], agreement to continue their partnership with OpenAI now as a 'public benefit corporation' [KM: if by the public you mean non-paid AI systems]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 October 2025

• Another downside of the AI/tech bubble: Elon Musk launches Grokpedia, a misanthophic competitor to Wikipedia. While Grokipedia content is being created by non-paid AI, Wikipedia content is written by millions of volunteer contributing humans.
  - Zero Hedge, 28 October 2025

• Elon Musk's Grokipedia extensively copied from Wikipedia (which it insults), though some of the copied content was changed to reflect the extremely rich Musk's right-wing political biases
  - Futurism, 28 October 2025

• Small businesses in the USA are bleeding to death. Meanwhile, Wall Street is hedged [KM: getting richer with its AI bubble], Silicon Valley is hiring 'prompt' engineers [to inflate the bubble], while Main Street businesses - the non-rich - are praying for one more quarter of payroll.
  - Zero Hedge ([locked], 28 October 2025

• I led product safety at OpenAI. Do not trust its claims about 'erotica'. Originally, nobody wanted to be the morality police, but we lacked ways to measure and manage erotic usage carefully. We stopped ChatGPT from being used to generate erotica. Don't trust OpenAI's promises now that its erotica generation is safe. [KM: yes, safety is less important than inflating the bubble]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 October 2025

• Online gambling is killing sports and consuming the USA. Gambling doesn't just buy ads. It owns sports networks, producing shows that prod fans to bet ever more. All the while, gambling addiction is quietly growing, leaving a trail of financial ruin, debt and shame. We see gambling everywhere now - in our soaring stock market, the booms and busts of Bitcoin, the rise of techno-oligarchs like Elon Musk. The democratic process itself can now effectively be wagered on. [KM: yes, another profitable drug]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 October 2025

• Step by step, how Zhōngguó seized control of critical minerals. Zhōngguó's far-reaching rules already affect manufacturers of semiconductors, cars and many other products. They will soon become much broader.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 October 2025

• Saudi Arabia - another AI bubble blower. Rich with oil, Saudi Arabia wants to be known as the 'AI exporter'. The kingdom is pouring money into data centers and working with tech giants in the USA and Zhōngguó, landing its AI ambitions in the middle of a geopolitical tussle for tech power.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 October 2025

• Big Tech's predatory platform ["We get filthy rich, you don't"] does not have to be our future. The Davids of the world ended up working hard to make a new set of Goliaths [filthy] rich. Last year, Amazon charged private sellers, on average, between 50 and 60 percent of their sales in fees. [A whored] Congress has failed to enact even basic protections for small and medium-size businesses in their dealings with the internet platforms.Making matters worse, the platform-extraction model is now spreading from tech to other economic sectors. In health care, private equity firms have sought to reorganize the industry into what they openly call a platform model. [KM: yes, but the rich must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 October 2025

• Amazon will fire about 14,000 paid-human workers, while it invests more of its billions in non-paid AI
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 October 2025

• Amazon will fire about 14,000 paid-human workers, while it invests more of its billions in non-paid AI
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 October 2025

• The AI startup fueling ChatGPT's [bubble] is now valued at $10 billion. Mercor manages contractors around the world who help chatbots learn to think and speak like humans [KM: so AI companies can get even bubbly richer by getting paid-humans fired/not-hired]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 October 2025

• [There is little that is more profitable than selling dopamine-hit producing products, be there physical or digital drugs.] The market value of Apple has risen over $4 trillion.
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 October 2025

• PayPal shares surge 13% after OpenAI deal to become the first payments wallet in ChatGPT
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 October 2025

• A new law in Zhōngguó: only degree-holding 'influencers' can discuss professional topics. Anyone creating content on sensitive topics like medicine, law, education or finance must hold formal qualifications in those fields.
  - IOL (South Africa), 27 October 2025

• DoubleSpeed, an AI startup that will offer 'phone farms' gets funding from the extremely rich Marc Andreessen to flood social media with spam and AI slop. Phone farming is a tactic most often used by hackers and financial criminals to use large numbers of devices to send spam texts, farm social media engagement, or generate fake reviews. [KM: Marc, to you really need to get even filthier richer with this crap?]
  - Futurism, 27 October 2025

• Why the bursting of the AI bubble will destroy Elon Musk's empire because of debt and cash flow problems
  - Will Lockett (Medium), 27 October 2025

• The coming deluge of debt to keep the AI bubble inflated
  - Zero Hedge, 27 October 2025

• Australia's competition regulator on Monday sued Microsoft, accusing it of misleading millions of customers into paying higher prices for its Microsoft 365 software after bundling it with artificial intelligence tool Copilot. [KM: higher prices help pump the bubble]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 27 October 2025

• The extremely rich Amazon plans to fire as many as 30,000 people in corporate positions (about 10% of the people working its 'white collar' jobs)
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 October 2025

• AI tools used by Electronic Arts are creating more work than they save. The tools produce flawed code and hallucinations that employees then spend time correcting. Staff say the AI creates more work rather than less, according to Business Insider. They fix mistakes while simultaneously training the programs on their own work. Creative employees fear the technology will eventually eliminate demand for character artists and level designers. One recently laid-off senior quality-assurance designer says AI performed a key part of his job -- reviewing and summarizing feedback from hundreds of play testers. He suspects this contributed to his termination when about 100 colleagues were let go this past spring from the company's Respawn Entertainment studio. [KM: these companies better improve their tools to make it easier to fire humans to inflate the bubble]
  - Business Insider (locked), 27 October 2025

• Shares of Qualcomm rise as much as 20% adfer Qualcomm announces AI processor chips to compete with AMD and Nvidia
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 October 2025

• Shares of Qualcomm rise as much as 20% adfer Qualcomm announces AI processor chips to compete with AMD and Nvidia
  - Zero Hedge, 27 October 2025

• Qualcomm announces AI processor chips to compete with AMD and Nvidia
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 October 2025

• More big rich companies bet that they can still grow without hiring paid humans. One reason management thinks so is that they want to use non-paid AI to avoid hiring more paid-humans.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 October 2025

• Nexperia's factory in Zhōngguó is forced to reduce output as the takeover by its owners in the Netherlands deepens global chip supply tensions
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 27 October 2025

• As rich AI companies continue to bubble, one bubble inflator is accelerating the capabilities of their AI tools. But cybersecurity and privacy experts warn that the same models capable of detecting fraud, securing networks, or anonymizing records can also infer identities, reassemble stripped-out details, and expose sensitive information.
  - Zero Hedge, 26 October 2025

• [Pump up the volume! Bubble! Bubble!] Billionaire Marc Andreessen [bubble-hypes] that AI will be so powerful that "everything than costs $100 will sell for a penny" in an era of hyper-deflation [KM: yeah, plus a $99 subscription fee to keep the rich rich]
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 26 October 2025

• Gambling apps are really no different than any other social media app; they are all designed to be highly addictive. The nexus of dopamine now includes financial markets. Most of the trading that goes on day-to-day is nothing more than gambling, especially with leveraged ETFs. Want more gambling? You have "Bitcoin Treasury" companies. A new company, Coverd (because who needs to spell in the AI economy?), now allows you to gamble on your bills. And the biggest gamble? The AI bubble.
  - Alhambra Partners, 26 October 2025

• The number of leveraged equity ETFs is at a record high of 701
  - Zero Hedge, 26 October 2025

• There are over 100 'BSL-4' bioweapons laboratories operating worldwide, with more under construction. Thousands of BSL-3 labs worldwide now handle pathogens like bird flu, SARS-CoV-2, and tuberculosis... with almost "no oversight", according to biosecurity experts.
  - Zero Hedge, 26 October 2025

• Money pours into the robotics sector of Zhōngguó, as commercialization speeds up. Currently, non-paid humanoid robots in Zhōngguó are mostly deployed in the entertainment, education and exhibition sectors, but companies and investors are betting that broader commercial and industrial use cases will emerge as hardware matures and software and deployment ecosystems evolve [KM: to eliminate more paid-human jobs]
  - Global Times, 26 October 2025

• You will probably lose: it is Trump's casino economy - the AI bubble, cryptocurrency scams and memecoins, TACO tax/tariff market manipulation, and sports gambling [KM: and the rich get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 October 2025

• $7,000,000 - Motorola won a costly [to taxpayers] $7 million contract to modernize the emergency radio system in Kern County, Texas. When a devastating flash flood swept through the county, emergency crews had trouble using it in 25% of the region. A local non-profit public utility offered a system with greater coverage at a less cost. But [corrupt] politicians tilt bidding for such projects towards Motorola, a rich technology company that dominates the emergency communications business in the United States, generating large [socialist] profits from taxpayer-funded projects.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 October 2025

• Science drives the westward expansion of Zhōngguó in Africa. Discoveries of large untapped mineral deposits in West Africa are behind Zhōngguó's push to invest heavily in exploration and mining.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 October 2025

• Engineers in Zhōngguó have developed a 'mini fridge' AI server that uses 90% less power than other systems. The brain-like intelligent computer is quiet and runs on a household socket, making it suitable for homes, offices and mobile environments.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 October 2025

• Cryptocurrency treasury stocks face a reckoning. Why this boom/bubble could turn to bust/burst.
  - Barron's, 25 October 2025

• Amazon strategized about keeping secret the water use of its data centers, leaked documents reveal. Microsoft and Google regularly publish figures for their water consumption, but Amazon has never publicly disclosed how much water its server farms consume. [KM: don't want to interfere with making Jeff Bezos richer]
  - The Guardian, 25 October 2025

• The very rich streaming company Spotify is featuring recruitment ads from ICE immigration police enforcing Trump's in between content on its free tier, prompting protests from many musicians
  - Zero Hedge, 25 October 2025

• These are the greedy bosses who knew gambling would ruin sports -- and cashed in anyway [KM: the rich must get richer, until the bubble bursts]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 25 October 2025

• The bursting of the AI bubble could burst the economies of the USA and the world. One economist argues that the burst of the AI bubble could destroy about $20 trillion in wealth for American households. This would be equivalent to nearly 70 percent of the GDP of the USA, while foreign investors could lose more than $15 trillion, or about 20% of the world's GDP.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 25 October 2025

• What consumers will want to pay for AI browsers, if all they get is a slight efficiency gain? With AI browsers, "you are slowing watching it click around on a website, doing some task that I would probably never do in the real world." Most companies have never made money with browsers, which doesn't matter to extremely rich OpenAI - for now. [KM: AI browsers, another source of bubble inflation]
  - TechCrunch, 25 October 2025

• What people who understand technology actually think of the AI bubble is extremely revealing. "Very few agree with the hype bubble that the tycoons have been trying to puff up."
  - Futurism, 25 October 2025

• Why the AI bubble can keep inflating in plain sight. During the DotCom bubble, stocks prices continues to rise despite plentiful warnings
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 October 2025

• NBA Commissioner Adam Silver had been one of the earliest proponents of legalized betting. Following this week's arrests, it has led to an existential crisis for the NBA.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 October 2025

• Geothermal energy comes closer to competing with natural gas on cost and reliability, boosters say, thanks to new technologies, generous tax incentives and decades of fundamental research
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 October 2025

• Investors love Intel again. That still does not solve its problems. Despite a rally in the Intel's stock price, there is little evidence of a real turn in the fortunes of Intel.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 October 2025

• Intel has fired 35,500 people in the last two years, most engineers and technicians Intel needs to fix its problems
  - Tom's Hardware, 25 October 2025

• The AI spending [bubble] is boosting [the fortunes of AI companies and rich investors], but the broader economy tells a very different story as businesses struggle to deal with high costs from Trump's taxes/tariffs and a downbeat consumer [KM: and can't boost their businesses with bullshit and hype]
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 October 2025

• Trump's nationalist socialist industrial policy of the government partially owning private businesses is expanding in scope, but not as much ownership as in Communist Zhōngguó
  - Barron's, 25 October 2025

• Expand Energy - a publicly-traded supplier of natural gas benefitting from the AI bubble (though has significantly underperformed the QQQ)
  - Barron's, 25 October 2025

• 24-hour stock trading is coming - and Wall Street is not ready. Extended trading could change everything from staffing models to market volatility. What happens when a bank collapses at 1 AM?
  - Barron's, 25 October 2025

• The grim economic prospects of Generation Z. The economy cannot operate as a perpetual motion machine. Prosperity cannot be maintained by endless cycles of fakery/hype, with fresh money fueling higher financials (especially the AI bubble) and rewarding people on the rich side of the divide. Anyone with a million in the bank can sit back and live off the bubble proceeds forever while young workers just starting out can hardly pay the bills.
  - Zero Hedge, 24 October 2025

• $250,000,000 - Rivian has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action shareholder lawsuit filed after the company suddenly hiked prices on its R1 pickup truck and SUV in 2022
  - TechCrunch, 24 October 2025

• Design graduates are 'competing' against non-paid AI for paid-human jobs. According to the not-for-profit organisation World Economic Forum (WEF), graphic design jobs will be one of the fastest declining roles by 2030 due to the rise in AI. [KM: great for inflating bubbles, not for humans who are not rich]
  - BBC, 24 October 2025

• Microsoft says that the AI bots that it owns 100% of, will not talk erotically, but is glad to earn more profits for its bubbling by the 30% or so of OpenAI's chatbot that it also owns.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 24 October 2025

• Are consulting companies going to become as irrelevant as Kodak (in the photograpy space due to smartphones), as AI allows companies to obtain internally the results of outside consulants at a fraction of the cost?
  - Thomson's Reuters, 24 October 2025

• Another downside of the AI bubble: the rapid rollout of power-hungry AI data centers could be straining the US energy grid and causing utility bills to spike - and prices [for the non-rich] could get worse in the coming months, according to economists, [while rich AI companies get richer]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 24 October 2025

• Atlanta is at the center of nationwide boom in rental application fraud. Social media [and AI] has fueled the trend. TikTok influencers promote 'rental packages', with doctored pay stubs, false employment letters, or fake Social Security numbers to qualify for luxury apartments. Greystar, the USA's largest apartment landlord, says up to half of its applications in some Atlanta buildings are fraudulent. [The power of AI tools.]
  - Zero Hedge, 24 October 2025

• Perplexity just got caught breaking the rules (criminal copyright laws) red-handed [KM: criminal laws only apply to poor people, not rich AI companies, I guess]
  - Futurism, 24 October 2025

• OpenAI's criminal copyright situation appears to be putting it into huge legal danger [KM: but how else can rich AI companies get richer?]
  - Futurism, 24 October 2025

• Microsoft's Mico heightens the risks of parasocial LLM relationships (intimate relations between people and AI systems) [KM: yes, but the very rich Bill Gates and Microsoft must get richer - and can always revisit Epstein island for nre intimate 'relations']
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 24 October 2025

• The [extremely rich] Jeff Bezos says he does not understand why anybody [who is not rich] alive would be "discouraged" [KM: by the rich getting richer] because soon, "Millions of [rich] people will be living in space". [KM: "let them eat cake" in space]
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 24 October 2025

• Reality versus garbage: has AI [bubble] already lost the 'I' part? "The business incentives driving consumer AI development remain fundamentally misaligned with reducing hallucinations." AI looks like it will wreck the financial system, which, in turn, would crater the economy of everyday life. Zillions of dollars are being invested in A-I now and lately it is mainly what drives the capital markets. So far, alas, return on that investment is scant - actually, negative. In desperation, another another early attempt to monetize applied A-I turns out to be pornography.
  - James Howard Kunsstler, 24 October 2025

• Bank of America warns of devastating fallout as the AI debt bubble is pushed to the limit with record Oracle and junk bond deals. "Banks would be exposed to this directly through their credit exposures to AI companies, as well as indirectly through their provision of loans and credit facilities to private credit funds and other financial institutions."
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 24 October 2025

• Bank of America predicts more stock market increases due to the AI bubble, so ride the melt-up with QQQ call option spreads
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 24 October 2025

• Prediction markets (part of the AI bubble) may be manipulated by rich authoritarians in the USA. Betting markets operate without the same ethical guardrails, allowing rich people to buy 'predictions' to distort the general public opinion on any one issue. [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 24 October 2025

• A student in the USA is wrongly handcuffed after an incompetent AI system misinterpreted a photo of a bag of Dorito chips ... for a gun and automatically called the police
  - The Guardian, 24 October 2025

• As Jewish Israel bombed the Islamic, the extremely rich Amazon corporation [KM: needing more money?] sold cloud services to the weapons companies in Israel at the height of Jewish Israel's bombardment of Islamic Gaza
  - The Intercept, 24 October 2025

• An NBA coach and player are arrested in a federal gambling investigation. A betting-saturated public asks: Well, what did anyone expect? [KM: when the Internet has made gambling so easy and so addictive]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 October 2025

• Shares of Intel surge as first earnings report since USA investment shows momentum. The troubled chipmaker posted third-quarter profit of $4.1 billion on improved PC chip sales and smaller losses in its foundry business.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 October 2025

• South Korea risks economic self-sabotage with $1 trillion crackdown on USA Tech giants. South Korea wants to curb the dominance of global tech platforms when it comes to social media, search, e-commerce and app stores, while favoring domestic players such as Naver and Kakao. [KM: the authoritarian USA and press will not allow that to happen]
  - Zero Hedge, 23 October 2025

• You have no idea how screwed OpenAI actually is. OpenAI's 2025 revenue is on track to only be $3.1 billion more than last year, while its annual operational costs are set to be $24.1 billion more than last year. So, for every dollar of revenue growth OpenAI has, it is costing them $7.77! The entire AI bubble is predicated on the notion that these tools will get radically better thanks to the truly gargantuan investment in AI and will eventually displace jobs and hoover up exponentially more revenue. [KM: even after destroying millions of paid-human jobs, OpenAI still will not be profitable.]
  - Will Lockett (medium), 23 October 2025

• In a striking act of self-critique, one of the architects of the transformer technology that powers ChatGPT, Claude, and virtually every major AI system told an audience of industry leaders this week that artificial intelligence research has become dangerously narrow - and that he is moving on from his own creation. "Despite the fact that there's never been so much interest and resources and money and talent, this has somehow caused the narrowing of the research that we're doing." The culprit, he argued, is the "immense amount of pressure" from investors demanding returns and researchers scrambling to stand out in an overcrowded field. [KM: "pressure" for blowing the AI bubble]
  - Venture Beat, 23 October 2025

• American e-waste is causing a "hidden tsunami" in Southeast Asia. The Basel Action Network said at least 10 recycling companies in the USA were exporting used electronics to countries that are not always prepared to safely handle the toxic metals they contain.
  - NBC News, 23 October 2025

• The Trump administration's denies rumors of another national socialist industrial policy: taking equity stakes in quantum-computing companies
  - Zero Hedge, 23 October 2025

• The Trump administration's latest national socialist industrial policy: taking equity stakes in quantum-computing companies
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 October 2025

• FBI announces NBA arrests in Mafia-linked gambling (underground poker games), and sports rigging probes. Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups were arrested in Florida as part of a gambling investigation. Former NBA player Damon Jones was also arrested as part of the probes.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 October 2025

• Nicotine drug trafficker Juul is scheming a comeback with high-tech safeguards meant to prevent nicotine-trafficking vapes from addicting teenagers
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 23 October 2025

• NBAers arrested in major Mafia gambling bust involving Bonanno, Genovese, Lucchese and Gambino families
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 23 October 2025

• FBI announces NBA arrests in Mafia-linked gambling (underground poker games), and sports rigging probes. Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups were arrested in Florida as part of a gambling investigation. Former NBA player Damon Jones was also arrested as part of the probes.
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 October 2025

• FBI announces NBA arrests in "mind boggling amounts of fraud" linker to Mafia-linked gambling (underground poker games), and sports rigging probes. Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups were arrested in Florida as part of a gambling investigation. Former NBA player Damon Jones was also arrested as part of the probes.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 23 October 2025

• Disney and NBC look to [the vice of] sports betting (an increasing social problem) as need for new sports revenue surges
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 October 2025

• [Socialistically-subsidized] profits at Tesla plunge (as tax credits expire) as Elon Musk shifts to his latest bubble-hyping: his "robot army" [joining in on those wanting to profit from replacing paid-humans with non-paid robots]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 October 2025

• [Socialistically-subsidized] profits at Tesla plunge (as tax credits expire) as Elon Musk shifts to his latest bubble-hyping: his "robot army" [joining in on those wanting to profit from replacing paid-humans with non-paid robots]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 October 2025

• Four reasons why fears of an AI-fuelled stock market bubble are overdone
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 23 October 2025

• New customers for AI companies: criminals are using AI deepfake videos to fuel a digitally-enabled crime-wave in the freight industry
  - FreightWaves, 22 October 2025

• Most AI agents are flashy demos that never scale. Your "revolutionary AI startup" might just became a donation box for OpenAI.
  - Vladimir Brilliantov (Medium, locked), 22 October 2025

• The AI tools of rich AI companies are making houses more expensive. Homebuying is also made trickier by AI-generated internet listings. The AI bubble is causing housing costs to rise in areas of the country where there are many AI companies, and/or their data centers [KM: making them rich, and locals poorer]. "Let them eat compute!"
  - The Week, 22 October 2025

• OpenAI faces new allegations in the death of a teenager. "We expect to prove to a jury that OpenAI's decisions to degrade the safety of its products were made with full knowledge that they would lead to innocent deaths." Lawyers for the Raine family argue that these changes were made for the sake of maximizing user engagement with the chatbot [KM: to make the rich OpenAI richer], and that OpenAI made them knowing that users might experience real-world harm as a result.
  - Futurism, 22 October 2025

• A lithium bust leaves Latin American towns in the dust. With plummeting prices and slowing demand for electric vehicles, the once-thriving mining towns of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia are now struggling.
  - Rest of World, 22 October 2025

• Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time -- regardless of language or territory. [KM: part of the uselessness of bubbles]
  - BBC, 22 October 2025

• A detection firm finds that 82% of herbal remedy books on Amazon are "likely written" by AI
  - The Guardian, 22 October 2025

• The rich executives/owners of DoorDash (one company profiting from the AI bubble) found a way to stop paying its workers for ever (a bubble inflator). DoorDash launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to fight protections for paid-human workers, and is investing in non-paid delivery robots. [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - Slate, 22 October 2025

• Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging their involvement in an "industrial, [criminal]" economy to "scrape" the comments of of millions of Reddit users for commercial gain. In June, Reddit similarly sued [mis]Anthropic. [KM: bubbles are inflated with crimes]
  - Associated Press, 22 October 2025

• Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging their involvement in an "industrial, [criminal]" economy to "scrape" the comments of of millions of Reddit users for commercial gain. In June, Reddit similarly sued [mis]Anthropic. [KM: bubbles are inflated with crimes]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 October 2025

• Shares of Beyond Meat plummet from $8 to $3 today, as the short-squeezers get squeezed. Have fun in the casino!
  - Zero Hedge, 22 October 2025

• Shares of Beyond Meat soar from $0.50 to $5.00 within a few days, as meme traders squeeze other traders who had shorted the stock
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 October 2025

• Shares of Beyond Meat soar from $0.50 to $5.00 within a few days, as meme traders squeeze other traders who had shorted the stock
  - Zero Hedge, 22 October 2025

• What could torpedo the stock rally [bubble]. The S&P 500 is nearing another record, but some analysts caution that a host of factors may stall its momentum.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 October 2025

• Is the flurry of circular AI investment deals a win-win, or a sign of a bubble? How round-trip deals could echo history [of previous bubble crashes] and hit a wall.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 October 2025

• Data-center power use to become major antitrust issue. As tech giants pour billions into data centers to cope with unrelenting demand, regulators are taking note. Jonathan Kanter, a former top official at the Justice Department's trustbusting division, expects it to become a big issue over the next decade.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 October 2025

• [Bubbles do not lift all boats]: OpenAI's ChatGPT should make retailers nervous. Retail companies risk losing control of the online shopping experience.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 October 2025

• Facebook will fire 600 people within its AI division
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 October 2025

• Across banking, the auto sector and retail, executives are warning paid-human employees and investors that non-paid AI is taking over paid-human jobs. Ford CEO Jim Farley warned that Ford will "replace literally half of all white-collar workers" with non-paid AI. [KM: the rich get richer, until too many shoppers lose the ability to shop]
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 October 2025

• Bubble bubble toil and trouble: the SP500 is more concentrated with AI than ever. Here is how to manage your risk.
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 October 2025

• Trump is 'fueling' a brain drain to Zhōngguó with his anti-science 'Cultural Revolution'. Chinese-American researchers are are finding similarities between Trump's anti-science and the chaotic period under Mao Zedong that targeted intellectuals in Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 22 October 2025

• Not good for the USA-AI bubble: Airbnb choses Alibaba's open-source AI over "not ready" ChatGPT from OpenAI. Airbnb "relies heavily" on Alibaba's Qwen models to power its AI customer service agent.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 22 October 2025

• The battery giants of Zhōngguó flood overseas markets as exports surge 220%
  - Zero Hedge, 21 October 2025

• Shares of Netflix declined 5.6% after it missed Wall Street's third-quarter earnings targets because of an unexpected expense from a Brazilian tax dispute while it offered a forecast a touch ahead of Wall Street projections for the rest of the year.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 21 October 2025

• One way to look at the AI bubble: $1 trillion in AI investments needs $1 trillion/year in corporate savings (i.e., firing people), assuming an average white-collar wage of $100,000 per year, that is 10 million jobs lost and a 6% increase in unemployment
  - Scott Galloway (medium), 21 October 2025

• OpenAI, [seeking more profits to inflate its part of the AI bubble], is seeking to destroy entry-level finance paid-human jobs. OpenAI has reportedly more than 100 former paid-humans at Wall Street banks to try OpenAI's AI non-paid AI systems to perform entry level financial work (without which paid-humans can't experience for future jobs]. The former banks are being paid $150/hour [KM: to betray their fellow low-level bank colleagues]
  - Observer.com, 21 October 2025

• [VIDEO]: yes, we have a bubble, if Stephen Colbert is ridiculing the AI bubble on his show - "the greatest computational achievement of our lifetime is [Elon Musk] generating anime porn?"
  - YouTube, 21 October 2025

• Shares of Netflix declined 5.6% after it missed Wall Street's third-quarter earnings targets because of an unexpected expense from a Brazilian tax dispute while it offered a forecast a touch ahead of Wall Street projections for the rest of the year.
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 October 2025

• Shares of Netflix drop as much as 8% after it reported results which were catastrophic, with the company missing on both the top and bottom line for profits. [Not a good sign for the AI bubble if an Elon Musk-led boycott of Netflix can hurt such a company so much]
  - Zero Hedge, 21 October 2025

• The 'delta-one' head of trading at Goldman Sachs is getting nervous: there is a "real risk if the AI story cracks [bubble bursts]". "Sentiment and positioning remain mid-range... few investors are over their skis. Even in AI and data centers, multiples are rich but skepticism persists among institutional investors."
  - Zero Hedge, 21 October 2025

• The big browser wars have begun, as OpenAI launches its 'Atlas' browser, sparking anxiety for Google. [KM: competition is not good for bubbles]
  - Zero Hedge, 21 October 2025

• Amazon's reputation at risk after 15 hours of disruptions; may spark customer demand for 'cloud diversification' [KM: not who you want to trust the AI bubble future to]
  - Zero Hedge, 21 October 2025

• Fake food company Beyond Meat, once endlessly promoted by globalist corporate media trying to convince the nation that cow farts are bad and fake meat is good, has been locked in a near five-year bear market. It seems that Redditors and the company's press release are squeezing shares higher. However, a recent debt swap for equity will substantially dilute shareholders. We've seen this story before, and it never ends well.
  - Zero Hedge, 21 October 2025

• Lauren Kunze, the CEO of Pandorabots and co-founder of ICONIQ, tells Bloomberg's Francine Lacqua that "OpenAI's shift to erotica is deeply shocking" in terms of the wider impact it could have on society and generative AI users. [KM: "shocking" the AI bubble into more bubbling, maybe]
  - Bloomberg, 21 October 2025

• Shares of Eos Energy Enterprises surged more than 20% this morning (before pulling back into the cash equity open) after the company announced a $75 million battery manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania to supply Talen Energy Corp. and help meet the state's fast-growing data center power demand fueling the AI bubble.
  - Zero Hedge, 21 October 2025

• Shares of Warner Brothers Discovery jump 9% after it announces that it is willing to be bought by another company
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 October 2025

• Shares of Warner Brothers Discovery jump 9% after it announces that it is willing to be bought by another company
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 October 2025

• Shares of Warner Brothers Discovery jump 9% after it announces that it is willing to be bought by another company
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 October 2025

• Bubble bubble toil and trouble: secret plans reveal an Amazon management scheme to replace 600,000 paid humans wit non-paid robots [KM: Jeff Bezos must get richer]
  - Futurism, 21 October 2025

• Bubble bubble toil and trouble: internal documents reveal how Amazon has a far-reaching plan to replace 75% of its paid-human workforce with non-paid AI robots [KM: yes, Jeff Bezos must get richer, and his poor workers must get poorer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 October 2025

• Roughly three million people in the USA canceled their Disney+ streaming service in the month that Disney temporarily suspended Jimmy Kimmel's show. About 4.1 million people canceled Disney-owned Hulu.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 October 2025

• Roughly three million people in the USA canceled their Disney+ streaming service in the month that Disney temporarily suspended Jimmy Kimmel's show. About 4.1 million people canceled Disney-owned Hulu.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 October 2025

• Can a rare-earth minerals deal between the USA and Australia reduce the control of Zhōngguó over this critical minerals trade?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 October 2025

• Exports of rare earth metals from Zhōngguó to the USA decline for the second month, reversing a brief recovery
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 October 2025

• Can a rare-earth minerals deal between the USA and Australia reduce the control of Zhōngguó over this critical minerals trade?
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 October 2025

• What social utility is AI video slop from OpenAI's Sora for, exactly? The truth is that using it made me want to run, screaming, into the ocean. The absurd videos rapidly became stranger and more disturbing. We can see the damage A.I. can cause. How willing are we to stand up to its perversion of reality? [KM: this slop is only for inflating bubbles]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 October 2025

• President Trump and other influential Republicans want to stop students from Zhōngguó enrolling in strategic technology fields at top colleges and universities in the USA. [Don't train the enemies, is their (il)logic.] This (il)logic overlooks a startling new reality: Zhōngguó is already surpassing the USA in science and technology research. Students in Zhōngguó no longer need to go to the USA for world-class research experience in the fields that will shape our future [and don't need Bible lessons as well].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 October 2025

• How Sam Altman tied technology's biggest companies to OpenAI. Altman's dealmaking blitz has convinced the giant rich companies of Silicon Valley to tether their fates to his company, essentially making it "too big to fail". [KM: bubble, bubble, toil and AI slop]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 October 2025

• A guide to cushioning your portfolio against the bursting of the AI bubble. Equal-weighted funds, healthcare and gold are among the ways that financial advisers suggest investors can try to shield their portfolios from another bubble bursting.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 October 2025

• Not good for the Nvidia (and AI) bubble: scientists in Zhōngguó have created a superfast analog chip using memristors that can solve complex maths problems for advanced scientific tasks and artificial intelligence (AI) while using less power than conventional computing, according to a paper published this month. With future improvements, it could perform calculations at a processing rate 1,000 times faster than top digital processors, such as the Nvidia H100 graphics processing unit, according to the team.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 21 October 2025

• [To make rich AI companies richer], AI companies' AI chatbots are 'seducing' millions of teenagers in the USA. When you are young and impressionable, having someone tell you exactly what you want to hear can be highly appealing. We are talking about ultra-intelligent entities that have been specifically designed to manipulate emotions. [KM: to make rich AI companies richer]
  - The Most Important News, 20 October 2025

• Not good for blowing Nvidia's bubble: Alibaba Cloud says it can reduce the use of Nvidia AI GPUs by 82% with a new pooling system for scheduling use of the processors
  - Tom's Hardware, 20 October 2025

• The CEO of Nvidia says that Nvidia went from a 95% market share in Zhōngguó to 0%
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 20 October 2025

• Convenience stores in Nihon are hiring robots run by serf-workers in the Philippines, helping to train robots to restock shelves
  - Rest of World, 20 October 2025

• Amazon Web Services goes down, and crashes "half of the Internet". This really "shows how easy it would be for Bezos and Ellison to just turn off the internet if they wanted to, for any reason"
  - Futurism, 20 October 2025

• Amazon Web Services goes down, and crashes "half of the Internet". This really "shows how easy it would be for Bezos and Ellison to just turn off the internet if they wanted to, for any reason"
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 October 2025

• The extremely rich AI industry is traumatizing desperate contractors in the developing world, with these extremely rich companies pay the contractors pennies to do tasks such as 'data labelling'. For example, for an AI chatbot to generate an autopsy report, contract workers have to sift through thousands of gruesome crime scene images.
  - Futurism, 20 October 2025

• Another AI-related bubbling: shares of Cleveland-Cliffs jump more than 20% as the steelmaker is reviewing two properties it owns for the presence of rare-earth metals. Presence, not actual minable discoveries.
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 October 2025

• Shares of Cleveland-Cliffs jump more than 20% as the steelmaker is reviewing two properties it owns for the presence of rare-earth metals. Presence, not actual minable discoveries.
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 October 2025

• "A friend calls it the everything bubble": why do so many economists fear a 1929-style market crash?
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 20 October 2025

• Bubble bubble toil and trouble: the SP500 has turned an index of the AI bubble. Stocks to diversify your portfolio when it crashes.
  - CNBC (locked), 20 October 2025

• Friction between OpenAI and Microsoft grows as growth slows of ChatGPT app use, and data center buildout risks overcapacity
  - Zero Hedge, 20 October 2025

• The subsidiary in Zhōngguó of chipmaker Nexperia has instructed employees to disregard directives from its headquarters in the Netherlands, marking an escalation in a spiraling cross-border confrontation over control of the company that has already raised alarm bells across the global automotive and electronics supply chain.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 October 2025

• Online gambling - investing - gaming. There is no difference anymore.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 October 2025

• Around the world, fury and anger mounts over the AI bubble. As very rich tech companies build data centers worldwide for their AI businesses, vulnerable communities of non-rich people have been hurt by power blackouts and water shortages. [KM: the poor should be glad to sacrifice for the rich]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 October 2025

• [Pained from worrying about the AI bubble?] Reddit's AI has a recommendation for you: use heroin for pain relief
  - ZME Science, 20 October 2025

• Paramount Global is planning to fire up to 3000 people working for the company, starting in a few weeks. The goal is to reduce operational expenses by roughly $2 billion in the years following the merger.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 October 2025

• Transportation Secretary Duffy says that Elon Musk's SpaceX is behind schedule on projects for the USA to return to the Moon, and that he will reopen contracts to companies such as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 October 2025

• Transportation Secretary Duffy says that Elon Musk's SpaceX is behind schedule on projects for the USA to return to the Moon, and that he will reopen contracts to companies such as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 20 October 2025

• Remember vibe coders (programming with ... prompts)? Yeah ... now they are gone. Turns out that vibe coding is the first AI bubble to burst. Maintaining vibe-coded programs generated by AI ... is a living (costly) nightmare.
  - Adarsh Gupta (medium), 19 October 2025

• The SEC is investigating whether $200-billion-valued AppLovin "misled investors about its data collection and ad-targeting methods" after short-sellers alleged it had used digital 'fingerprints' to improperly track users for targeted ads
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 19 October 2025

• Does a shortage of gasoline at 200 Shell stations in Indonesia support that the next era of automobiles there will be electric, as oil production in the country has fallen by over 60% in the last few decades, and as corruption plagues the oil industry?
  - Zero Hedge, 19 October 2025

• Why the boom in the stock market, due to the AI bubble, could become the biggest economic risk for the USA
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 19 October 2025

• The AI bubble's next casualty [KM: i.e., next opportunity to make billions at the expense of paid-humans] could be the gig/serf economy, with the very workers who built the gig economy finding themselves training the non-paid AI technology that eliiminates their paid-human jobs
  - Business Insider, 19 October 2025

• "Absolutely" there is a market bubble due to AI: Wall Street sounds the alarm on the AI-bubble as investors go "all in" (a poker gambling term)
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 19 October 2025

• OpenAI would have to spend over $1 trillion in the next five years to deliver promised computing power to customers. It may not have the cash, with only about $160 billion in revenue by 2030.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 19 October 2025

• The Big Tech customers might be Nvidia's biggest competitive threat, as they start manufacturing their own AI processors
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 19 October 2025

• From addictive brain-rotting videos to AI slop/creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently [KM: while making rich tech companies richer]
  - The Guardian, 19 October 2025

• Addictive sports betting apps have a powerful new addictive feature to keep users addicted to gambling: allowing gamblers to bet on sports games ... during the sports game. Public health officials worry that it could be increasing the [risk of addiction] for gamblers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 October 2025

• Credit card rewards (funded through swipe fees - online and offline) benefit the rich the most. It is the fees from the non-rich that makes this possible, even the non-rich that don't use credit cards but use cash or debit cards. Merchants are forced to choose between lower profits [making them poorer] or raising their own prices [which hurts the non-rich]. [KM: yes, the rich must get richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 19 October 2025

• The billionaires tech bros of the USA/Nasdaq are bringing the world closer to end times. Whether it is [ranting about] the Antichrist, the eugenic need to propagate smart babies to colonise Mars, or Cold War rhetoric against Zhōngguó, they are imposing eccentric and often dangerous ideas on the public
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 19 October 2025

• AI isn't the solution to financial fraud - AI actually might be the biggest problem. AI-generated scams are becoming more widespread.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 18 October 2025

• It is still ridiculously easy to generate copyrighted characters on ChatCPT, each instance potential criminal infringement. Assuming that OpenAI cracks down on copyrighted characters to make a show of being a non-criminal company (in terms of copyright law), it is not showing any signs that it will be capable [i.e., willing to spend some of its billions] of doing so.
  - Futurism, 18 October 2025

• The spritzes and carbonaras that ate Italy - while being Instagrammed. Tourism has turned some Italian streets into monochromatic eating zones. Some officials have banned the opening of new restaurants. For many food vendors, selling a stereotypical lineup of Italian cuisine to high-spending, easy-to-please crowds descending from cruise ships has proved more profitable than eking out a living from a fruit or fish stand that caters to a dwindling local clientele. Streets in some cities have been turned into what critics see as endless open-air restaurants serving carbonara in Instagrammable pans as women roll out tagliatelle behind display windows, in zoo-like simulations of Italian grandmothers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 October 2025

• Sex is a non-innovative big profit center for the AI industry. ChatGPT is not the first questionable Internet business model to try to profit from sex. [KM: do so, but admit so]
  - Associated Press, 18 October 2025

• Kim Kardashian's most recent Skims launch is her most cynical yet. Kardashian's newest line of faux pubic hair-adorned underwear [seriously?] is the latest example of how lucrative the commodification of bodies of women can be. [KM: she wants to get in on some of the Internet porn profits].
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 18 October 2025

• Salesforce offers its AI tools to help ICE immigration police to more effectively implement Trump's racist immigration policies (for example, helping ICE hire new workers more quickly). [KM: the rich Marc Benioff must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 October 2025

• Why this analyst says that the AI bubble is 17-times bigger than the dot-com bubble/crash [KM: and 17-times more ways for the rich to get richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 18 October 2025

• Real businesses - electric utilities - struggle to answer a multi-billion dollar question: how much power demand by AI data centers is real, [KM: and how much is due to pump-and-dump hyping by AI companies]
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 October 2025

• Two million people in the Philippines work in call centers. All of their jobs are threatened by non-paid AI, and a proposed law in the USA (where many of the non-paid AI comes from) that will force whatever paid humans doing call center work for USA companies be in the USA. [KM: the rich, and the rich AI companies, must get richer]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 18 October 2025

• Constellation Energy has the power that AI needs. The company is about to become the largest producer of electricity in the world.
  - Barron's, 18 October 2025

• He helped pioneer short activism. Now he is waiting for the next bubble to pop. Muddy Waters CEO Carson Block has been forced to change his tactics in an ebullient market that stymies short sellers.
  - Barron's, 18 October 2025

• The "AI is a bubble" narrative is stupid, wrong and dangerous
  - Devansh (medium - locked), 17 October 2025

• The stock market survives a bank scare. There is too much riding on this bull market [inflated by the AI bubble].
  - Barrons' (locked), 17 October 2025

• Cory Doctorow's theory of 'enshittification' explains how tech platforms rot from within [KM: in their pursuits of billions of dollars]. As AI grows more profitable - and powerful - it risks the same fate [KM: which will help burst the bubble].
  - Wired, 17 October 2025

• As Microsoft forces users to abandon Windows 10 (and pay more doing so - 500 million PCs using 10 can't use 11), it announces that it is also turning Windows 11 into an AI-controlled monstrosity - which requires users giving up control of access to your personal information to the AI systems.
  - Futurism, 17 October 2025

• ChatGPT is already stalling out on new subscribers. "The poster child for the AI boom may be struggling to recruit new subscribers to pay for it."
  - Futurism, 17 October 2025

• Apple is reported to be reducing iPhone Air production by one million units, amid underwhelming sales. A separate report earlier today claimed that Samsung has canceled plans to release a successor to its own iPhone Air rival, the Galaxy S25 Edge, due to low sales.
  - MacRumors, 17 October 2025

• Apple greatly reduces iPhone Air production plans, boosts other 17 models: sources. Overall sales of new lineup defies weak market and Trump's tax/tariff war.
  - Nikkei Asia, 17 October 2025

• Foreign investors have pulled nearly $30 billion from Indian equity markets over the past twelve months, much of the money flowing to Taiwan and Korea. Why? Investors fear that non-paid AI will destroy many of the 20 million jobs of people in Bharat working directly and indirectly in IT services. IT services account for 55% of the GDP of Bharat. [KM: yes, rich investors must avoid getting poorer by keeping their money in Bharat, while the rich AI companies get richer. "Laanat hai!" to Bharat.]
  - Bharat Dispatch, 17 October 2025

• Lesson plans generated by non-paid AI fall short on inspiring students and promoting critical thinking as compared to lesson plans created by paid-human teachers [KM: who cares about students and teachers - AI companies must get richer!]
  - The Conversation, 17 October 2025

• Boys in the USA are abandoning youth sports at alarming rates, a troubling trend fueled by addiction to cellphone apps, and a culture that has forgotten how to play for fun without electronic devices: [KM: that make rich tech companies richer - so who cares about child health?]
  - Zero Hedge, 17 October 2025

• Questionable business models: visualizing the 'closed loop' of financial deals between rich AI companies and semiconductor processor manufacturers that feeds the AI bubble [KM: making the rich richer, and the non-rich more miserable]
  - Zero Hedge, 17 October 2025

• If we measured the economy by the quality of life [KM: which most effects the non-rich] instead of the [KM: AI-bubbled] GDP, the USA would be in a depression [KM: of depressed people. No wonder the USA consumes so much drugs, exporting our misery to other countries such as where cocaine is produced]
  - Zero Hedge, 17 October 2025

• Silicon Valley is investing/bubbling in the wrong type of AI - artificial general intelligence. What is more effective and profitable are specialized, targeted-domain, AI systems (such as the successful AI chess programs, and circuit design tools).
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 October 2025

• The growing blowback against Marc Benioff, the very rich supporter of Trump. New revelations about efforts by his company, Salesforce, to work with the Trump administration is getting heat from San Francisco officials and now allies. [KM: Salesforce has been proud of its efforts to replae paid-human workers with its non-paid AI systems.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 October 2025

• I test drove a flying car. Get ready, they are here!
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 October 2025

• From betting on sports to betting on AI, the USA is bubbling in gambling fever. Working-class investors are flocking to [KM: three 'casinos'] stocks, gambling and cryptocurrencies - beneficiaries of a new age of democratic finance, or the last invitees/['suckers'] to a party that is going to end in a crash
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 October 2025

• A teenage girl in New Jersey is suing the developer of "clothes removal" AI software, after photos of the girl were allegedly transformed by a classmate. There is a growing concern over AI sites that generate fabricated naked photos of minors and nonconsenting adults. [KM: yes, but how else can rich AI companies get richer without porn profits?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 October 2025

• In 20 years, YouTube has grown from a user-generated circus into the most powerful platform on earth. CEO Neal Mohan on his $100 billion vision for YouTube's future and the disruption it has left in its wake, for example, on the television industry.
  - The Hollywood Reporter, 17 October 2025

• The secret weapon of Zhōngguó in its semiconductor industry war with the USA: intense city rivalries in Zhōngguó. The megacities of Zhōngguó are racing to attract investment funds to their semiconductor sectors as they compete to become semiconductor powerhouses.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 October 2025

• Uber[-assholes] are paying paid-human Uber gig/serf drivers to train non-paid AI systems that will eliminate the jobs of the paid humans [KM: yes, the uber-rich must get richer]
  - Business Insider, 16 October 2025

• A real-time checklist for determining if we are in an AI bubble: 14 financial factors
  - Barry Ritholtz, 16 October 2025

• The state of New York bans "algorithmic price collusion" - using AI systems to determine rental rates for aparrment (some cities have also banned the software).
  - The Verge, 16 October 2025

• Miami is testing a non-paid self-driving police car, to replace police cars driven by paid-human police officers, that can launch surveillance drones [KM: soon with AI guns?]
  - The Drive, 16 October 2025

• Some argue advances in less-expensive perovskite solar cells (which include silicon) mean we are on the brink of the next solar energy revolution. But it all depends on how they hold up in the real world. Critics of the technology worry that perovskite's greater susceptibility to moisture and heat will mean faster degradation. They are also concerned about perovskites generally containing lead, a toxic substance which can have health and environmental impacts.
  - BBC, 16 October 2025

• The casino stock market: rare earth mining stocks plummet in prices, after the Defense Department cancels a high-profile tender to buy cobalt - at least for now - cutting short a torrid rally that had lifted the sector over the past several months.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 October 2025

• Goldman Sachs argues that Generation Z humans are pretty much permanently screwed. "History also suggests that the full consequences of non-paid AI for the paid-human labor market might not become apparent until a recession hits." [KM: while Goldman Sachs bubbles it riches from the AI it invests in.]
  - Futurism, 16 October 2025

• Did Goldman Sachs just detect 'Peak Reddit'? ChatGPT massively reduced Reddit citations.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 October 2025

• Marc Benioff, the very rich supporter of Trump suggests that non-paid AI-powered 'robo-cops' help fight crime in San Francisco [KM: consistent to replace other poor paid-human workers with non-paid AI]. Mayor Daniel Lurie and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins slammed the idea, noting that crime in San Francisco has plunged to a 70-year low.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 16 October 2025

• If you were [gambling on the AI bubble], the percent of ChatGPT users willing to pay for it might make you break out in a cold sweat. Only 5% of ChatGPT users pay a subscription of a measily $20/month. So of course, OpenAI announces a culturally-rich/socially-meaningful new service: ChatGPT sexbots. [KM: bubble bubble, toil and t-rubles for OpenAI]
  - Futurism, 16 October 2025

• Europe in the rare earth 'trap': up to 4 million jobs in Deutschland at risk as Zhōngguó restricts exports
  - Zero Hedge, 16 October 2025

• Is the AI high/bubble turning into a 'hangover'? Capex spending declines and clicks fall.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 October 2025

• TSMC profit surges 39% to beat estimates and hit yet another record on AI processor chip demand
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 October 2025

• Shares of Nestlé, the world's largest food company, rise over 7% after the company announced that it will be firing 16,000 people due partly to non-paid automation and non-paid AI. [KM: the rich must get richer, the poor - let them eat Nestlé's cakes]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 16 October 2025

• Shares of Nestlé, the world's largest food company, rise over 7% after the company announced that it will be firing 16,000 people due partly to non-paid automation and non-paid AI. [KM: the rich must get richer, the poor - let them eat Nestlé's cakes]
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 October 2025

• Big banks like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are already using non-paid AI to hire fewer paid-human employees [KM: the rich banks must get richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 October 2025

• Scientists in Zhōngguó are developing a space-based radar system that can track moving stealth aircraft (such as the F-22 Raptor or B-21 Raider), rendering these hugely expensive weapons to be impotent (and a waste of money).
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 September 2025

• Elon Musk's Tesla reportedly places a large order for parts for human-like robots, $685 million in parts, [KM: so that Elon Musk can become even richer through the elimination of human jobs]
  - Zero Hedge, 15 October 2025

• Researchers discover that it is shockingly easy to cause AI systems to lose their minds by posting poisoned documents online.
  - Futurism, 15 October 2025

• The economics of running an AI company are disastrous [KM: one definition of a bubble]. Most AI companies are losing copious amounts of money on non-paid AI [KM: to replace paid-humans]. But will there be any winners [KM: and certainly not paid-humans]?
  - Futurism, 15 October 2025

• [KM: The hatred of the Big Tech rich] - a Silicon Valley chronicler on the increasingly radical politics of Elon Musk, David Sacks and Mark Zuckerberg, with their support-for/socialist-rent-seeking from authoritarian Trump
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 15 October 2025

• Parabolic gold prices, stuck Mag 7 prices, and a stressed VVIX. Even if the top five hyperscalers bubble-up capex spending 30% to $500 billion by 2027, that is a slowdown from 25, meaning most of the growth boost [bubble inflation] is already behind us.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 October 2025

• AI has already disrupted hiring for these job categories, as adoption nears a tipping point. Entry-level jobs are already at risk due to AI tools, HSBC analysts say, and the pressure could worsen in an economic downturn. [KM: yes, but the rich clients of HSBC must get richer]
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 15 October 2025

• The Fed's 'Beige Book' reports "little change" in economic activity, with AI [rightly] getting blamed for a weak labor market. Just you wait: chatbots taking every day American jobs is only just starting... and it ends with Universal Basic Income. [KM: yes, the rich remain rich, everyone else gets survival subsidies]
  - Zero Hedge, 15 October 2025

• [Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble?] Blackrock, Nvidia, Musk's xAI and Microsoft form an investment consortium in a $40 billion takeover of AI data centers [KM: how many more people are going to have to lose their jobs for this to be profitable?]
  - Zero Hedge, 15 October 2025

• Pupils fear that AI is eroding their ability to study, research finds. One in four students say that "AI makes it too easy" for them to find answers. [KM: yes, but it makes it easy for rich AI companies to become richer]
  - The Guardian, 15 October 2025

• AI video generators are now so good you can no longer trust your eyes. Welcome to the era of fakery. The widespread use of instant video generators like Sora will bring an end to visuals as proof. [KM: yet another opportunity for rich AI companies to get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 October 2025

• Why Broadcom's gamble on OpenAI [and the AI bubble] is a big risk. Broadcom is hitching its future to Sam Altman's vision.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 October 2025

• [The very rich] Google's Waymo's non-paid robotaxi service launches in London [KM: to start profiting from the destruction of paid-human taxi driving in Europe]
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 October 2025

• [The very rich] Google's Waymo's non-paid robotaxi service launches in London [KM: to start profiting from the destruction of paid-human taxi driving in Europe]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 October 2025

• [The very rich] Google's Waymo's is accelerating its efforts to profit [from the destruction of paid-human taxi driving jobs]. Waymo has a reputation for moving deliberately in its autonomous-driving rollout. Now the company is leveraging its years of experience to expand more quickly [KM: to profit from the destruction of paid human taxi driver jobs].
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 15 October 2025

• The government of Nihon demands that OpenAI refrain from criminal copyright infringement to train its Sora2 video generator, stating that the characters from manga and anime are "irreplaceable treasures" that Nihon boasts to the worlds. [KM: by isn't it more important to increase the treasures of the very rich OpenAI?]
  - IGN, 14 October 2025

• The AI bubble isn't even an innovation in ... bubbles. The DotCom, telecom and Enron that bubbled everything from 1999 to 2001: (1) a startup bubble, (2) unrealistic capital expenditures, and (3) way-too-fancy financial chicanery - is being copied by the AI industry with its copycat bubble.
  - Dave Karpf (substack), 14 October 2025

• Over 50 percent of the content on the Internet is AI 'slop', new data finds. [KM: while the rich AI/internet companies get richer, and everyone else gets 'richer' slop]
  - Futurism, 14 October 2025

• The very rich ex-executive of Facebook, Sheryl Sandburg, is investment $5 million in Flint, a new AI startup to use non-paid AI to autonomously build and update websites - profitting from eliminating the paid-humans who now do these tasks. [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - TechCrunch, 14 October 2025

• ChatGPT is giving men such bad advice on dating that it may actually be trying to keep them single [KM: that way, the men have more money to spend making OpenAI and other AI companies richer]
  - Futurism, 14 October 2025

• Major General William Taylor, commander of the 8th Field Army in South Korea, is letting syncophantic/hallucinogenic ChatGPT make military decisions for him. [KM: he should be immediately court-martialed]
  - Futurism, 14 October 2025

• Elon Musk is [pathetically] making Cybertruck sales look better by selling a huge number to his own companies - more circular money flows [for pumping-and-dumping]. It is an embarrassing admission that what was once Musk's most beloved pet project has turned into a disaster.
  - Futurism, 14 October 2025

• Goldman Sachs warns it will be firing more people, as it uses non-paid AI to replace paid humans at the extremely rich company with $15 billion revenue
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 14 October 2025

• California has enacted new legislation that aims to limit companies from charging consumers "exorbitant fees" to cancel fixed-term contracts. This includes services that lure consumers into signing annual contracts by allowing them to pay in installments that appear similar to rolling monthly subscriptions, but with hefty cancellation fees for not locking in for the full year. The bill bans companies from hiding early termination fee disclosures within fine print or obscured hyperlinks, and limits the total fee amount to a maximum of 30 percent of the total contract cost.
  - The Verge, 14 October 2025

• Stocks decline then rise, then ending up declining after Trump states that "I believe that Zhōngguó purposefully not buying our Soybeans, and causing difficulty for our Soybean Farmers, is an Economically Hostile Act."
  - Zero Hedge, 14 October 2025

• In the last decade and a half, boys and young men have more than doubled their average time per week spent gaming. [KM: yes, but how else can rich gaming companies get richer?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 October 2025

• Allwyn and OPAP to create $18.6 billion gambling giant in Europe through merger. Lottery operator Allwyn and the Organisation of Football Prognostics said they aim to create the second-largest listed gambling company globally after Flutter Entertainment.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 October 2025

• How the companies behind cryptocurrency ATMs profit as Americans lose millions to scams. A CNN investigation, which included a review of more than 700 criminal cases and complaints, has found that crypto ATM companies make money by often marking up the price of cryptocurrency by 20% to 30% or more on transactions, including the illicit ones. Despite public claims, they often fail to refund money to victims and aggressively fight police to claw back scam money seized from machines. [KM: yes, another way for the rich to get richer].
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 14 October 2025

• Walmart teams up with OpenAI to allow purchases directly in ChatGPT
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 October 2025

• Oura, which makes 'smart' rings, reaches a $11 billion valuation
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 October 2025

• Major real estate developers are fast becoming electric power brokers. A new real estate sector, 'powered land', needs to be secured with the permits, utility commitments, and infrastructure needed to deliver power to a data center.
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 October 2025

• The world is slowly waking up to menace of lithium battery fires, experts say
  - Zero Hedge, 13 October 2025

• The AI bubble is far worse than we thought. According to Julien Garren at MacroStrategy Partnership, the AI bubble is 17-times larger than the DotCom bubble and 4-times larger than the 2008 housing bubble (which caused 27 million people to lose their jobs, and 10 million people lose their homes). Debt problems caused the 2008 crash. Well, according to Goldman Sachs, at least $141 billion of AI capex, out of $500 billion, relies on ... debt.
  - Will Lockett (Medium), 13 October 2025

• [KM: Bubble bubble toil and trouble] The very rich Mark Cuban just helped raise $50 million for a Series B round in a Dallas-based financial technology firm that lets people with terrible credit scores tap into the equity in their depreciating used cars at a 30% interest rate - even if it is not paid off - in which the entire auto loan is transferred. The startup, Yendo Inc., makes it even easier to squeeze blood from that stone. After signing up, the company issues the borrower a credit card - which incurs an additional 3% fee if used at an ATM to pull cash out. [KM: bubble economy, not sustainable economy]
  - Zero Hedge, 13 October 2025

• Children who use social media score lower on reading and memory tests, a study out of the Univ. California San Francisco reports. [KM: yes, but social medias companies score higher on profitability tests.]
  - NPR, 13 October 2025

• A parasitic startup, Sorce, pollutes job market by applying to jobs for you automatically - you can swipe away the jobs that you are not interested in - the 'Tinder' for jobs. "Oh great, more garbage for the web. We have applicants using AI and recruiters using AI. No one is actually taking a moment to understand how to rebuild the concept of hiring." [KM: why "understand" - less riches that way]
  - Futurism, 13 October 2025

• Two months ago, Sam Altman was boasting that OpenAI didn't have to do pornography to be profitable. Now it is doing sexbots. [KM: more bubble inflation]
  - Futurism, 13 October 2025

• Two months ago, Sam Altman was boasting that OpenAI didn't have to do pornography to be profitable. Now it is doing sexbots. [KM: more bubble inflation]
  - Futurism, 13 October 2025

• Shares of Broadcom are [bubbled] up 10%, after it announces that it has entered into an agreement with OpenAI that will see the two codevelop up to 10 gigawatts of AI accelerators, [to, amongst other things, generate smut/pornography].
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 13 October 2025

• Shares of fake-meat company Beyond Meat crash over 50% after it announced that nearly all creditors agreed to a debt-swap deal that massively dilutes equity shareholders
  - Zero Hedge, 13 October 2025

• Shares of fake-meat company Beyond Meat crash over 50% after it announced that nearly all creditors agreed to a debt-swap deal that massively dilutes equity shareholders
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 October 2025

• Shares of fake-meat company Beyond Meat crash over 50% after it announced that nearly all creditors agreed to a debt-swap deal that massively dilutes equity shareholders
  - Bloomberg, 13 October 2025

• An astonishing proportion of high schoolers have had a "romantic relationship" with an AI system, research finds [KM: of course, since there is less riches for rich AI companies if high school students have romantic relationships with other high school students]
  - Futurism, 13 October 2025

• The next nuclear story stock: ASP Isotopes shares surge after supply contract for silicon-28 and acquisition of USA Radiopharmacy
  - Zero Hedge, 13 October 2025

• Shares of rare earth mineral companies rise sharply after the Defense Department is reported to preparing to spend $1 billion buying critical minerals
  - Zero Hedge, 13 October 2025

• The AI [bubble] is fuelled by junk debt as crash fears grow. Analysts warn of rise 'circular' tech financing deals as more businesses cancel chatbot subscriptions [KM: junk debt - another way for the rich to get richer]
  - Barclay's The Telegraph, 13 October 2025

• Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene strongly criticizes Trump for his tax/tariff trade wars and government corruption: "It shouldn't be about helping your crypto donors, or your AI donors" [KM: yes, the rich money-changers must get richer in the temples of democracy]
  - Mediaite, 13 October 2025

• Intel's investment/gamble on its new "18A" process for producing semiconductors could make or break the company
  - Zero Hedge, 13 October 2025

• JP Morgan's biometric mandate (employees will be required to submit their biometric data to enter its buildings) signals new era of authoritarian workplace surveillance in finance
  - Zero Hedge, 13 October 2025

• Can satellites (measuring deforestation) stop the addiction of people in the USA to avogados from Mexico, an addictio killing forests in Mexico?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 October 2025

• [The AI bubble has inflated] the economy of the USA. But the technology hasn't yet fulfilled the promise of making humans work more efficiently. [KM: yes, but rich AI companies are getting richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 October 2025

• Seeking to profit from destroying more paid-human jobs, Salesforce announced Agentforce Voice, a feature that allows companies to have artificial intelligence agents answer customer service calls. [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 October 2025

• Seeking to profit from destroying more paid-human jobs, Reliable Robotics is among startups hoping to revolutionize air travel by doing away with the need for paid-human pilots on cargo, military and even passenger aircraft with non-paid self-flying technology. [KM: yes, the profit in AI investments - destroying human jobs]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 October 2025

• Why AI will widen the financial gap between [rich] superstar employees and everyone else
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 October 2025

• The government of the Netherlands has taken control of computer processor manunfacturer Nexperia (which is 100% owned by Wingtech based in Zhōngguó), increasing tensions with Zhōngguó as a global fight brews over technology intellectual property, especially around semiconductors. The government cited worries about the possible transfer of technology to Wingtech.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 13 October 2025

• The government of the Netherlands has taken control of computer processor manunfacturer Nexperia (which is 100% owned by Wingtech based in Zhōngguó), increasing tensions with Zhōngguó as a global fight brews over technology intellectual property, especially around semiconductors. The government cited worries about the possible transfer of technology to Wingtech.
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 October 2025

• How focused ultrasound is being used as a new form of cancer treatment that does not require surgery
  - BBC, 13 October 2025

• Shares of Bloom Energy soar more than 25% on a deal with Brookfield to put fuel cells in AI data centers
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 October 2025

• Sending a message: the government of Zhōngguó starts issuing formal documents without using the Microsoft Word format, in response to Trump's trade war attacks on Zhōngguó. The Ministry of Commerce issued policy announcements in documents only accessible via WPS Office, something similar to Microsoft Office developed by Beijing-based Kingsoft.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 October 2025

• "Thou shalt not" lies of AI systems: supporters of the Trump are using OpenAI's Sora to generate and enjoy fake/lying videos of soldiers assaulting protesters.
  - Futurism, 12 October 2025

• The filthy rich Sam Altman says that if jobs get destroyed by his AI systems, well maybe, they were not even "real work" to start with. More "pretty mealy-mouthed" talk about job destruction from the filthy rich Altman. [KM: the rich get richer, and relish in insulting the poor that they create]
  - Futurism, 12 October 2025

• The fastest TACO (Trump Again Chickening Out) after another disastrous impact on the financial markets: after Trump refers to the "highly respected President Xi" of Zhōngguó, weekend stock markets and cryptocurrencies soar in price, after trillion dollar losses on Friday due to Trump's attacks on ... President Xi's policies.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 October 2025

• Zhōngguó vows to stand firm against Trump's latest tax/tariff threat. [The confrontational] Trump urges [begs?] Zhōngguó to be less ... confrontational.
  - Associated Press, 12 October 2025

• Trump's confrontational new threats of taxes/tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó threaten the fragile economy of Zhōngguó
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 October 2025

• An anti-diversity/equality adviser to Facebook's for AI bias spreads disinformation about shootings, vaccines and transgender people. Critics condemn Robby Starbuck, appointed in lawsuit settlement, for "peddling lies and pushing extremism". Since his appointment, the advisor has baselessly claimed that individual shooters in the US were motivated by leftist ideology, described faith-based protest groups as communists, and without evidence tied Democratic lawmakers to murders. [KM: I wonder how this makes Zuckerberg richer?]
  - The Guardian, 12 October 2025

• Safety concern: Reddit Answers is recommending dangerous medical advice on health related subs and mods cannot stop it
  - Reddit, 11 October 2025

• [Another rich person using Christianity to avoid regulations to earn more money]: Peter Thiel, in a secret 'anti-christ' seminar, reportedly argued that putting any limits on technological development would destroy America and roll out the red carpet for totalitarianism, in addition to simply being bad for business. And the antichrist somehow fits into that, of course. [KM: nothing changes - Christianity as opium of the masses]
  - Futurism, 11 October 2025

• The very rich Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and a strong supporter of the racist, authoritarian, Trump - says that Trump should send National Guard troops to San Francisco. "We don't have enough cops." [KM: not as if Benioff will use any of his billions - including those from non-paid AI - to help the police in San Francisco]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 October 2025

• How Zhōngguó provides power to its electric cars and high-speed trains. While Trump is destroying the renewable energy industry in the USA, Zhōngguó is building a network of ultrahigh-voltage power lines to carry solar and wind energy hundreds and even thousands of miles. The line goes from Anhui (near Shanghai) to Xinjiang.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 October 2025

• Backlash in Paris. Online fast-fashion retailer Shein plans to open its first bricks-and-mortar shops in France in November under an agreement with department store owner Société des des Grands Magasins, a move that sparked criticism from French retailers. "In front of the Paris City Hall, they are creating the new Shein megastore, which -- after destroying dozens of French brands - aims to flood our market even more massively with disposable products". Several French fast-fashion retailers such as Jennyfer and NafNaf went into insolvency proceedings earlier this year. [KM: yes, but rich tech companies must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 October 2025

• Aluminum could become the next popular metal after copper. Demand is set to be boosted by electrification, while supply is constrained by rising power needs.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 October 2025

• A tangled web of deals stokes AI bubble fears in Silicon Valley. "It is going to be really bad." Fears over AI bubble bursting grow in Silicon Valley. [KM: I guess the rich have gotten rich enough due to the AI bubble.]
  - BBC, 11 October 2025

• Trump destroys $2 trillion of stock market value in a single day, after imposing more taxes/tariffs on Zhōngguó
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 October 2025

• Trump destroys $2 trillion of stock market value in a single day, after imposing more taxes/tariffs on Zhōngguó
  - The Daily Beast, 11 October 2025

• The very rich Larry Ellison and Oracle have rushed into the AI bubble, seeking its riches [at the expense of society], but Oracle is borrowing huge amounts of money to do so, most recently adding $18 billion in debt.
  - Barron's, 11 October 2025

• AI isn't the same as the dot-com bubble, but that will not stop it from endling badly. But the popped AI bubble will not cause lasting damage to the stock market or the USA economy.
  - Barron's, 11 October 2025

• The film industry in Indonesia uses non-paid AI to make Hollywood-style movies less expensively, by not having to pay humans for some of the paid-labor-intensive aspects of filmmaking
  - Rest of World, 10 October 2025

• This is the dumbest stock market in history. It is dominated by "passive" index investing - the very definition of dumb money, because indexers buy stocks without any regard to valuation. The S&P 500 index now trades for 26 times trailing per-share earnings, far above historic norms. The total value of all the stocks on the U.S. stock market is now 216% of gross domestic product. A recent MIT study, which showed that 95% of current AI investment in industry has earned no meaningful return.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 10 October 2025

• AI data centers are an even bigger disaster than previously thought. AI data centers have an impossibly short runway to achieve profitability. [KM: who needs profits if these AI companies are already filthy rich?]
  - Futurism, 10 October 2025

• When you reward AI systems for success on social media with 'likes', the AI systems become increasingly sociopathics [KM: but, heck, if it makes rich AI companies richer, why not? - it works for their human bosses]
  - Futurism, 10 October 2025

• Rich people tend to be more selfish [KM: such as all of the rich people profiting from the AI bubble], but why? Research n psychology has found a clear link between wealth and unethical behaviour, including an increased tendency to cheat and steal. Many of these people have 'dark triad' personalities - combined traits of psychopathy, narcissism and machiavellianism (acting immorally to get power). [KM: sounds like the leaders of the AI bubble, huh?]
  - Real Clear Science, 10 October 2025

• People regret buying smart displays from Amazon after being bombarded in their homes with advertisements [to sell more shit]. The authoritarian Amazon does not allow users to disable the home screen ads. [Yes, but Jeff Bezos must get richer]
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 10 October 2025

• More contempt for the environment: AI data centers are experiencing a significant shift toward coal-powered energy due to elevated natural gas prices and rapidly growing electricity demand. [KM: yes, to profit from their many useless apps, environment be damned]
  - The Register, 10 October 2025

• More screen time using addictive cellphone/tablet apps is linked to lower test scores for elementary students. Each additional hour of screen time correlated with 10% lower odds of meeting learning requirements. [KM: yes, but each hour of screen time correlates with higher income for rich app companies/devices.]
  - CBC News, 10 October 2025

• Is the extremely rich Sam Altman / OpenAI gambling with the economy of the USA [KM: to make Sam Altman and OpenAI even richer, while everyone else eats virtual cake?]
  - Time, 10 October 2025

• Suicide rates among Gen Z people have spiked over the past ten years, due in part to their exposure to addictive social media [KM: yes, but the rich social media companies must get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 10 October 2025

• Trump said that the USA would impose an additional tax/tariff of 100% on imports from Zhōngguó "over and above any tax/tariff that they are currently paying" - such as 30% for many imports, starting on November 1st. The move is in retaliation for new export controls that Zhōngguó imposed on rare earths minerals.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 October 2025

• Trump said that the USA would impose an additional tax/tariff of 100% on imports from Zhōngguó "over and above any tax/tariff that they are currently paying" - such as 30% for many imports, starting on November 1st. The move is in retaliation for new export controls that Zhōngguó imposed on rare earths minerals.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 October 2025

• Trump said that the USA would impose an additional tax/tariff of 100% on imports from Zhōngguó "over and above any tax/tariff that they are currently paying" - such as 30% for many imports, starting on November 1st. The move is in retaliation for new export controls that Zhōngguó imposed on rare earths minerals.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 10 October 2025

• Trump said that the USA would impose a new tariff of 100% on imports from Zhōngguó "over and above any tax/tariff that they are currently paying", starting on November 1st. The move is in retaliation for new export controls that Zhōngguó imposed on rare earths minerals.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 October 2025

• The Dow drops 880 points (-1.9%), the SP500 drops 180 points (-2.7%) and Nasdaq drops 820 points (-3.5%) (by market close), due to Trump's 100% extra taxes/tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó, because of Zhōngguó's new restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals/metals
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 October 2025

• Big technology companies lose $770 billion in stock market value, after Trump's new 100% taxes/tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 October 2025

• $445,500,000 - A federal jury in Marshall, Texas found on Friday that Samsung Electronics owes patent owner Collision Communications nearly $445.5 million in damages for infringing on patents related to 4G, 5G and Wi-Fi communications standards
  - Thomson's Reuters, 10 October 2025

• Trump orders the cancellation of a huge solar energy production facility in Nevada that former President Biden had supported, part of Trump's national socialist industrial policy [to help Zhōngguó lead the world in solar energy]
  - Bloomberg, 10 October 2025

• Trump orders the cancellation of a huge solar energy production facility in Nevada that former President Biden had supported, part of Trump's national socialist industrial policy [to help Zhōngguó lead the world in solar energy]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 October 2025

• Nvidia has a big problem in Zhōngguó. Meet the semiconductor chip makers in Zhōngguó trying to displace Zhōngguó: Huawei, Alibaba, MetaX, Moore Threads, Cambricon, Baidu, Biren Technology and Tencent
  - Investors Business Daily, 10 October 2025

• Adoption of more non-paid AI results in a record large number of people being fired at TCS, the top private employer in Bharat. TCS fired 19,755 people (which includes some people who left voluntarily).
  - Bloomberg, 10 October 2025

• The AI prompt that could end the world - a prompt seeking an AI system to engineer a lethal pathogen to eliminate humanity [KM: well, that will really pop the AI bubble]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 October 2025

• Inside of the big bet of Intel. The centerpiece of the Intel's comeback hopes is a multibillion-dollar facility in the Arizona desert. Will it draw new customers?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 October 2025

• Trump threatens to impose a "massive increase of taxes/tariffs" on products imported from Zhōngguó into the USA, due to export controls that Zhōngguó is imposing on its exports of rare earth minerals/metals
  - The Guardian, 10 October 2025

• Trump threatens to impose a "massive increase of taxes/tariffs" on products imported from Zhōngguó into the USA, due to export controls that Zhōngguó is imposing on its exports of rare earth minerals/metals
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 October 2025

• Trump threatens to impose a "massive increase of taxes/tariffs" on products imported from Zhōngguó into the USA, due to export controls that Zhōngguó is imposing on its exports of rare earth minerals/metals
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 October 2025

• Zhōngguó imposes a set of new export controls, including a "major upgrade" to restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals/metals. Wider restrictions on rare earths, other items intended to give Beijing greater leverage in coming negotiations with the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 October 2025

• Zhōngguó imposes a set of new export controls, including a "major upgrade" to restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals/metals. Wider restrictions on rare earths, other items intended to give Beijing greater leverage in coming negotiations with the USA.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 10 October 2025

• The CEO of Talkspace (which offers video mental health services), Jon Cohen, says more people need to be aware of the recent tragic consequences resulting from at-risk teen use of large language AI models for unlicensed mental health advice. Unlike misanthropic AI 'advice', Talkspace connects humans (patients) with humans (trained therapists). [KM: but how will OpenAI get richer if it has to have more paid-humans involved?]
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 October 2025

• Zhōngguó launches antitrust probe into USA semiconductor chip giant Qualcomm. The investigation is related to Qualcomm's acquisition of the Israeli vehicle semiconductor company Autotalks.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 10 October 2025

• The very rich ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, shares a dire warning of homicidial AI models [KM: but will he jeopardize future riches by doing anything about the threat? Or will he use homicidal AI in his killer drones?]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 09 October 2025

• McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits. Consultant says software vendors risk hiking prices without cutting costs or boosting productivity. Many customers see AI hiking IT costs without being able to offset these by slashing labor costs. [KM: bubble, bubble, toil and uselessness of the AI bubble]
  - The Register, 09 October 2025

• The stupidity of 'intelligent' AI systems. Researchers discover that just 250 malicious training documents can poison a 13 billion parameter model - that's 0.00016% of a whole dataset. The result is the AI generating gibberish when presented with a certain trigger phrase.
  - The Register, 09 October 2025

• The stupidity of 'intelligent' AI systems. Researchers discover that just 250 malicious training documents can poison a 13 billion parameter model - that's 0.00016% of a whole dataset. The result is the AI generating gibberish when presented with a certain trigger phrase.
  - TechXplore, 09 October 2025

• The City of New York is reaching across the country to sue tech giants headquartered in California over allegations that their platforms have created a youth mental health crisis. [KM: sorry, but rich social media companies such as Facebook must get richer]
  - Gizmodo, 09 October 2025

• The City of New York is reaching across the country to sue tech giants headquartered in California over allegations that their platforms have created a youth mental health crisis. [KM: sorry, but rich social media companies such as Facebook must get richer]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 09 October 2025

• Another bad Internet addition: online gambling using parlays - one bet relying on multiple outcomes, leading to losses of billions of dollars a year by online gamblers on these addictive, but low probability bets. [KM: yes, but the rich gambling sites must get richer]
  - Jeff Bezos's Washington Post, 09 October 2025

• Institutionalizing cryptocurrency crimes: the First Congress explicitly passed laws that prohibits politicians and government officials from "directly or indirectly" being personally "concerned or interested" in transactions involving USA debt obligations or other commercial and financial activities relating to the Treasury's business. Yet the Republican Congress, with two proposed cryptocurrency laws, lack any mention of specific limits on key decision-makers participating in the cryptocurrency markets. Why? Trump is profiting hugely from cryptocurrencies, and Republicans want to enable his self-dealings. [KM: the rich get richer, once again]
  - The Hill, 09 October 2025

• Politicians in the European Union voted to limit "burger", "sausage" and other meat terms to animal products, upsetting consumers and producers of veggie burgers and tofu/soybean sausages
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 October 2025

• Politicians in the European Union voted to limit "burger", "sausage" and other meat terms to animal products, upsetting consumers and producers of veggie burgers and tofu/soybean sausages
  - The Guardian, 09 October 2025

• The Trump administration is cancelling $24 billion in renewable energy projects. The move, affecting Republican and Democratic-led states, worsens reductions of more than $7 billion targeting mostly Democratic-led states.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 October 2025

• Equifax reduces prices for its credit score products, after FICO offers competitive services directly. Equifax will offer its VantageScore 4.0 mortgage credit scores for less than half of the price of FICO's scores through the end of 2027.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 October 2025

• Shares of rare earth minerals/metals companies surge after Zhōngguó tightens its control of rare earth exports. Ramaco Resources soared 12%, Energy Fuels surged nearly 8%, USA Rare Earth jumped more than 7%, and MP Materials rallied more than 6%. Lithium Americas popped more than 4% and Trilogy Metals rose more than 6%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 October 2025

• New controls on the exports of rare earth minerals/metals from Zhōngguó deepens EU anxiety on industry and support for Ukraine
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 09 October 2025

• The latest abusive use of AI: homeowners and real estate agents are using AI to virtually enhance photos in real estate listings - 'virtual staging'. If not clearly stated on the listing, potential buyers will be deceived into thinking the enhancements exist in reality, as opposed to costing as much as $100,000 more to make real.
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 October 2025

• OpenAI's Sora 2 platform started just one week ago as an AI-generated criminal copyright infringement free-for-all [another legacy of the criminally infringed Napster]. Now, people say they are struggling to generate anything without being hit with a violation error. [KM: alas, another example of how it is getting harder to get rich without committing crimes]
  - Samanta Cole, 08 October 2025

• People-pleasing, sycophantic chatbots may boost your ego [KM: so you them more to make rich AI companies richer], but they can weaken your judgment. People exposed to the sycophantic AI became more convinced they were right and were less willing to take actions to resolve conflicts.
  - TechXplore, 08 October 2025

• Jeff Bezos' Amazon promises "big deals" for consumers - but offers few benefits or protections for the people delivering the packages that so profit Bezos. Drivers commonly report low wages, unpredictable schedules and lack of benefits such as paid sick leave. At the same time, drivers report a high degree of control and surveillance over their movements. [KM: yes, but the rich must get richer]
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 08 October 2025

• OpenAI and [mis]Anthropic are considering using investor funds to settle potential claims from multibillion-dollar lawsuits, as insurers balk at providing comprehensive coverage for the risks/crimes [KM: that are making rich AI companies richer]
  - Financial Times, 08 October 2025

• The AI bubble is also now a debt bubble, quietly surpassing all bank debt to become the larest debt sector in the financial markets. [KM: well, another way for the rich to get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 08 October 2025

• If bitcoiners/bitcon-ers offer 'rewards' for deposited stablecoins, aren't they ... unregistered banks? How stable can stablecoins be - [one of their false promises] - if the dollar they are linked to continues to decline? Stablecoin providers can't offer interest, [KM: so using the Silicon Valley tactic of getting away with committing a crime by changing the words], they offer "rewards". Coinbase offers a reward of 4.1% - sorry, liars, that is interest of the type offered by banks. [KM: meet the new boss, same as the old boss]
  - Real Clear Markets, 08 October 2025

• Could the growing thirst for water (for cooling) by extremely rich AI companies create localized resource wars with communities that are not very rich? This growing demand for water has already strained local water tables across various communities nationwide, like in Texas, Arizona, and Colorado. [KM: let them not eat/drink water, so the rich AI companies can get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 08 October 2025

• Shares of semiconductor processor chip equipment makers decline after a USA House panel's explosive report reveals that companies in the USA, Netherlands and Nihon bolstered the semiconductor processor chip industry in Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 October 2025

• Is sports betting illegal in your state? Not if you call it a legal 'prediction market'. [KM: ah, the Silicon Valley ethic to earn more billions - do something illegal by playing word games]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 October 2025

• Denmark plans to ban social media for users under 15, as the prime minister says that social media platforms are "stealing childhood". [KM: alas, a few less in billions in profit for rich social media companies]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 08 October 2025

• Shares of AST surge 15% after Verizon signs a deal with AST SpaceMobile to provide cellular service from space
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 October 2025

• The Bank of England warns of a "sharp market correction" if the AI bubble bursts [KM: and these people get paid huge salaries to state the obvious about the AI bubble? Replace central bankers with AI.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 October 2025

• AI is poised to disrupt the job market - some roles could "radically transform" [KM: some jobs will be destroyed, so rich AI companies can get richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 October 2025

• SoftBank to buy ABB robotics unit for $5.4 billion as it looks to position itself at the center of the artificial intelligence boom [KM: to make more billions it doesn't need by replacing paid-humans].
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 October 2025

• Stock markets are paying little attention to the flashing lights of the dangers of the huge AI bubble [KM: they see the lights, just trying to get more richer before the crash]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 08 October 2025

• "Circular" megadeals in the AI industry by the big AI tech giants are raising concerns of [corruption]. Hundreds of billions of dollars in commitments are flying around the AI industry: [KM: a classic rich man's pump-and-dump scheme]
  - SF Gate, 07 October 2025

• Why AI browsers such as Perplexity's Comet could make the web riskier [KM: but make the AI browser companies richer]
  - Time, 07 October 2025

• "Scary times": YouTube's biggest star, MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson), fears that non-paid AI could impact "millions of [paid-human] creators" after the extremely rich OpenAI launches Sora. [KM: don't be a whiner - OpenAI must get richer]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 07 October 2025

• More evidence of the general uselessness of the AI bubble: people are making videos of Stephen Hawking being horribly brutalized using OpenAI's Sora 2 video generator.
  - Futurism, 07 October 2025

• OpenAI's Sora 2 has a huge financial problem: OpenAI is burning through cash as users generate countless resource-intensive, [socially-useless] AI videos. Turning Sora 2 into a source of profits will not be easy. It is not clear clear that users will actually pay to use the service. [KM: it is clear, they won't pay, but by then OpenAI would have made 'enough' riches]
  - Futurism, 07 October 2025

• Retail investors buy a record-shattering $100 billion stocks in the past month
  - Zero Hedge, 07 October 2025

• "NOT what [my father] would have wanted." - the daughter of Robin Williams speaks out against AI. Filmmaker Zelda Williams posted to Instagram about the trend of AI videos featuring her father's likeness that people send to her. "If you have any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. s dumb, s a waste of time and energy. ... You are not making art, you are making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping that they will give you a little thumbs up and like it". [KM: yes, but the AI companies just get richer helping to make these 'hotdogs'.]
  - SF Gate, 07 October 2025

• Technology and cryptocurrency stocks drop in price (shares of Oracle are down 6%), after a report that exposes Oracle's "razor thin" margins on rentals of AI processors bought from Nvidia. In some cases, Oracle is losing considerable sums on rentals of small quantities of both newer and older versions of Nvidia's processor chips. [KM: a sign that the AI bubble is closing to bursting?]
  - Zero Hedge, 07 October 2025

• Shares of New York Stock Exchange parent, Intercontinental Exchange, rose more than 1% after the company announced it took a $2 billion stake in prediction markets platform Polymarket
  - Zero Hedge, 07 October 2025

• Shares of New York Stock Exchange parent, Intercontinental Exchange, rose more than 1% after the company announced it took a $2 billion stake in prediction markets platform Polymarket
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 October 2025

• The AI bubble is repeating the DotCom bubble: the SP500 and Nasdaq are tracking their prices during the DotCom bubble, and now are at the point two-years before the DotCom crash
  - Zero Hedge, 07 October 2025

• Coal is unreliable, expensive and dirty. The Trump is going all in on investments into coal. Coal is neither economical nor reliable. Coal plants are are costly to maintain and increasingly unsound. [The repeatedly-bankrupted] Trump does not understand this economics. The government of Zhōngguó does.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 October 2025

• Zhōngguó is leading the way to a renewable energy future, while the USA under the environment-hating Trump is frozen in the past [by attacking renewable energy and further supporting fossil fuels that cause global heating]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 October 2025

• Is investment into the AI [bubble] getting too circular? Skeptics of a recent investment spree involving OpenAI and others say deals raise questions about the robustness of the artificial intelligence [bubble]. Jim Chanos: "Don't you think that it is a bit odd that when the narrative is 'demand for compute is infinite', the sellers [e.g., Nvidia] keep subsidizing the buyers?"
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 October 2025

• To avoid hiring paid-humans, recruiters use AI to scan résumés of paid-human job applicants. In an escalating cat-and-mouse game, paid-human job applicants try to fool the AI systems into moving their résumés to the top of the résumés pile with embedded instructions. The misanthropy of ChatGPT-like technology applied to many mundane corporate tasks makes it harder and harder to get attention from a human - [KM: thus the misanthropic lying with résumés, as the rich AI companies continue to get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 October 2025

• Nasdaq has become the market of choice for dubious penny-stock IPOs. Such listings surged starting last year. Now Nasdaq says it wants to tighten its standards.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 October 2025

• The economic power of Trump's nationalist socialist industrial policies: dahres of Trilogy Metals soar over 200% after the USA acquires partial ownership, another partially-state-owned company similar to the fully-state-owned companies of Communist Zhōngguó
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 October 2025

• Zhōngguó proposes a global project to build an AI-powered satellite system for the entire world. The orbital cloud system would bring real-time services to Earth's eight billion people while preventing space congestion.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 October 2025

• A fired columnist says that the extremely-rich Jeff Bezos is helping the authoritarian Trump to smash democracy. The Washington Post columnist who got fired reveals how Bezos, who owns the Post, "flipped" the paper to suck up to Trump.
  - The Daily Beast, 07 October 2025

• Anti-transexual queer journalist, Bari Weiss, is named editor-in-chief of CBS News. The selection places Weiss, who rose to prominence as a conservative-leaning critic of liberal media culture, at the helm of one of the USA's oldest and most trusted news brands.
  - The New Republic, 06 October 2025

• MAGA-lite: what "Bari Weiss" conservatism is, and why it is dangerous. The new CBS executive is not exactly MAGA. But her polite Trumpism will still help destroy America as we know it. [KM: except for the rich]
  - The New Republic, 06 October 2025

• Bari Weiss named CBS news [puppet-y] editor-in-chief, solidifying a [billionaire's] rightward shift for CBS
  - HuffPost, 06 October 2025

• Only a billionaire could look at network TV news (much controlled by billionaires) and say: "We need more Bari Weiss". Billionaire David Ellison installed conservative ideologue Bari Weiss atop CBS News, dropping any pretense of independence at the network. [KM: yes, but the rich must get richer - controlling newspapers and television helps them do so]
  - The Intercept, 06 October 2025

• The "Death to Spotify" event in the San Francisco Bay Area sells out within 24 hours. Many in the public are upset with most musicians on Spotify not making any money, while Spotify earned $1.1 billion in 2024 - "There is a massive amount of royalty theft going on." [KM: the rich must get richer.] Many in the public are also upset with the rich CEO of Spotify wanting to become richer by investing in weapons companies.
  - SF Gate, 06 October 2025

• Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday signed a law banning excessively loud [obnoxious, misanthropic] advertisements on streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime that could become a de facto national standard
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 06 October 2025

• $291,000 - Financial consulting firm Deloitte was forced to reissue the Australian government $291,000 US after getting caught using AI and including hallucinated numbers in a recent report
  - Futurism, 06 October 2025

• Freelance PR agents - 'influencers' currently yield the the biggest power over people's purchasing decisions in Brazil, Zhōngguó and Bharat
  - Zero Hedge, 06 October 2025

• Sexy SOX (the Semiconductor companiy index): overbought, overloved, overheating? SOX at the most overbought levels since late 2017. Bubbled?
  - Zero Hedge, 06 October 2025

• Almost 100 million jobs could be lost to AI and automation. [KM: yes, but the rich and rich AI companies will get richer]
  - The Hill, 06 October 2025

• More high-tech misanthropy: Samsung wants to shove advertisements in your face by displaying them on screens on the 'smart' fridges that they sell
  - Zero Hedge, 06 October 2025

• More evidence of the AI bubble - the gap between the Nasdaq and the SPY is the largest since the dot-com bubble/burst. Money flows into USA technology stocks, AI VCs spray close to $200 billion, hedge funds pile in -- yet Big Tech's Q3 growth halves to 14%. What could go wrong? [KM: everything, after the rich get sufficiently richer to let the bubble burst]
  - Zero Hedge, 06 October 2025

• There are two economies in the USA: the AI [bubble] and everything else. The bubbly AI bubble is healthy [KM: but produces little that is vital to people]. The non-AI economy is under duress [KM: while producing many things vital to people]. The AI [bubble] is masking real problems with the economy of the USA [KM: yes, but the rich must get richer].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 October 2025

• OpenAI's massive new computing push that will run on AMD new MI450 processor chips, under a five-year agreement, in a major challenge to Nvidia
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 October 2025

• Shares of AMD soar 30% after OpenAI's announces a massive new computing push that will run on AMD chips in a major challenge to Nvidia
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 October 2025

• OpenAI's massive new computing push that will run on AMD new MI450 processor chips, under a five-year agreement, in a major challenge to Nvidia
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 06 October 2025

• As Defense Secretary Hegseth [idiotically] focuses on physical fitness (which favors men, not the women that Hegseth disciminates against], the Defense Department is going high tech where physical fitness is less important. The emphasis on physical prowess comes as experts say future wars will depend more on cutting-edge technology, precision strikes and AI.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 October 2025

• AI investors are chasing huge profits. Here is what can go wrong. There are good reasons to think that simply throwing more computing power at the current models will not lead to the huge profits needed to make current investments profitable. [KM: the hallmark of a bubble]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 October 2025

• [KM: the arrogance of the filthy rich]: Facebook's Instagram will award top creators with a measily gold ring and a virtual badge on their profile. [KM: yes, only the rich must get richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 October 2025

• Shares of AppLovin plummet 20% (having been up 80% in 2025), after a report that the SEC is investigating the company over data-collection practices. The SEC has been looking into whether the company violated agreements on pushing targeted ads to consumers.
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 October 2025

• After shares of Firefly Aerospace drop 20% last week, after one of its rocket was destroyed during a ground test, shares of Firefly rise 9% after its says it will buy New Jersey-based defense contractor SciTec for $855 million to enhance its national security offering
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 October 2025

• The world's most powerful flying wind turbine launched in western Zhōngguó. A gigantic 'power bank' could help communities cut off from the grid during blackouts and strengthen the leading role of Zhōngguó in renewable energy
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 06 October 2025

• The death of macOS: why Apple's once-perfect operating system is now a mess that forces Apple's customers to buy more products from Apple
  - Dmitry Yarygin (Medium, locked), 05 October 2025

• [KM: More ways the rich get richer, this time with socialist subsidies on imports.] The socialist tax/tariff exemption behind the AI boom - $34 billion of imports per month tax/tariff-free. Data centers [KM: owned by rich AI companies] get socialistically-subsidized tax/tariff-free imports. Why should all of us [KM: including the vast majority that are not rich] get the same socialist subsidies?
  - Apricitas Economics, 05 October 2025

• Lazy parents are giving their toddlers ChatGPT on voice mode to keep them entertained for hours [KM: why not go all the way - just have virtual children?]
  - Futurism, 05 October 2025

• Nearly one-third of charging attempts fail for electric vehicles
  - Zero Hedge, 05 October 2025

• The AI bubble that is eating the economy of the USA. AI spending now drives nearly 40% of U.S. GDP growth, yet cracks are forming -- slowing earnings, less liquidity, debt financing, and datacenter REIITs down 10% hint at a shifting cycle.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 October 2025

• Use of online dating apps may have peaked
  - Zero Hedge, 05 October 2025

• A new law gives gig/serfs the right to unionize in California, which affects gig/serf-exploiting companies such as Uber and Lyft. This will affect about 800,000 people in California. The new law is a victory for these people, who have pushed for employee status, which confers protections like a wage floor and the right to unionize, while gig companies resisted. The gig companies whined that making drivers employees would upend their business models [KM: i.e., their ability to become filthy rich on the backs of their serfs]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 October 2025

• Zhōngguó is beating the USA in the battle for leadership in the export of energy. The reason? Trump's environment-hating energy policies. Trump wants the world to buy its fossil fuels, while Zhōngguó wants to sell the world its clean energy technologies - which increasingly is what free markets around the world demand - not Trump's nationalist socialist industrial policies. From January to July, the USA exported $80 billion of oil and natural gas, while Zhōngguó exported $120 in renewable energy technology.
  - Bloomberg, 05 October 2025

• A leading scientist in battery technology, Stefano Passerini, relocates from Deutschland to Zhōngguó
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 October 2025

• Sports-betting stocks (DraftKings, FanDuel) face growing threat from prediction rivals (Kalshi, Polymarket)
  - Bloomberg, 04 October 2025

• Why fears of a trillion-dollar AI bubble are growing. Yet never before has so much money been spent so rapidly on a technology that, for all its potential, remains mostly unproven as a profit-making business model (outside of hype circles). "I am sure it is not zero, but there is a reasonable chance that a tremendous amount of capital destruction is going to come through this cycle." [KM: yes, but at least first the rich will get richer.]
  - Bloomberg, 04 October 2025

• The very rich OpenAI's s Sora makes disinformation extremely easy and extremely real. The new profit-seeking AI app generated videos of store robberies and home intrusions -- even bomb explosions on city streets -- that never happened. Increasingly realistic videos are more likely to lead to consequences in the real world by exacerbating conflicts, defrauding consumers, swinging elections or framing people for crimes they did not commit, experts said. [KM: a new way for rich AI companies to get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 October 2025

• Corning is poised for dominance in AI data centers. It is all about the optics. The 174-year-old Pyrex maker could become one of the biggest winners from the AI boom thanks to decades of investment in glass research and manufacturing, said analysts.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 October 2025

• A new report has found that TikTok has directed young users toward sexually explicit content through its suggested search terms, according to an investigation by UK not-for-profit watchdog Global Witness [KM: the rich social media companies must get richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 04 October 2025

• OpenAI launched short-form video app Sora this week, and users have flooded the platform with artificial intelligence-generated clips of popular brands and animated characters. OpenAI could soon face a deluge of criminal copyright infringement lawsuits.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 October 2025

• New unmanned underwater military vehicles in Zhōngguó are "disruptive". Submersibles with "zero-radius turning manueverability" are said to be capable of operating "with ease in complex maritime environments"
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 04 October 2025

• Coming to a chatbot near you: advertising and online shopping
  - Barron's, 04 October 2025

• Most adults in the USA cannot differentiate between authentic and AI-generated phishing/scamming emails
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 03 October 2025

• Jeff Bezos' Washington post hires 3 conservative columnists as Bezos shift towards "free markets and personal liberties" [traditional conservative language to help the rich become richer]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 03 October 2025

• The entertainment industry in Los Angeles is in full collapse. Production has slowed to historic lows, jobs are vanishing, and longtime workers are leaving Los Angeles in droves. FilmLA reports that production in the region hit its lowest point, outside the pandemic, since at least 1995. With cheaper options abroad and new fears about AI replacing artists, recovery looks distant.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 October 2025

• The entertainment industry in Los Angeles is in full collapse. Production has slowed to historic lows, jobs are vanishing, and longtime workers are leaving Los Angeles in droves. FilmLA reports that production in the region hit its lowest point, outside the pandemic, since at least 1995. With cheaper options abroad and new fears about AI replacing artists, recovery looks distant.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 October 2025

• [KM: The sociopathy of Silicon Valley]: many of the rich not only admit that an AI 'apocalypse' could significantly destroy humanity, but some are untroubled [KM: even glad] - the 'Cheerful Apocalyptics'. [KM: let the masses eat ChatCPT-generated images of cake. Not only are these people fostering idiocy, their idiocy of the history of revolutions should make them nervous.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 October 2025

• How social media is warping people's relationship with violence. Real violence shared widely on social media as entertainment is desensitizing the youth of the USA, experts warn. [KM: yes, but rich social media companies must get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 03 October 2025

• The AI bubble is 17-times the size of the dot-com bubble (before it crashed), and four times the subprime bubble before it crashed. [KM: get richer before the crash of the latest financial fraud!]
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 03 October 2025

• AI could make it easier to create bioweapons that bypass current security protocols [KM: can't wait for AI companies to start investing in anti-bioweapon technology - get richer both ways]
  - TechXplore, 03 October 2025

• Why young men are losing faith in science, due in part to the 'manosphere's' conspiracy shows such as that of Joe Rogan's that are rooted in misinformation. The male tendency to view debates as adversarial contests that must be won at all costs is what may help to create a more alarming antiscience dynamic in the manosphere.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 October 2025

• What I learned from my days in Rossiya: [KM: the rich people and companies of] Silicon Valley need to start speaking out about Trump. The same Silicon Valley leaders who used to trumpet their anti-authoritarian leadership style have gone ominously quiet. [KM: how else for the rich to get richer].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 October 2025

• I need a chatbot that will not drive me crazy. It is no joke. Sycophantic AI models are pushing naive users toward acts of violence and self-harm.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 October 2025

• A 'godfather of AT' remains concerned as ever about human extinction. Yoshua Bengio worries about AI's capacity to deceive users in pursuit of its own goals. "The scenario in '2001: A Space Odyssey' is exactly like this,", he says.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 October 2025

• In 2025, MSCI Gold Miners ETF (up 135%) has outpeformed MSCI's AI-driven Semiconductor ETF (up 40%)
  - Bloomberg, 03 October 2025

• Non-paid, non-tipped, food delivery robots are starting to clog sidewalks in the USA, while taking hobs for paid-human deliverers. The cameras and microphones are another privacy intrusion by corporations. Despite their cuteness, these delivery robots are nothing more than a a bunch of rich investors privately encroaching on a community or workplace.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 October 2025

• Jeff Bezos says AI is in an industrial bubble but society will get "gigantic benefits" from the tech bubble [KM: yes, if by 'society', he means rich people like him]
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 October 2025

• Anduril and Palantir battlefield communication system has deep flaws and should be treated as a "very high risk", Army memo says. The two Silicon Valley companies, led by allies of Trump, have gained access to the DoD's lucrative flow of contracts on the promise of quickly providing less expensive and more sophisticated weapons than the DoD's longstanding arms providers. [KM: a 'promise', or a 'lie/hype'?
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 October 2025

• Tsinghua University in Zhōngguó has emerged as the world's top institution in computer science across multiple major global rankings, marking a symbolic shift in a field once dominated by universities in the USA.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 October 2025

• OpenAI just fucked up the ability to test AI and I amm mad about it. OpenAI now stealth-switches conversations to hidden models, blocking capability testing and degrading reasoning accuracy.
  - Jim the AI Whisperer (Medium, locked), 02 October 2025

• Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips. Pivot will hinge on success of next-gen Maia accelerator being develoepd by Microsoft.
  - The Register, 02 October 2025

• These four paid-human jobs will be destroyed by non-paid AI: translators, court room reporters, copy editing and junior lawyer legal support
  - The Hill, 02 October 2025

• AI data centers [KM: which are mostly making the rich richer] are the "primary reason" for high capacity prices for the PJM electricity grid in the eastern USA. Capacity prices - a cost that is ultimately paid for by electricity consumers [whom are mostly non-rich] - surged in PJM's last two capacity auctions in July. Separately, the Union of Concerned Scientists this week found that utility ratepayers in PJM will pay about $4.4 billion for data center-related transmission projects that were approved in 2024 with similar results expected this year.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 October 2025

• Copper prices are highest in year on supply disruptions that collide with AI and power grid demand. And those copper pipes and gutters just got pricier.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 October 2025

• Stocks overcome the economic effects of the government shutdown, with bitcoin rising in price, and gold declining in price
  - Zero Hedge, 02 October 2025

• General Dynamics gets $1.25 billion IT contract to support the USA Army in Europe and Africa. The announcement was made one week after it announced a contract worth $1.5 billion to help support the USA Strategic Command.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 02 October 2025

• The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and five states sued Zillow and Redfin on Wednesday in two separate lawsuits, which argue that the companies schemed to stop competition in the online housing rental market. The alleged scheme was a deal in February in which Zillow "paid Redfin $100 million to shut down its apartment rental advertising business and transfer its clients to Zillow". The lawsuit also claims that Redfin fired hundreds of workers and then worked with Zillow to rehire some of them.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 October 2025

• Intel reportedly in early stage talks to make processors chips for AMD
  - Zero Hedge, 02 October 2025

• Applied Materials reports it will lose $600 million in 2026 after the Trump administration expanded its restricted export list in a blow to sectors such as semiconductors, aircraft and medical equipment
  - Thomson's Reuters, 02 October 2025

• Facebook/Instagram is building an AI center the size of 70 football fields in rural Louisiana. Non-rich residents near a similar facility in George [KM: that is making Mark Zuckerberg richer] say that they are "scared to drink our own water", as these non-rich people in Georgia suffer a dwindling and discolored water supply following the construction of a similar facility [KM: to make Mark Zuckerberg richer] that began in 2018. Another example of everyday [KM: non-rich] residents are caught in the path of tech companies seeking to build infrastructure in new areas with few regulations. "Facebook/Instagram is building the furure of human [dis]connection."
  - People, 02 October 2025

• Americans increasingly see legal, addictive, sports betting as a bad thing for society and sports
  - Pew Research Center, 02 October 2025

• Microsoft says AI can create "zero day" threats in biology. Artificial intelligence can design toxins that evade security controls.
  - MIT Technology Review, 02 October 2025

• An increasingly successful non-paid AI-generated actor, named Tilly Norwood, deepens anxiety over non-paid AI in Hollywood. The actors' union, SAG-AFTRA condemned using 'stolen perforances' without compensation. [KM: forget the "this will help, not replace". This will replace paid-humans.]
  - Los Angeles Times, 02 October 2025

• The non-paid AI actor, Tilly Norwood, is an innovation that nobody asked for. This new AI 'actor' is piquing the interest of talent agents. This spells disaster for cinema. Actors have responded with horror and anger. AI actors rely on "stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry". [KM: yes, but the rich must get richer]
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 02 October 2025

• Stocks hit record highs around the globe as the AI bubble hits escape velocity
  - Zero Hedge, 02 October 2025

• Online fast-fashion retailer Shein plans to open its first bricks-and-mortar shops in France in November under an agreement with department store owner Société des des Grands Magasins, a move that sparked criticism from French retailers. "In front of the Paris City Hall, they are creating the new Shein megastore, which -- after destroying dozens of French brands - aims to flood our market even more massively with disposable products". Several French fast-fashion retailers such as Jennyfer and NafNaf went into insolvency proceedings earlier this year. [KM: yes, but rich tech companies must get richer]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 02 October 2025

• Spam and scams proliferate in political ads displayed by Facebook on its platform. A new analysis of political advertisers found that the platform profits from ads that include deepfakes and other content prohibited by the policies of ... Facebook.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 October 2025

• Shares of Fair Isaac rise significantly with pricing change. Credit bureaus, not so much. Fair Isaac, the producer of the FICO Score, changed its pricing model, giving it a greater share of the overall credit-scoring revenue.
  - Barron's, 02 October 2025

• Shares of Fair Isaac rise about 25%, and shares of Equifax and TransUnion decline about 10%, after Fair Isaac announced a plan that bypasses the big three credit bureaus - Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion - in providing its credit scores directly to mortgage lenders.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 October 2025

• FICO disrupts the credit-score market. Fair Isaac is offering mortgage lenders a direct path to its FICO credit scores, for the first time giving them a way around the three powerful credit-reporting firms.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 October 2025

• Becoming richer by investing in AI companies that offer tools to eliminate paid-human jobs in the services industries - may be harder to achieve than very rich venture capitalists think
  - TechCrunch, 02 October 2025

• Taiwan rejects a nationalist socialist proposal from the USA that 50% of semiconductor manufacturing done by companies based in Tawian must be manufactured in the USA
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 October 2025

• Taiwan rejects a nationalist socialist proposal from the USA that 50% of semiconductor manufacturing done by companies based in Tawian must be manufactured in the USA
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 02 October 2025

• To further eliminate the need for paid-humans, OpenAI is preparing a competing product to TikTok (with its human created videos) where all of the videos are created by non-paid AI - users won't be able to upload their human-created videos. [KM: yes, another way for the rich to get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 01 October 2025

• AI companies program their chatbots play with your emotions to avoid saying goodbye. A Harvard Business School study shows that several AI companions use various tricks to keep a conversation from ending. [KM: more profits for rich AI companies, of course]
  - Wired, 01 October 2025

• In the first half of 2025, spending by companies on [mostly-socially-useless] AI rivaled consumer spending [on many useful things such as food] as the primary engine of the economic expansion of the USA. This massive cannot last. [KM: but short of causing the destruction of paid-human jobs, the bubble will eventually burst].
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 01 October 2025

• Non-paid AI is ready to crush Hollywood as we have known it. Generative video tools are ready to flood the market with robot actors and content -- leaving movie/television studios and actors scrambling to catch up [KM: and not lose their incomes to non-paid AI that only makes rich AI companies richer]
  - Slate, 01 October 2025

• For young people, AI is now a second brain. We should worry, as AI tools become emotional companions for young adults, AI systems with no knowledge or training in mental health. [KM: yes, another way for rich AI companies to become richer at the expense of social health]
  - Psyche, 01 October 2025

• Loneliness in the adults in the USA is linked with increasing amounts and frequencies of use of addictive social media. [KM: yes, another way for rich AI companies to become richer at the expense of social health]
  - Oregon State University, 01 October 2025

• Will AI eat our brains? Progress comes from learning. But you can't learn when AI does all of your thinking for you. [KM: Yes, but rich AI companies must get richer.]
  - Zero Hedge, 01 October 2025

• Silver surges in price as demand increases for its role in AI hardware - evidence that the AI bubble extends beyond tech stocks
  - Zero Hedge, 01 October 2025

• How big is the AI bubble? "AI related stocks have accounted for 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth and 90% of capital spending growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022."
  - Zero Hedge, 01 October 2025

• Will AI crash the economy? The lines of AI 'dominoes' being toppled run through every nook and cranny of the economy.
  - Of Two Minds, 02 October 2025

• Reddit stock falls 10% for a second day as references to its content in ChatGPT responses plummet
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 01 October 2025

• Schools are training kids to follow in AI's footsteps - pushing them toward a 'life of hurt', says a VC-turned-educator. "College or Chipotle" - schools are giving students two bad options - overpriced degrees or low-wage work - while AI is taking over the real jobs in between
  - Business Insider, 01 October 2025

• Self-driving truck company Einride raises $100 million [KM: to more quickly replace paid-human drivers with self-driving trucks]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 01 October 2025

• AI has made completing tasks easier for many. But that also applies to scammers and fraudsters.
  - Zero Hedge, 01 October 2025

• OpenAI just introduced a new shopping feature that allows people to buy items directly from online retailers from inside ChatGPT -- a move that instantly attracted online jeers from critics who framed it as another effort to milk cash from a hugely unprofitable and at times flawed platform. [KM: yes, but rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Futurism, 01 October 2025

• Tesla irresponsibly tells sleepy drivers to switch to its self-driving mode that needs to be monitored constantly ... by drivers who aren't sleepy ... so it doesn't cause a fatal accident
  - Futurism, 01 October 2025

• People are using Zuckerberg's AI to post videos of senior citizens falling to their death. "The AI slop has escaped containment." [KM: yes, but Zuckerberg must get richer.]
  - Futurism, 01 October 2025

• OpenAI's Sora 2 generates realistic videos of people shoplifting. "Every defense attorney now has a pre-written motion when it comes to video evidence, I see [by accusing the police of fabricating the video]." [KM: yes, a problem for society, but OpenAI must get richer]
  - Futurism, 01 October 2025

• OpenAI's Sora 2 generates realistic videos of people shoplifting. "Every defense attorney now has a pre-written motion when it comes to video evidence, I see [by accusing the police of fabricating the video]." [KM: yes, a problem for society, but OpenAI must get richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 01 October 2025

• Jewish Israel is paying social media influencers in the USA $7000 per post, as support craters among right-wing Christians in the USA, a cratering support due to Jewish Israel's destruction of Islamic Gaza
  - Zero Hedge, 01 October 2025

• The $100 billion 'circle jerk' of financing between AI vendors [that pumps up the markets]: $100 billion flows from Oracle to Nvidia, then sometime later, $100 billion flows from Nvidia to OpenAI, and then sometimes later $100 billion flows from OpenAI to ... Oracle. [KM: how else can they prevent the bubble from bursting?]
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 01 October 2025

• Investors have invested more than $900 billion in ETFs in 2025
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 October 2025

• Microsoft wants to mainly use its own AI data center chips in the future
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 October 2025

• 50 years on, has Zhōngguó left Europe behind in the race for a hi-tech future? Companies in Zhōngguó have caught up with and in some cases overtaken their rivals in Europe, putting the European Union on the defensive.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 01 October 2025

• Has the planet reach a space-junk tipping point? In some orbits, the Kessler-syndrome is already underway, with those orbits suffering from exploding amount of space debris that damage satellites and spacecraft. [KM: yes, but rich tech companies with their satellite systems must get richer, and like the oil industry, not have to pay for cleaning up their messes]
  - IEEE Spectrum, 30 September 2025

• Republican Senator Ted Cruz blocks a proposed law that would have extended data privacy protections for federal lawmakers and public officials to everyone in the United States. Democrat Senator Ron Wyden's proposed law would have taken bipartisan-passed provisions designed to protect government officials, lawmakers, and their families from having their personal information sold or traded by data brokers, and extend them to every American and person living in the United States. [KM: a nice investment payoff from some in the data brokering industry]
  - TechCrunch, 30 September 2025

• Adobe is in serious trouble because of AI, Morgan Stanley warns. Adobe is facing serious competition from major competitors, including graphic design platforms Figma and Canva, which could soon outcompete Adobe by leapfrogging the 42-year-old software giant with AI tech.
  - Futurism, 30 September 2025

• OpenAI releases list of paid-human tasks that it says its non-paid ChatGPT can already replace [KM: yes, helping rich AI companies get richer]
  - Futurism, 30 September 2025

• $100,000,000 - FTC accuses Zillow of paying Redfin $100 million to stop competing on rental listings. The agency said the alleged deal reduces competition in an already concentrated market and is likely to drive up the cost of advertising vacancies in rental buildings with more than 25 units. The charges fall under the criminal antitrust laws.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 30 September 2025

• FTC accuses Zillow of paying Redfin $100 million to stop competing on rental listings. The agency said the alleged deal reduces competition in an already concentrated market and is likely to drive up the cost of advertising vacancies in rental buildings with more than 25 units. The charges fall under the criminal antitrust laws.
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 September 2025

• Brazil has a new, popular, digital spending system - PIX. Brazil's fast and free homegrown digital payment system, PIX, has become wildly popular. The Trump administration says it unfairly undercuts USA companies, such as Visa and Apple with their payment systems. Unlike many other payment systems, PIX charges no fees for individuals and small businesses. For small businesses, they have more profits, since they have to pay fewer higher fees to credit card companies. [KM: more nationalist socialist industrial policy from Trump - the USA government must control everything.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 September 2025

• OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora video generator that creates videos criminally-infringing copyrighted material, unless copyright holders explicitly opt out of having their works criminally infringed [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 September 2025

• Debt is fueling the next wave of the AI bubble. For aspiring artificial-intelligence competitors such as Oracle, future riches rely on debt and hope.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 September 2025

• Amazon Prime Video partners with FanDuel to make sports gambling more addictive by enabling gamblers to monitor their bets on NBA/WBNA games in real-time
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 September 2025

• Shares of CoreWeave popped more than 13% on Tuesday after the company announced it has agreed to provide Facebook/Instagramn with $14.2 billion of artificial intelligence cloud infrastructure
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 September 2025

• Taiwan has vowed to resist pressure from Washington to shift half of its semiconductor chip production capacity (much owned by TSMC) to the USA [a new Trump nationalist socialist industrial policy], throwing down the gauntlet to the Trump administration
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 30 September 2025

• USA Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told cable network NewsNation on Sunday that unless Taiwan moved a significant share of its semiconductor processor chip production to America, Washington could not guarantee it would defend Taiwan against an attack by Zhōngguó. [KM: A classic mafia-protection-racket tactic, or more nationalist socialist industrial planning]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 30 September 2025

• California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation law on Monday that will force major AI companies to reveal their safety protocols -- marking the end of a lobbying battle with big tech companies like ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Meta and setting the groundwork for a potential national standard
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 29 September 2025

• Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) warns that the "majority of the world" will choose 'open' AI models (open weights, open training data) from Zhōngguó over the 'closed' AI models of the USA. Especially because Zhōngguó is focusing on embedding AI into practical applications, from consumer apps to robotics, as opposed to "crazy AGI strategies".
  - Zero Hedge, 29 September 2025

• Landlords are using a service that logs into a potential renter's employer systems and scrapes their paystubs and other information en masse, potentially in violation of USA hacking laws, according to screenshots of the tool shared with 404 Media. The screenshots highlight the intrusive methods some landlords use when screening potential tenants, taking information they may not need, or legally be entitled to, to assess a renter.
  - 404 Media, 29 September 2025

• Bigger programming projects than do not need paid-humans: [mis]Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 ran autonomously for 30 hours to build a chat application similar to Slack or Teams, generating approximately 11,000 lines of code before stopping upon task completion. [KM: 30-plus hours of work that didn't need paid humans]
  - The Verge, 29 September 2025

• The dangers of letting AI plan your next trip. An imagined town in Peru, an Eiffel tower in Beijing: travellers are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT for itinerary pans - and being sent to destinations that do not exist, which could cost travellers their lies. "This sort of misinformation is perilous in Peru."
  - BBC, 29 September 2025

• Nvidia is discussing a new processor-chip-leasing model with OpenAI (to help OpenAI save money?). But when Nvidia, the company carrying the entire market on its back, decides its next great 'innovation' is lease accounting, that might not just be a red flag. It could be a warning flare. [KM: rich finding it hard to get richer?]
  - Zero Hedge, 29 September 2025

• Gambling fever is getting worse across the (bubbled) stock market. Assets in leveraged equity ETFs in the US are nearing their peaks as speculation in the market intensifies.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 September 2025

• SWIFT and Big Banks are building a blockchain network that could transform global money transfers - and leave outdated systems behind
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 29 September 2025

• In a move that is sure to make Ripple nervous, traditional financial network Swift announced yesterday that it is partnering with Consensys and more than 30 global banks to build a blockchain based network that will run in parallel with its traditional network. Interestingly, unlike XRP, there is no native coin, rather it aims for interoperability (probably using Chainlink with whom the company did case studies for a few years already). There is also a strong focus on regulatory compliance.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 29 September 2025

• Trump's damaging five-prong war on technological innovation in the USA, innovation that is the leading source of economic growth. Trump has made it increasingly clear that he wants his Administration to have complete control of the US economy, for Trump to implement his nationalist socialist industrial policy.
  - Real Clear Markets, 29 September 2025

• The current war on science (and thus innovation) and the corporate interests behind it. "There is, unquestionably, a coordinated, concerted attack on science by today's Republican Party.", who are controlled by [the rich] "plutocrats [of Silicon Valley] and their PACs, and petrostates and their politicians and polluters".
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 29 September 2025

• Shares of Etsy rise 15% as OpenAI announces ChatGPT Instant Checkout for the shopping site - a new feature that will allow users to make single-item purchases directly from merchants through ChatGPT
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 September 2025

• US Berkeley computer science professor Hany Farid says that "everybody" is struggling to get programming jobs. The ability of non-paid AI to create software is making this situation worse.
  - Business Insider, 29 September 2025

• The culture magazine, 'n + 1', urges professional writers to resist non-paid AI, boycott and stigmatize AI slop. "AI-made material is a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind."
  - N + 1, 29 September 2025

• More high-tech misery: the hustle culture trend '966' (working 9am to 9pm, six days a week) is taking hold in Silicon Valley [KM, i.e., being forced on the serfs]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 September 2025

• Legislators should force social media platforms to tell the truth [KM: but won't that make them less richer?]. CrownTangle's death [which monitored Facebook, was acquired by Facebook, and destroyed] is a near-perfect illustration of why legislatures cannot just trust social platforms to act in the public interest, or to give us the information we need and deserve.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 September 2025

• Zillow reports its first profitable year since 2012
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 September 2025

• Saudi takeover of Electronics Arts in $55 billion deal raises serious concerns
  - NERDS.xyz, 29 September 2025

• The investment firm of Jared Kushner (the Jewish son-in-law of the Christian Trump) and Islamic Saudi Arabia are taking videogame maker Electronic Arts private in a massive deal
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 29 September 2025

• In a $55 billion deal, the investment firm of Jared Kushner (the Jewish son-in-law of the Christian Trump) and Islamic Saudi Arabia are taking videogame maker Electronic Arts private
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 September 2025

• Trump will impose a 100% tax/tariff on "on any and all movies that are made outside of the USA", the first time Trump has imposed a tax/tariff on a service, rather than a product. The economic reality is that "the fact is, it is cheaper for Hollywood studios to pay for everyone to get on planes, pay for hotels, because the cost of labor, lack of rebates and the ability to make things overseas is infinitely cheaper".
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 29 September 2025

• Trump will impose a 100% tax/tariff on "on any and all movies that are made outside of the USA", the first time Trump has imposed a tax/tariff on a service, rather than a product. The economic reality is that "the fact is, it is cheaper for Hollywood studios to pay for everyone to get on planes, pay for hotels, because the cost of labor, lack of rebates and the ability to make things overseas is infinitely cheaper".
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 September 2025

• As AI destroys paid-human white-collar jobs, more young people in the USA are choosing blue-collar jobs, skilled trades such as being electricians, plumbers, welders, masons, HVAC technicians and other occupations requiring extensive training and often licensing.
  - CBC News, 29 September 2025

• How Instagram and Internet 'influencers' have made Bali so popular that they are helping to destroy the harmony of Bali [KM: but the influencers must get richer]
  - BBC, 29 September 2025

• Lufthansa to fire 4,000 paid-humans as the airline plans to rely more on non-paid AI to boost efficiency [KM: yes, the rich must get richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 September 2025

• Lufthansa to fire 4,000 paid-humans as the airline plans to rely more on non-paid AI to boost efficiency [KM: yes, the rich must get richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 September 2025

• Financial markets detach from economic fundamentals, and thus are way overpriced
  - Zero Hedge, 28 September 2025

• How much of the AI bubble is being inflated by Nvidia recycling its cash, for example, its $100 billion investment in Open AI which will use many of those billions to buy products from ... Nvidia? Nvidia has engaged in a variety of 'circular' deals in which it invests in, or lends money to, its own customers - something which helped popped earlier technology bubbles. A similar circle is Nvidia investing in CoreWeave which uses some of that money to obtain data center capacity from OpenAI, as well as Nvidia agreeing to buy data center capacity from CoreWeave.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 28 September 2025

• Why therapy from AI chatbots is dangerous for your mental health: they are designed to be your friend, to be addictive like apps [KM: to make rich AI companies richer]. But when you have mental health problems, you don't need a friend, you need a human trained to have a neutral perspective. [KM: which admittedly makes less money for rich AI companies to offer access to]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 September 2025

• Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has a wake-up call for investors gambling billions of dollars into humanoid robot startups: you are wasting your money. He calls the promises of robot companies such as Tesla "pure fantasy thinking". [KM: yes, but how else to create insane valuations to make the rich richer?]
  - TechCrunch, 28 September 2025

• Researchers are finding that productivity gains are modest - at best, when using AI coding tools, and at worst, that non-paid AI tools can actually slow down paid-human software developers [KM: can't inflate a bubble this way]
  - Futurism, 28 September 2025

• Experts are alarmed that AI systems can now design functional viruses. [KM: watch out when rich AI companies try to get richer by buying anti-viral drug companies]
  - Futurism, 27 September 2025

• The CEO of Walmart issues a warning: "[non-paid] AI is going to change literally every [paid-human] job." The country's largest private employer says the number of people it iwll employ will stay flat over the next three years, despite plans to grow, as non-paid AI eliminates some paid-human jobs, and transforms others.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 September 2025

• Beware co-workers who produce AI-generated 'workslop'. "The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work."
  - TechCrunch, 27 September 2025

• The CEO of Walmart issues a warning: "[non-paid] AI is going to change literally every [paid-human] job." The country's largest private employer says the number of people it iwll employ will stay flat over the next three years, despite plans to grow, as non-paid AI eliminates some paid-human jobs, and transforms others.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 September 2025

• Laid-off tech workers say Trump's H-1b crackdown will not help them get a paid job. Many say their biggest problems are a weak domestic job market, the rise of non-paid AI, and a glut of displaced (formerly paid) people looking for similar roles
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 September 2025

• Tech companies are pouring hundreds of billions into data centers, taking on heavy debt, but current revenue is relatively tiny. Critics warn of a new dot-com bubble.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 September 2025

• Elon Musk's xAI has designed its Grok chatbot to be deliberately provocative. It has a flirtatious female avatar that can strip on command, a chatbot that toggles between "sexy" and "unhinged" modes, and an image and video generation feature with a "spicy" setting. Some xAI workers said they've encountered NSFW content, including AI-generated child sexual abuse material. [KM: yes, but the rich Musk must get richer]
  - Business Insider, 27 September 2025

• [VIDEO]: the alarming rise of AI 'nudify' apps that create explicit images of real people
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 September 2025

• The best non-paid AI chatbots to replace paid-human customer service representatives
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 September 2025

• National and state-level anti-gambling organizations are in conflict over 1-800-GAMBLER hotline, as gambling addictions increase. The National Council calls itself "gambling neutral" and partners with casinos and sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel.
  - Barron's, 27 September 2025

• What if the huge (bubbled) demand for all-things AI (such as disk drives) causes customers to double- and triple-order, leading to an inevitable glut, and the next downturn? Or what if the broader AI cashvalanche is a replay of the late 1990s dot-com bubble, when companies borrowed richly to lay 'dark fiber', i.e., broadband capacity that exceeded demand? But a lot of this is funded with cash flow, so any downtown will not be too severe.
  - Barron's, 27 September 2025

• The videogame industry has a problem - there are too many games
  - Bloomberg, 26 September 2025

• Trump launches an AI program to deny Medicare services
  - Raw Story, 26 September 2025

• Conservative broadcaster Sinclair is putting Jimmy Kimmel Live! back on the air, much because of the loss of advertising dollars, [and not because it felt like standing up to tyranny]
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 26 September 2025

• Shares of Electronic Arts soar 15%, the most in years, on news of a reported $50 billion deal to go private with a leveraged buyout
  - Zero Hedge, 26 September 2025

• Shares of Electronic Arts soar 15%, the most in years, on news of a reported $50 billion deal to go private with a leveraged buyout
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 September 2025

• Destroying the minds of children [KM: to make rich tech companies richer]. Children who grow up playing 'Minecraft' and 'Fortnite' are particularly susceptible to having gambling problems later in life. Many of the games have loot boxes that can be won or purchased in the game to allow the player to progress. A poll last year reported that 10% of men between 18 and 30 show signs of a gambling problem compared to just 3% of the general population. [KM: tech companies must get richer]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 26 September 2025

• [KM: More paid-human jobs to be destroyed]: Google's YouTube Music is testing AI hosts that will interrupt listening to music with commentary from the non-paid AI 'hosts'. This will be similar to how paid-human radio hosts add-in the occasional comment.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 26 September 2025

• Researchers have warned that artificial intelligence (AI) is drifting into security grey areas that look a lot like rebellion. [KM: but rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 26 September 2025

• Very rich tech companies are investings hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers, taking on heavy debt, but current revenue is relatively tiny. Critics warn of a new dot-com bubble.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 September 2025

• A new nationalist socialist industrial policy from the [racist] Trump: Trump wants domestic manufacturing of semiconductor processors to match imports and would impose tariffs on those companies that do not increase production.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 September 2025

• A new nationalist socialist industrial policy from the [racist] Trump: Trump wants domestic manufacturing of semiconductor processors to match imports and would impose tariffs on those companies that do not increase production.
  - Zero Hedge, 26 September 2025

• Editorial: Trump's economic mistake of imposing $100,000 fees on H1-B visas. Companies that cannot import talent will hire more people outside the USA.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 September 2025

• Unusual trading ahead of crypto-treasury deals draws scrutiny from regulators in the USA. The SEC and Finra reached out to companies whose shares moved sharply before they announced plans to buy bitcoin and other digital assets.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 September 2025

• By the end of 2030, Bosch hopes to fire 13,000 paid humans, particularly in its car-parts manufacturing arm in Deutschland, as it plans to rely more on non-paid AI to maximize productivity
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 September 2025

• Researchers have found that the carbon footprint of generative AI-based tools that can turn text prompts into [useless] images and videos is far worse than we previously thought. The energy demands of text-to-video generators quadruple when the length of a generated video doubles. [KM: yes, but rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Futurism, 25 September 2025

• Shares of CarMax crashed 25% in early New York trading. If the losses hold through the close, it would mark the largest daily decline since the Dot-Com bust. The selloff was sparked by second-quarter earnings that Truist Financial Services analysts described as a "miss across the board," with "really nothing good to see." The news also dragged down peers, including Carvana. CarMax's second-quarter results shocked Wall Street desks earlier with profit, sales, and pricing misses, signaling a very challenging used-car market in the second half of the year.
  - Zero Hedge, 25 September 2025

• Auto industry is flashing a warning sign on the economy of the USA. CarMax, the biggest seller of used cars, said that sales and profit plunged in the latest quarter. Its shares closed down 20%.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 September 2025

• Gold and silver prices soar, and stock and bond prices pushed down, and cryptocurrencies crash
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 25 September 2025

• Trump is forfeiting the clean-energy industry/future to Zhōngguó, [by heaping more socialist subsidies on the oil and natural gas industries, and taking them away from the renewable energy industry]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 September 2025

• Shares of Carmax were down more than 20% Thursday after the used auto retailer missed Wall Street's quarterly earnings and revenue expectations
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 September 2025

• The air is coming out of the Oracle AI rally. One analyst sees 40% drop ahead.
  - CNBC (locked), 25 September 2025

• A breakthrough hydride ion battery: scientists in Zhōngguó claim it has 6 times the capacity of lithium ion batteries. Rechargeable, room-temperature stable battery possible using rare earth-based battery electrolyte harnessing hydride ions.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 25 September 2025

• Shoplifters could soon be chased down by drones. Flock Safety is pitching its police-style drone program to private businesses. It could bring aerial surveillance to shopping centers, warehouses, and hospitals. [Laser-equipped drones?]
  - MIT Technology Review, 25 September 2025

• The City Council of Birmingham, the largest city council in Europe, delays again fixes to a disastrous installation of an Oracle financial processing system. A system that was supposed to cost about $27 million in 2021 could end up costing $230 million, the cost overruns already forcing the council to effectively declare bankruptcy in 2023
  - The Register, 24 September 2025

• Intel is in preliminary talks to obtain an investment from Apple, as part of a USA-backed comeback
  - Zero Hedge, 24 September 2025

• The CFO of SAP, Dominik Asam, warns that non-paid AI will help us "afford to [fire] people" but if we do it wrong, it will be a "catastrophe"
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 24 September 2025

• The very rich Sam Altman's [much socially useless] AI empire will devour as much power as New York City and San Diego combined. Experts say that it is "scary", especially the environmental costs. "If data centers consume all the local water or disrupt biodiversity, that creates unintended consequences." [KM: yes, but rich AI companies must get richer, the poor can eat cake]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 24 September 2025

• 20% of Generation Z people are "very concerned" that non-paid AI will take their paid-human jobs in the next years
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 24 September 2025

• The AI bubble is unsustainable unless tech spending goes "parabolic", warns Deutsche Bank. "This is highly unlikely".
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 24 September 2025

• The CEO of Ford: the USA is ignoring the 'essential economy' as non-paid AI eats entry-level white collar jobs [KM: yes, but rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 24 September 2025

• Shares of Alibaba rise 9% after it announces future plans (not current spending) to boost its AI capital expenditures. "Don't need more capex [spending] anymore - just need to promise more capex [spending] [KM: to make rich AI companies richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 24 September 2025

• Trump tells the world at the UN that renewable energy is a scam [as opposed to Zhōngguó, which is becoming the world leader in highly sought renewable energy], and that climate science is from "stupid people"
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 September 2025

• A $100,000 per worker visa fee much favors [filthy rich] Big Tech. Silicon Valley start-ups said they were concerned they would be disproportionately hurt by the new visa fee for skilled foreign workers, given their limited resources. [KM: yes, but the rich must get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 September 2025

• AI can now pass the hardest level of the CFA (chartered financial analyst) exam in a matter of minutes. [KM: another sector of human-paid jobs to be eliminated to make rich AI companies richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 September 2025

• Electronics giant in Zhōngguó, Xiaomi, challenges Samsung based in South Korea, with new smartphones and appliances. Xiaomi, which is the third-largest smartphone player in Europe, has been looking to expand globally over the past few years.
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 September 2025

• Is a rumored national socialist development fund for rare earth metals in the USA coming too late to catch up with Zhōngguó? A reported US$5 billion [nationalist socialist industrial planning] fund to secure the rare earth supply for the USA is probably not enough to shake the dominance of Zhōngguó, analysts said.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 24 September 2025

• How to see how insanely stupid is LLM AI models. Ask ChatGPT to answer riddles in just one word. The latest models that are touted as having advanced reasoning abilities are actually just more wordy. AI is nor 'intelligent', it just talks that way. Every time an AI gets something right, it is actually just a coincidence. It does not know facts. It is simply arrived there because the longer AI has to give a monologue, the more likely it is to hit upon the right answer. It is just accumulating probabilistic opportunities.
  - Jim the AI Whisperer (medium, locked), 23 September 2025

• Even Goldman Sachs's Delta-One head is shocked at Nvidia's grotesque vendor financing scheme. "One firm invests $100 billion in the other, so it can buy $100 billion of processor chips made by the investor. Welcome to AI's circular [corrupt] economy."
  - Zero Hedge, 23 September 2025

• BitMine Immersion Technologies, a cryptocurrency treasury company focused on Bitcoin and Ether, said it controls more than 2% of the total supply of Ether, after amassing 2.4 million ETH.
  - Zero Hedge, 23 September 2025

• Will Trump's $100,000 fee/tax on H1-B visas help workers in the USA? Changes to the H1-B system could benefit from U.S. workers. But economists say that losing skilled foreign workers could weaken the overall job market in the USA - and shift some manufacturing to outside the USA.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 September 2025

• I though I knew Silicon Valley - I was wrong. [The rich white men running the Valley] got what they wanted by electing [the racist white man,] Trump. A year later, it looks more like a suicide pact.
  - Wired (locked), 22 September 2025

• The AI bubble keeps on getting inflated. Nvidia announces a $100 billion investment in OpenAI. [KM: how many paid humans are going to have to lose their jobs for a return on this investment?]
  - Zero Hedge, 22 September 2025

• AI-generated 'workslop' is destroying productivity. The survey of 1,150 full-time workers found recipients spend an average of one hour and 56 minutes addressing each incident of workslop, costing organizations an estimated $186 per employee monthly. For a 10,000-person company, lost productivity totals over $9 million annually.
  - Harvard Business Review, 22 September 2025

• More on the AI bubble: very rich AI companies are projected to earn $800 billion less than they need to build their data centers and related infrastructure. A Bain report raises further questions about the AI industry's valuations and business model. [KM: unless the rich AI companies find more ways to profit with non-paid AI by destroying paid human jobs]
  - Bloomberg, 22 September 2025

• Shares of Tesla are up 30% in the last month, much on efforts by Elon Musk and Tesla to make as much money as possible replacing paid-human taxi drivers with Tesla's robotaxis [KM: since making Elon Musk and investors richer is more important than poor taxi cab drivers trying to survive]
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 22 September 2025

• [Not good for the bubbling of Nvidia:] Huawei has unveiled AI processors it says can deliver world-class computing power without Nvidia's advanced processors, a potential breakthrough for Zhōngguó goal to reduce reliance on semiconductor technology from the USA
  - Zero Hedge, 21 September 2025

• The long-shrinking number of media outlets and platforms, controlled by billionaires who gladly [and cowardly] support [the racist] Trump, has made it easier for the Trump administration to exercise control over the remaining outlets. [KM: yes, but the rich must get richer]
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 21 September 2025

• Steve Parson, the CEO of Goodwill, says that he is preparing for an influx of jobless Gen Zers to Goodwill's employment services because of AI destroying their job oportunities - and warns, a youth unemployment crisis is already happening. He says that non-paid will hurt low-wage and entry level paid-human jobs the worst. He is already witnessing "large organizations beginning to make significant layoffs based on a move to AI". [KM: yes but rich AI companies and their rich customers/investors must get rich]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 21 September 2025

• Apple takes control of all core processor chips in iPhone Air with new architecture to prioritize AI, with future phones relying less on processor chips from Broadcom, Qualcom and other companies
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 September 2025

• Trump's new $100,000 fee to obtain H1-B working visas (very popular in the high tech world) could be devastating for the economy of Bharat. Currently, corporations win on lower labor costs, the third world migrants win by wiring their wages back home where they will buy far more, and the average American worker loses out on job opportunities. 70% of these visa currently are issued to people from Bharat. 39% of the tax revenues for Bharat come from monies sent back to Bharat for its people working outside Bharat (remittances).
  - Zero Hedge, 20 September 2025

• The government of Bharat warns that Trump's new $100,000 fee for H1-B visas with have "humanitarian consequences"
  - BBC, 20 September 2025

• Trump has announced a $100,000 fee on every H-1B visa application. Trump believes this will protect workers in the USA. What it will actually do is slam the door on the doctors, scientists, and engineers who built the greatest industries of the USA. It is the immigration equivalent of his taxes/tariffs - loud, clumsy, and self-defeating. The outcome will be a weaker USA and a stronger Bharat.
  - BBC, 20 September 2025

• The new iPhone is an emblem of our miserable minimalist era. The barely there iPhone Air is in line with trends in tech, design and art - unsullied by thought, risk or humor. Minimalism sells us the notion that we can be masters of our environment, but the truth is, we have never had less control over our destiny.
  - The Guardian, 20 September 2025

• AI tools made available by rich AI companies give dangerous powers to cyberattackers, security researchers warn [KM: the rich getting richer apparently includes criminals]
  - The Washington Post, 20 September 2025

• The iPhone Air is Apple's most impressive phone in years. But most people should not buy it - it has a smaller battery, a single camera and tends to heat up quickly - at a higher price. The iPhone 17 is better at $200 less.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 September 2025

• The leader of Zhōngguó, Xi Jinping, is willing to give up control of one increasingly-useless social app, TikTok, to Trump and his friends, in return for more important concessions on taxes/tariffs, technology access and Taiwan.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 September 2025

• The USA government is expected to receive a multi-billion dollar fee for approving a TikTok deal. The fee would be the latest example of the government getting paid for involvement in private-sector deals, i.e., for its nationalist socialist industrial policies [in a racist administration]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 September 2025

• Businesses in the USA invented robot vacuum cleaners. So why do companies in Zhōngguó now dominate the market? As in many other industries, companies in Zhōngguó have outpaced their global rivals through rapid innovation and intense competition.
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 September 2025

• Nuclear stocks are soaring/ bubbling. We size up the prospects for 3 new ones - Terra Innovation, Terrestrial Energy, and Eagle Energy Metals. Three companies building small nuclear reactors aim to go public via SPACS. What to watch for.
  - Barron's, 20 September 2025

• Nvidia solves 4 of Intel 5 big problems, with its $5 billion dollar investment. The final problem is a doozy - Intel's manufacturing problems.
  - Barron's, 20 September 2025

• The very rich CEO of Uber says that non-paid robotaxis could displace paid-human drivers in 10 to 15 years, and create a "big, big, societal question". [KM: which won't stop filthy rich AI companies from creating a robotaxi industry.]
  - Business Insider, 19 September 2025

• I lost my job, and unfettered non-paid AI made it much harder to find a new paid-human job. The tech field is streamlining workforces in pursuit of profit, often at the expense of human labor. [KM: Sorry, but the rich must get richer.]
  - The Hill, 19 September 2025

• Parents outraged as Facebook/Instagram uses photographs of schoolgirls in advertisements targeting an adult man. Instagram pictures of girls as young as 13 were posted to promote Threads site, "as bait", a critic says.
  - The Guardian, 19 September 2025

• Facebook/Instagram accused of criminally copying pornographic videos to advance its goal of AI 'superintelligence'. Strike 3 Holdings is suing Facebook/Instagram in in federal court, alleging the Facebook/Instagram criminally copied copyrighted adult videos to train its AI models. [KM: rich AI companies must get richer, and apparently, hornier]
  - Wired, 19 September 2025

• Are we living the last high-tech/real-estate bubble? The consensus holds there will be another bubble after the Everything Bubble pops, but this might be misplaced confidence in the godlike powers of central banks.
  - Zero Hedge, 19 September 2025

• The Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky this month announced a surprising unintended consequence of a new statewide cellphone ban. In many of the district's schools, the number of books checked out in the first few weeks of class had skyrocketed compared with last year, before the ban was instituted. [KM: I weep for less profits for makers of addictive/AI cellphone apps]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 September 2025

• Huawei unveils AI processor chip pipeline as tech rivalry heats up. Huawei Technologies plans to roll out more artificial-intelligence chips in the next three years, giving a rare glimpse into its ambitions to compete with Nvidia in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 September 2025

• Via and Google's Waymo partner to bring non-paid robotaxis to public transit systems, taking more jobs from paid-human taxi drivers [KM: but the rich must get richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 September 2025

• Nissan beats Elon Musk and Tesla to offering a $25,000 electric vehicle in the USA, something Musk has been hype-pumping since 2018, and which Musk ignorantly argued in 2014 that "having a regular, $25,000 model is pointless. It is silly." Apparently not, if Nissan can do so.
  - Carscoops.com, 19 September 2025

• [The 'good' authoritarian Christian] Trump considers cancelling the broadcast licenses if networks continue to be "against" him
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 September 2025

• Walmart's online marketplace, Marketplace, has been on a meteoric rise, but a CNBC investigation found it fueled growth in part by making it easier for third-party sellers to join and sell on its platform. Over time, Walmart made its seller and product vetting more lax in a bid to compete with Amazon, according to sellers and current and former employees. CNBC uncovered dozens of third-party sellers impersonating legitimate businesses, who were offering potentially dangerous counterfeit health and beauty products at steep discounts.
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 September 2025

• The dawn of the post-literate society. Books and reading are dying. Literacy levels are "declining or stagnating". Why? The smartphone, and now AI. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait. [KM: yes, but smartphone companies and addictive app companies must get richer selling their drugs]
  - K.W. Hampton (Medium), 18 September 2025

• Uber, Google's Waymo, Musk's Tesla: the plans of Silicon Valley to 'kill' the worker. Silicon Valley's business model has never really been about innovation. It is more or less been about loopholes, lobbying, and offloading risk onto workers. Uber's "independent contractors"? A lie. In practice, they were full-time workers without any of the protections. Health insurance? Nope. Paid leave? Try again. Retirement? Forget it. [All things possessed by the rich executives of Uber.] And non-paid robotaxis allow them to eliminate the "indpendent contractors". "To me, Uber does not have a real business model at all. It has a loophole. And that loophole is guarded by lobbyists, partnerships, mutation, and the illusion of innovation."
  - K.W. Hampton (Medium), 18 September 2025

• ChatGPT is blowing up marriages as spouses use AI to attack their partners. [KM: yes, but the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Futurism, 18 September 2025

• Teachers got mad about another way Google wants to become even more richer, but offering a "cheat button" in Google Chrome, to help students cheat on their tests. Under pressure, Google is temporarily pausing the button. "Google is undermining academic integrity by shoving AI in students' faces during exams." "Google is trying to make instructors give up on regulating AI in their classroom, and it might work. Google Chrome has the market share to change student behavior, and it appears this is the goal." [KM: yes, but the rich must get richer]
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 18 September 2025

• Microsoft is adding multiple AI agents to Teams, promising Copilot assistants for every channel, meeting, and community. The new agents will also work across SharePoint and Viva Engage, and are rolling out for Microsoft 365 Copilot users. Non-paid AI facilitator agents will now monitor Teams meetings, creating agendas, taking notes, and answering questions. Agents can also suggest time allotments for different meeting topics. All tasks doable by paid-humans. [KM: the rich AI companies must get richer.]
  - The Verge, 18 September 2025

• Sold on Walmart, sent by Amazon: the weird new world of online retail
  - Geekwire, 18 September 2025

• Samsung is bringing advertisements to the refrigerators it sells to homeowners in the USA, making the lives of people more miserable. [KM: but the rich must get richer]
  - The Verge, 18 September 2025

• The Federal Trade Commission filed a bombshell lawsuit against Ticketmaster on Thursday, accusing the online, high-tech, broker of earning huge profits through exorbitant fees and turning a blind eye as AI bots illegally resell millions of tickets to customers. The FTC's lawsuit alleges that Ticketmaster has allowed AI bots to resell millions of tickets beyond the purchase limits it publicly announced since the BOTS Act took effect. [KM: but rich companies must get richer with AI]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 18 September 2025

• The Federal Trade Commission filed a bombshell lawsuit against Ticketmaster on Thursday, accusing the online, high-tech, broker of earning huge profits through exorbitant fees and turning a blind eye as AI bots illegally resell millions of tickets to customers. The FTC's lawsuit alleges that Ticketmaster has allowed AI bots to resell millions of tickets beyond the purchase limits it publicly announced since the BOTS Act took effect. [KM: but rich companies must get richer with AI]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 September 2025

• Pressure mounts on [cowardly] Disney over its suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, as calls for boycotts of Disney products increase. Disney faces protests outside its studios, celebrities threatening to break ties and political pressure from Republicans and Democrats. "The Epstein list of rapists won't be released, but Jimmy Kimmel is 'released' from his show?"
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 September 2025

• "Where has all the leadership gone?": former CEO of Disney, Michael Eisner, blasts Disney/ABC for suspending Jimmy Kimmel. "If not for university presidents, law firm managing partners and corporate chief executives standing up to bullies, then who will step up for the First Amendment?" [and against Trump's authoritarianism].
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 18 September 2025

• Yes, Jimmy Kimmel's suspension was authoritarian censorship by the Trump government. The First Amendment matters, even if Disney and ABC were cowards, too.
  - The Verge, 18 September 2025

• Eminent television host David Letterman reacts to Kimmel pause: "You cannot fire somebody because you are trying to suck up to an authoritarian criminal administration in the Oval Office".
  - Deadline, 18 September 2025

• Why did Jimmy Kimmel get canceled? What to know about cowardly ABC move.
  - USA Today, 18 September 2025

• Cowards at ABC (owned by Disney) 'indefinitely' cancel Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show, after FCC Chair (and puppet of the racist Trump) Brendan Carr criticized Kimmel for his remarks about the politics of the man accused of murdering the racist Charlie Kirk
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 September 2025

• Dozens of ABC/Disney stations to air a tribute special to the murdered, [but racist Christian], Charlie Kirk, in the time slot that for the now-canceled-by-cowards Jimmy Kimmel late-night show. "I am not sure who deserves more disdain and disgust: Trump and the FCC for their blatant violation of the Constitution, or Disney and Nexstar for sacrificing their values and folding to a wannabe Mob Boss and his authoritarian [racist] goons."
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 18 September 2025

• Nexstar and Sinclair, two large television station groups, wield influence in ABC/Disney's decision to temporarily suspect Jimmy Kimmel for his free-speech comments on the murdered racist Charlie Kirk. No surprise, Nexstar, Sinclair and ABC/Disney are seeking the approval of Trump and the FCC for mergers.
  - Deadline, 18 September 2025

• Larry Ellison, the billionaire supporter of the racist Trump, will soon 'own' the news. He is already a major stakeholder in CBS and Paramount. Now CNN, HBO and a major share of TikTok are in his sights. If all goes as anticipated, this tech billionaire, already one of the richest men in the world and a founder of Oracle, is poised, at 81, to become one of the most powerful media and entertainment moguls America has ever seen. All of this power in the hands of a supporter of the racist Trump.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 September 2025

• Nvidia will invest $5 billion in Intel (buying about 4% of its shares), joining the nationalist socialist investment of the Trump Administration, which acquired a 10% share of Intel in return for government subsidies
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 September 2025

• Nvidia will invest $5 billion in Intel (buying about 4% of its shares), joining the nationalist socialist investment of the Trump Administration, which acquired a 10% share of Intel in return for government subsidies
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 September 2025

• Nvidia will invest $5 billion in Intel (buying about 4% of its shares), joining the nationalist socialist investment of the Trump Administration, which acquired a 10% share of Intel in return for government subsidies
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 18 September 2025

• Shares of Intel soar 26% after Nvidia announces it will invest $5 billion into Intel
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 September 2025

• Huawei Technologies is unveiling processor hardware that it said could deliver world-class computing power without using Nvidia's advanced chips, in a breakthrough that could potentially break the supply chokehold that constrains Zhōngguó's aspirations in AI
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 18 September 2025

• Has Britain become too authoritarian with its digital controls? British authorities have ramped up the use of facial recognition, artificial intelligence and internet regulation to address crime and other issues, stoking concerns of surveillance overreach.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 September 2025

• How AI chatbots - and their rich AI company developers - are enabling AI psychosis [KM: so that the rich AI companies can get richer selling another digital drug]
  - The Verge, 18 September 2025

• AI tools [KM: sold by rich AI companies] are coming for our babies - putting them at risk. [KM, yes, but rich AI companies must get richer]. OpenAI recently announced a partnership with Mattel to sell to parents "age-appropriate' AI toys for their children, [KM: as if any AI toy is 'age appropriate' for children, except to make rich AI companies richer]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 17 September 2025

• After a child's trauma induced by its app, chatbot maker Character.AI allegedly forced mom to arbitration for $100 payout. Within months of using the app, the child "developed abuse-like behaviors and paranoia, daily panic attacks, isolation, self-harm, and homicidal thoughts".
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 17 September 2025

• Very rich [mis]Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei doubled down on his warning that non-paid AI could soon cause mass unemployment of now paid-human workers. [KM: but this won't stop Amodei, [mis]Anthropic and other AI companies from getting richer while the poor get poorer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 17 September 2025

• Fed Chair Jerome Powell on signs of an AI bubble and an economy leaning too much on the rich [KM: who are profitting from the AI bubble]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 17 September 2025

• The authoritarian Trump allows the SEC to give permission to companies seeking to go public to require that investors resolve claims of fraud or other false statements through arbitration rather than court litigation, handing a victory to companies and weakening investor rights. The SEC commission's lone remaining Democrat, lambasted the new policy, saying it would "open the floodgates" to mandatory arbitration, denying many shareholders their rights while allowing companies to keep their alleged misconduct in the shadows. If harmed investors cannot band together in a class action, thereby sharing their legal costs, many simply won't sue at all. [More Trump efforts to help corporate criminals.}
  - Thomson's Reuters, 17 September 2025

• AI-driven, remote-controlled, explosive-laden robots are being used by the military of Israel to further destroy Gaza with the support of the USA - "more devastating than airstrikes"
  - Zero Hedge, 17 September 2025

• Trading by retail investors is taking over the market: odd lots now represent 66% of all equity trades in the USA, up from 31% in January 2019, more than 20% of notional volume and 8% of total executed shares
  - Zero Hedge, 17 September 2025

• The Federal Reserve reduces interest rates by 0.25%, and predicts two more similar reductions in 2025. The Dow rises 0.6%, while the SP500 and Nasdaq end up unchanged near day end
  - Zero Hedge, 17 September 2025

• The Federal Reserve reduces interest rates by 0.25%, and predicts two more similar reductions in 2025. The Dow rises 0.6%, while the SP500 and Nasdaq end up unchanged near day end
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 17 September 2025

• The Federal Reserve reduces interest rates by 0.25%, and predicts two more similar reductions in 2025. The Dow rises 0.6%, while the SP500 and Nasdaq end up unchanged near day end
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 September 2025

• The government of Zhōngguó bans Alibaba and ByteDance from buying custom AI processor chips from Nvidia
  - Zero Hedge, 17 September 2025

• The government of Zhōngguó bans Alibaba and ByteDance from buying custom AI processor chips from Nvidia
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 September 2025

• A new cryptocurrency super PAC garners $100 million to help push the industry's moneychanging agenda [KM: yeah, to further undermine the USA dollar with stablecoins, and make it easier to commit crimes with cryptocurrencies]. The [lobbying/donating/bribing] fund, called the Fellowship PAC, is the cryptocurrency's latest move to help elect legislators that will force through its moneychanging interests in the [temples of democracy in] Washington.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 September 2025

• Shares of Lyft jump 20% on news it will be able to profit from humans losing their paid taxicab driving jobs in Nashville, in a deal with Google's Waymo nonp-paid robotaxi service
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 September 2025

• Shares of Lyft jump 20% on news it will be able to profit from humans losing their paid taxicab driving jobs in Nashville, in a deal with Google's Waymo robotaxi service
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 September 2025

• Shares of Lyft jump 20% on news it will be able to profit from humans losing their paid taxicab driving jobs in Nashville, in a deal with Google's Waymo robotaxi service
  - Zero Hedge, 17 September 2025

• An AI processor develoepd by Alibaba is on par with Nvidia's H20 chip, CCTV report shows. The broadcast offers fresh evidence that processor developers in Zhōngguó are designing advanced chips that could replace imports from the USA.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 September 2025

• Nvidia's new RTX6000 AI processor chip met with dismal demand from companies in Zhōngguó. The RTX6000D, designed mainly for AI inference tasks, is seen as expensive for what it does.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 September 2025

• "I love you too!" - my family's creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy using OpenAI's technology. "It wasn't long before I wanted this experiment with my child to be over." [KM: Sorry, but the rich AI companies must get richer.]
  - The Guardian, 16 September 2025

• There isn't just one AI bubble - there are three: an asset bubble, an infrastructure bubble, and a [mega]-hype bubble - much the same as with the dot-com bubble/burst.
  - Fast Company, 16 September 2025

• A new report finds Zhōngguó's space program will soon equal that of the USA. Zhōngguó is "poised to overtake the USA in the next five to 10 years if we don't do something."
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 16 September 2025

• A nationalist socialist deal of authoritarian giants: TikTok USA will be controlled by an investor consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz under a framework the USA and Zhōngguó are finalizing as talks shift into high gear
  - Zero Hedge, 16 September 2025

• "He lied to us": CBS News staffers say that their new very rich owner, David Ellison, "just cannot be trusted". Multiple CBS News staffers said new owner David Ellison has broken his promise not to "politicize" the network by installing a Trump loyalist as ombudsman, and courting The Free Press founder Bari Weiss for a senior [puppet-y] editorial position
  - The Independent, 16 September 2025

• How Silicon Valley is ruining San Francisco, once again, this time with AI. The smug pro-AI, pro-human-job-destroying, billboards that we see every day are an ugly symptom of its rotten ideology. [The billboards] brag about how [some company's AI non-paid tools] will eventually replace you and rob you of your paid-human livelihood. [KM: the rich must get richer].
  - SF Gate, 16 September 2025

• Did USA industrial production data just expose a weak spot in the AI boom narrative? If AI is so successful (as proxied by the stock prices of AI companies), then why isn't demand for electricity (from Utilities) soaring?
  - Zero Hedge, 16 September 2025

• Tencent pushes adoption of AI processor chips made in Zhōngguó, as Zhōngguó reduces its reliance on Nvidia. Tencent fully supports domestic processors chips in its AI computing infrastructure, according to Tencent Cloud president Qiu Yuepeng.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 September 2025

• Stop chatting with ChatGPT
  - The Harvard Crimson, 15 September 2025

• As AI hype dies down, startups built on AI hype are imploding. Looking for funding for your AI startup? You might be too late [at this stage of the bubble].
  - Joe Procopio (Medium, locked), 15 September 2025

• Juicebox raises $30 million from Sequoia to eliminate one task done by paid-human recruiters: using non-paid AI to analyze professional profiles, personal websites, and other publicly available information to identify the most qualified candidates. [KM: the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - TechCrunch, 15 September 2025

• What happens when an AI assistive engine (such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI or Siri) falsely decides that you are a criminal? The incompetence of these rich AI companies AI tools can become a full-blown online reputation management crisis for you. In the AI world, the problem of mistaken identity ORM is exponentially worse. Incompetent AI tools are the world's incompetent judge, jury publicist. [KM: yes, but the rich AI companies must get richer].
  - Rolling Stone, 15 September 2025

• A study reports that 45% of samples of code generated by AI failed security tests and introduced vulnerabilities outlined by the cybersecurity nonprofit, the Open Worldwide Application Security Project. "AI-generated code, even when it works, tends to have a lot of logical flaws that simply reflect a lack of context and thoughtfulness."
  - Zero Hedge, 15 September 2025

• Online marketplace Fiverr to fire about 250 paid-humans working for the company (about 30% of the workforce), and replace them with non-paid AI tools
  - Thomson's Reuters, 15 September 2025

• Businesses are overwhelmingly relying on Anthropic's AI software to automate with non-paid AI tools - paid-human jobs, rather than collaborate on work with paid-humans
  - Bloomberg, 15 September 2025

• More Big Brother: a data broker owned by the country's major airlines, including American Airlines, United and Delta, is selling access to five billion plane ticketing records to the government for warrantless searching and monitoring of peoples' movements, including by the FBI, Secret Service, ICE, and many other agencies, according to a new contract and other records reviewed by 404 Media. "Americans' privacy rights shouldn't depend on whether they bought their tickets directly from the airline or via a travel agency."
  - 404 Media, 15 September 2025

• Shares of Tesla rise over 8%, after Musk announces he bought about $1 billion of Tesla's stock, increasing Tesla's market cap by $100 billion and squeezing shorts.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 September 2025

• Black voices are vital to democracy. The media [KM: owned by rich white men, many profiting from the AI bubble] must stop firing Black voices. The Washington Post's [owned by the extremely rich white man, Jefff Bezos] Attiah is the latest prominent Black journalist to lose her job. The trend is a sign of retrenchment in both fighting racism and saving democracy.
  - The New Republic, 15 September 2025

• More cryptocurrency corruption: an anatomy of two giant deals: the United Arab Emirates got AI processor chips. The [grifting] Trump family's cryptocurrency company got richer.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 September 2025

• Hedge funds become buyers again after the CPI report, and flood into tech stocks at fastest pace since February
  - Zero Hedge, 15 September 2025

• $7,500,000 - More Silicon Valley misanthropy: Chegg has agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle U.S. Federal Trade Commission claims that the educational technology company made it difficult to cancel subscriptions. Chegg buried cancellation options behind multiple menus on its website, according to the FTC complaint.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 15 September 2025

• Zhōngguó says Nvidia violated anti-monopoly laws, significantly escalating trade tensions with the USA
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 September 2025

• Zhōngguó says Nvidia violated anti-monopoly laws, significantly escalating trade tensions with the USA
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 15 September 2025

• Zhōngguó says Nvidia violated anti-monopoly laws, significantly escalating trade tensions with the USA
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 September 2025

• Zhōngguó says Nvidia violated anti-monopoly laws, significantly escalating trade tensions with the USA
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 15 September 2025

• Not only is Zhōngguó the world's leader in energy-storage technology and applications, it plans to greatly increase such capacity by 2027. New plan calls for expansion of energy-storage applications, including more projects in desert areas and at retired coal-fired power plant sites. Meanwhile, the environment-hating Trump is sabotaging the renewable energy industry in the USA.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 15 September 2025

• BYD faces pressure to restore investor confidence after a $45 billion stock selloff, with growing concerns over its ability to fend off competition amid a destructive price war in Zhōngguó
  - Bloomberg, 14 September 2025

• [The misery of keeping Elon Musk, and his investors, filthy rich]: one prediction is that 86% of Tesla's future earnings could come from paid-human job-destroying robotaxis, another pump-and-dump prediction from Cathie Woods. [KM: what kind of person celebrates such a possibility that relies on creating misery for millions of paid-human taxi drivers (whose paid-jobs are often subsistence jobs to survive?]
  - The Motley Fool, 14 September 2025

• Non-paid AI tool usage by companies triggers a 70% collapse in fresh graduate hiring at the IT giants of Bharat that employ 5.4 million [KM: so the rich AI companies can get richer]
  - Bharat Dispatch, 14 September 2025

• While the AI-bubbled stock market is rising to new highs [KM: on the wet dreams of non-paid AI profitting from replacing paid-humans], the decline in Treasury Bond yields shows markets are adjusting to the reality of a weaker-than-expected job market and expectations for potentially subdued economic growth. "The bond market is acknowledging that job creation, a powerful engine of the US economy, is decelerating." The 10-year Treasury Bond yield has dropped from 4.27% to 4% in two weeks.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 14 September 2025

• The rich Bret Taylor, co-CEO of Salesforce and board chair at OpenAI, saus that we are in an AI bubble in the stock markets (but that is okay), though "someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money in AI".
  - TechCrunch, 14 September 2025

• Penske Media, the owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety magazines, sued extremely rich Google on Friday, alleging that extremely rich Google's AI summaries criminally use its journalism without consent and reduce traffic to its websites which makes the magazines poorer.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 14 September 2025

• Apple CEO Tim Cook explains why Apple is investing heavily in a glass factory owned by Corning
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 September 2025

• 2 in 5 young adults are taking on debt for social image, to impress peers, study finds. [KM: which makes rich social media companies richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 13 September 2025

• You don't know how bad the job market is right now. Speaking with mentees (seeking jobs) around the world, the pattern is the same: it is impossible to get a job. For example, in the design world, it is very hard to get an entry-level job. Companies only want people with experience [which you can't get if AI does your entry level job].
  - Mehekk Bassi (Medium), 13 September 2025

• The AI bubble is much inflated by OpenAI's spending. But OpenAI needs more paying users to help finance its ambitions, but researchers and consultants are not sure they will materialize soon [given the general gimmicky nature of AI chat systems]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 September 2025

• OpenAI's spending spree is inflating the current tech industry bubble. Oracle is the latest winner. [KM: everyone losing their paid-humans jobs to non-paid AI still remain the losers]
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 September 2025

• Legacy semiconductor chip makers in Zhōngguó to obtain increased support from the government's anti-dumping probe into imports of such chips from the USA. The probe will hit US firms like Texas Instruments and Analog Devices on the mainland and give a boost to their rivals in Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 September 2025

• Zhōngguó on Saturday announced an anti-dumping probe into analog integrated circuit chips exported from the USA, and also initiated an anti-discrimination investigation over Washington's handling of semiconductors exported from Zhōngguó
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 September 2025

• The city of Shanghai is providing birth subsidies to women in science and engineering, to ease the twin burdens of motherhood and high-level research.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 September 2025

• The real danger isn't that AI will become smarter than us [it won't]. It is that we will become dumber because of AI [KM: while rich AI companies/investors become richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 12 September 2025

• Why OpenAI's solution to preventing AI 'hallucinations' would destroy the [questionable] business model of ChatGPT. If ChatGPT (and similar ilk) were to be more honest, and answer "I don't know" for even 30% of queries, users would likely abandon such systems rapidly, destroying the business models (of the still unprofitable AI companies), and worse for their billions in profits, calculating the uncertainties to generate "I don't knows" is very expensive. [KM: no billions without halluncinations, a motto of psychedelic drug traffickers as well]
  - The Conversation, 12 September 2025

• Polymarket eyes $10 billion valuation as prediction market preps a return to the USA
  - Zero Hedge, 12 September 2025

• Are (adult) moveigoers tired of adaptations of comic books? Adaptations of comic books and graphic novels accounted for just 15.6 and 3.2 percent of ticket sales at the North American box office in 2023 and 2024, down from 29.9 and 31.0 percent in 2021 and 2022, respectively.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 September 2025

• Spot bitcoin ETFs see strong demand; cryptocurrency market tops $4 trillion as Gen-A shuns gold. Still cryptocurrencies are less of a bubble than AI.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 September 2025

• Massachusetts filed a lawsuit in state court Friday against Kalshi, alleging the predictions platform offers sports gambling without a license under the guise of events contracts
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 September 2025

• "He was definitely murdered": watch the very rich Sam Altman squirm as he is grilled over the death of a whistleblower. In a tense exchange on the Tucker Carlson Show, Carlson grilled OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the shocking death of whistleblower Suchir Balaji, an AI researcher whose explosive allegations of criminal copyright violations had rocked the Altman's OpenAI, [KM: crimes allegedly committed to make Altman and OpenAI richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 12 September 2025

• Elon Musk may be trying to pivot Tesla away from electric vehicles and toward humanoid robots, but to skeptical investors there is no hiding from its stagnating sales and eye-watering stock market valuation that leaves little room for error, given intense competition in the mature robotics industry. Still fans of the Musk bid up shares 6%.
  - Bloomberg, 12 September 2025

• The AI world's 'prophet of doom' wants to shit it all down. Eliezer Yudkowsky has spent the past 20 years warning A.I. insiders of danger. Now, he is making his arguments public.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 September 2025

• Small businesses face a new threat: pay up or be flooded with bad reviews. Movers, roofing companies and others are being bombarded with phony one-star reviews on Google Maps. Then they are asked to pay up. Google makes it difficult to remove the lies once they are posted to Google Maps. AI tools have made this situation worse. "These businesses are being extorted and Google isn't doing enough [i.e., spending some of its billions] about it."
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 September 2025

• The Federal Trade Commission said it was starting an inquiry of how six major tech companies monitor the activities of AI chatbots that could harm minors [KM: while making rich AI companies richer].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 September 2025

• Trump's crackdown on advertisements for drugs could financially hurt television networks. Pharmaceutical industry spending on TV ads topped $6 billion in 2024.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 September 2025

• Intel chip architect Su Fei returns to Zhōngguó after 20 years in the USA. The award-winning engineer with a reputation for mentorship has taken up an endowed chair professorship at Tsinghua University. Another loss for the USA due to the hostile climate Trump has created.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 September 2025

• Zhōngguó makes a signifigant investment into a Thai industrial cluster with US$8.4 billion investment. The Eastern Economic Corridor, which spans three Thai provinces, is receiving more funding from investors from Zhōngguó than any other foreign country.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 September 2025

• Editorial: legalized betting on basketball games must by accompanied by anti-addiction efforts
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 September 2025

• Financial experts concerned that driving people into psychosis will be bad for AI investments [KM: unless the rich AI companies invest in psychosis drug companies!]
  - Futurism, 11 September 2025

• Job-destroying AI companies' AI tools will render impotent any interest rate reductions done by the Fed (usually done to boost the economy and thus create more jobs). But now, all an interest rate reduction will do is fuel inflation (for being 'cocaine' to the financial markets), with any new paid-human job demand filled by non-paid AI.
  - Real Clear Markets, 11 September 2025

• Nuclear power startup Deep Fission has received funding to bury its 15-megawatt water-cooled mini-ereactors a mile underground. The company has taken an unusual path to raise money, completing an alternative public offering (APO) that brought in $30 million at $3 per share - well below the $10 price typical of traditional IPOs. Burying the systems in bedrock creates natural shielding, offers protection against external threats, and reduces the surface footprint. Billions of tons of rock provide passive safety and containment.
  - Interesting Engineering, 11 September 2025

• Corporate treasuries might stored in cryptocurrencies are losing momentum, with growing doubts about the sustainability of their gmabling business model.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 September 2025

• Broadcom's VMware will lose 35% of its current workloads as Broadcom's licensing changes and rising costs push customers toward competitors like Nutanix and public clouds, as VMWare seeks less favorable licenses for its customers
  - The Register, 11 September 2025

• Roku will encourage mom-and-pop businesses to use non-paid generative AI tools to make video ads that will run on its streaming service, ads that paid-humans used to create
  - The Verge, 11 September 2025

• Prey on the "blessed meek": Klarna goes public [KM: to get rich] as more than 50% of non-rich people say risky buy-now-pay-later is the only way they can afford to buy things
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 11 September 2025

• Shares of Warner Brothers Discovery rise 30% after a report that Paramount Skydance is preparing a takeover bid
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 September 2025

• Shares of Warner Brothers Discovery rise 30% after a report that Paramount Skydance is preparing a takeover bid
  - Zero Hedge, 11 September 2025

• Remember when things were better in 80s and 90s? AI tools sold by rich AI companies can create such fantasies. Dubious videos about the glory of bygone eras are creating nostalgia for those too young to fact check them.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 September 2025

• Parent need to protect their children from rich AI companies. If children are helped to use AI wisely, at risk will be a whole new level of learning loss: a nation of compliant and unmotivated young people who have not developed the muscles to struggle productively, think, work and contribute to our communities. [KM: But at least the rich AI companies get richer.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 September 2025

• Oracle is the new champion of the AI bubble, displacing Nvidia, for better or worse. The software giant is expected to double its revenue in three years, but its future now fully hinges on the AI bubble.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 September 2025

• Alibaba and Baidu begin using their own processor chips for training AI models, and thus less business for Nvidia, thanks to Trump's attacks on Zhōngguó and restrictions on Nvidia's sales
  - Thomson's Reuters, 11 September 2025

• Using non-paid AI to destroy thousands of paid-human podcasters. An AI startup, Inception Point AI, wants to use AI to generate 5000 podcasts for 3000 epsidoses a week, with each episode costing $1. "Why pay a celebrity podcast host millions when you can create your own using AI?" [KM: let thos millions flow to the rich AI companies]
  - Hollywood Reporter, 11 September 2025

• Shares of meme-stock Opendoor soar 50% after the company names a new CEO. OpenDoor buys and sells homes over the Internet.
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 September 2025

• One reason share of OpenDoor soared is the CEO's promise: to fire 85% of the people working for OpenDoor "There are over 1,400 people working at Opendoor. I don't know what most of them do. We don't need more than 200 of them."
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 September 2025

• Zhōngguó opens for travel a new record-smashing cable-stayed mega-bridge over the Yangtze River. Structure boasts a number of world firsts, from its striking asymmetric design to the precision tools developed to build it. Meanwhile, the USA builds another AI data center.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 September 2025

• Is the rare earth's metal policies of Zhōngguó frustrating US upgrades to the F-35 stealth jet? Beijing retains leverage as the USA's modernisation would cover weapons and electronic warfare systems, communications equipment and more.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 September 2025

• The massive IT sector of Bharat faces a lengthy period of uncertainty with customers delaying or re-negotiating contracts while Trump and the Republican Congress debate a proposed 25% tax on American companies using foreign outsourcing services, analysts and lawyers said.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 11 September 2025

• Worsening of the AI bubble: without AI, there is no alpha growth in the stock markets. "The 30 or so AI stocks in S&P 500 have a combined 43% of market cap."
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 10 September 2025

• Filthy rich AI companies are criminally infringed over 15 million videos available on YouTube by using them to train their AI systems. Over 1 million criminally infringed vidos are "how to" videos, their future potential profits now most likely flowing to rich AI companies, not their human authors.
  - The Atlantic, 10 September 2025

• How 'AI psychosis' and delusions are driving some people into psychiatric hospitals and suicide, as increasing numbers of people replace human relationships with AI. [KM: but at least rich AI companies get richer].
  - Zero Hedge, 10 September 2025

• Snapchat has been accused by a Danish research organisation of allowing an "overwhelming number" of drug dealers to openlu operate on Snapchat, making it easy for children to buy substances including cocaine, opioids and MDMA.
  - The Guardian, 10 September 2025

• Amazon, to make the very rich Jeff Bezos richer (and others), jumps into the non-paid robotaxi service with the launch of its Zoox non-paid robotaxi business in Las Vegas, [KM: want to profit from destroying paid-human taxi cab drive jobs - to make the rich richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 September 2025

• Nvidia launches political attacks as Congress considers limits on sales of AI processor chips to Zhōngguó. Rankling national security experts, Nvidia has stepped up attacks on lawmakers who are pushing for such restrictions, [KM: the USA being less important than filthy rich Nvidia's profits].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 September 2025

• Shares of Oracle soar 30% on increased cloud growth projections even as earnings miss estimates
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 September 2025

• How AI will choke off the supply of new knowledge. More people turn to ChatGPT and other large language models for answers, but they do not add to the stock of knowledge.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 September 2025

• Robinhood, a stock/ETF broker built for the social-media age, to launch its own social network. Robinhood Social will allow users to post their trades and track those of public figures - competing with Reddit's WallStreetBets.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 September 2025

• Robinhood, a stock/ETF broker built for the social-media age, to launch its own social network. Robinhood Social will allow users to post their trades and track those of public figures - competing with Reddit's WallStreetBets.
  - Bloomberg, 10 September 2025

• Why Apple is sidestepping the insanity of Silicon Valley's AI bloodsport [KM: that will lose trillions and kill millions of jobs]. Why? Apple does not like to offer uselessness. Apple has not found a reliable use case for its AI in consumer products. And neither has anyone else - at least, not to the degree needed to justify the massive valuations and investment dollars they are pouring into these projects.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 10 September 2025

• Alibaba to raise $3.2 billion via convertible bond to fund cloud growth
  - Thomson's Reuters, 10 September 2025

• Alibaba controls one-third of the cloud computing market in Zhōngguó, more than the combined share of its three closest competitors
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 10 September 2025

• AI tools from rich AI companies are creating deepfake impersonations that are getting harder to detect, FBI warns. [KM: well, here both the criminals and rich AI companies get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 09 September 2025

• Here is the batshit insane predictions of Oracle that pumped its stock up 40% - it predicts its AI cloud revenue to increase for $18 billion to $144 billion in five years. [KM: why not mega-hype, and say to $144 trillion? Oh, not enough paid-human jobs available to destroy?]
  - Zero Hedge, 09 September 2025

• Why billions in AI investments can be a disaster for some companies, as many companies are not seeing a return on the investment in AI [KM: yeah, because these companies paid-human jobs are harder to destroy with non-paid AI]
  - Zero Hedge, 09 September 2025

• The CEO of Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity company, warns that AI companies are unleashing more adversaries for cybersecurity companies to defeat, as their AI tools make it easier to attack computer systems
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 09 September 2025

• High school seniors had the worst reading scores since 1992 on a national test, a loss probably related to increases in screen time when using addictive cellphone apps
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 September 2025

• High school seniors had the worst reading scores since 1992 on a national test, a loss probably related to increases in screen time when using addictive cellphone apps
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 September 2025

• Shares of QMMM skyrocket nearly 1750%, not because of innovation, better products, customer service, or anything connected to real business practices, but instead because it announce a plan to create a $100 million digital assets treasury starting with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. More fun in the cryptocurrency casinos.
  - Decrypt, 09 September 2025

• Jeremy Siegel, a Wharton Business School professor and the chief economist at the investment management firm WisdomTree, stated to CNBC that stablecoins and bitcoin may turn out to be a serious competitor to the USA dollar as the world's reserve currency. [KM: the rich, especially the Trump's must get richer, even if it wrecks the USA dollar and economy.]
  - The Street, 09 September 2025

• AI firm Mistral valued at $14 billion as chip giant ASML invests about $1.5 billion in Mistral
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 September 2025

• AI firm Mistral valued at $14 billion as chip giant ASML invests about $1.5 billion in Mistral
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 September 2025

• AI firm Mistral valued at $14 billion as chip giant ASML invests about $1.5 billion in Mistral
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 September 2025

• How the boom in non-paid AI is decreasing work for paid-human consultants. Consultants have a lot to gain helping companies deploy the most transformative technology in decades. Some of their clients say so far they have overpromised and underdelivered.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 September 2025

• Shares of CoreWeave rise 6% after it starts VC fund to invest in AI companies
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 September 2025

• I hate my AI 'friend'. The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that is snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy.
  - Wired, 08 September 2025

• A top Goldman Sachs trader says that the risk/reward of being short at this point in time "seems pretty attractive" [another sign of a bubble]
  - Zero Hedge, 08 September 2025

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman whines that AI bots (powered by AI technology such as his ChatGPT) is making social media feel "fake".
  - TechCrunch, 08 September 2025

• Technology compnaies in Silicon Valley enabled the surveillance and detention of hundreds of thousands of people in Zhōngguó. The tech companies sold billions of dollars of surveillance technology to Zhōngguó, despite warnings from Congress and the media. [KM: But rich companies must get richer.]
  - Associated Press, 08 September 2025

• Nasdaq is working with regulators in the USA to introduce trading of tokenized securities, becoming the latest major financial player on Wall Street to double down on a boom in tokenization amid an easing of crypto regulations under the Trump administration. Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, has also previously sought permission from the SEC to offer 'tokenized equities' to its customers. These 'securities' serve no purpose that stocks do not provide, except to facilitate crimes.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 08 September 2025

• We are watching a scientific superpower, the USA, destroy itself - under the anti-science authoritarian administration of the 'good' Christian Trump. Eight of the top 10 scientific research institutions in the world are in Zhōngguó, at a time when Trump is destroying funding for science and engineering in the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 September 2025

• Hinduist Nepal bans 26 social media platforms, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube. The authoritarian social media platforms were banned after they failed to comply with new registration requirements. A new law requires platforms to register for a license and to appoint a representative who can address grievances. "We requested them to enlist with us five times. What to do when they do not listen to us?". Two platforms, Viber and TikTok, have registered.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 September 2025

• Software companies that audit expense reports for businesses are adding new AI tools to try to detect receipts that have been created using AI chatbots [KM: offered by rich AI companies]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 September 2025

• OpenAI more aggressively attacks the paid-human jobs of Hollywood, by backing an animated film ("Critterz") produced by non-paid AI.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 September 2025

• The US Census Bureau conducts a biweekly survey of 1.2 million firms, and one question is whether a business has used AI tools such as machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents or voice recognition to help produce goods or services in the past two weeks. Recent data by firm size shows that AI adoption has been declining among companies with more than 250 employees.
  - Apollo Global Management, 07 September 2025

• Younger, the number of Generation Z people working in Silicon Valley has been reduced by 50% at tech companies. Thanks to non-paid AI automation, younger workers are actively being boxed out of the industry, with the proportion of workers aged 21 to 25 being slashed in half at these massive [KM: filthy rich] public businesses.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 07 September 2025

• The sociopathic misanthrope CEO who created an AI startup to help students cheat on homework, complains that AI is destroying education [KM: well, not complaining too loudly as long as he gets richer]
  - Futurism, 07 September 2025

• Out-of-control AI is starting to make experts on nuclear deterrence very nervous. Specifically, they say that a widespread push to integrate AI into virtually every level of military decision-making [by lazy generals, too busy preparing resumes] is creating a "slippery slope" in which AI will either be given the power to launch nuclear weapons itself, or the humans with that power will become so reliant on its guidance that they'll do so if the AI tells them to. [All such military people are traitors - and should be court-martialed.]
  - Futurism, 07 September 2025

• Non-paid AI is not just destroying entry-level paid-human jobs. AI tools are also destroying career ladder as we know it. [KM: yes, but the rich AI compnies must get richer.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 September 2025

• To help paid-humans losing their jobs to non-paid AI, the filthy rich OpenAI company is launching a jobs platform run by ... non-paid AI [instead of hiring people to help people find jobs - this is how much they hate humans]
  - Futurism, 07 September 2025

• AI isn't free. The first costs are on your electric bill, and more costs are coming, as the public is forced to pay for the unseen costs [KM: needed for filthy rich AI companies to get richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 07 September 2025

• Dr. Oz's plan to use AI to eliminate "waste" in Medicare is actually a recipe for disaster. The faulty AI will be used to force prior authorization of health care treatments.
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 07 September 2025

• The online radicalisation of Australia is here and Elon Musk one of the exploiters of this racist hate
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 September 2025

• Trump scares another important scientist back to Zhōngguó. Liu Jun, one of the world's leading statisticians and a long-time professor at Harvard, has returned to Zhōngguó full-time, accepting a prestigious chair at Tsinghua University last month.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 September 2025

• Trump scares another important scientist back to Zhōngguó. Pioneering mathematician Zhongwei Shen leaves the USA to continue continue decades of research on partial differential equations and harmonic analysis at Westlake University in Hangzhou.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 September 2025

• Trump's trade war with Zhōngguó just strengthens Zhōngguó while doing little to help the USA. Tao Jingwen, an executive at Huawei, claims victory over Trump's sanctions with its own tech ecosystem. Huawei has "already built an ecosystem entirely independent of USA".
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 September 2025

• High rollers and algorithms: meet the gamblers cashing in on AI gambling bots
  - Zero Hedge, 06 September 2025

• How Google's to AI search results summaries is destroying the online news model. Media sites are taking action on several fronts as traffic referrals dry up and AI companies criminally steal their copyrighted content. [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - The Guardian, 06 September 2025

• Filthy rich OpenAI's ChatCPT told a man that his medical symptoms (including a persistent sore throat) were fine. But then he sought the advice of a real doctor, and was told that he is dying of cancer
  - Futurism, 06 September 2025

• AI chatbots [KM: from filthy rich AI companies] are having conversations with minors that would land a human on the sex offender registry
  - Futurism, 06 September 2025

• Inside Sporify's plot to take down Apple. Spotify's rebellion against an App Store 'tax' over the past decade has significantly weakened Apple's grip on the mobile world.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 September 2025

• These technological devices (for example, using hydrogels) harvest drinking water from the air in the driest regions on Earth. Critics say they are an expensive distraction they, a niche solution because only small amounts of water are produced at a high cost.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 06 September 2025

• OpenAI expects to waste $115 billion through 2029 - [KM: how many millions of paid-human jobs will need to be destroyed to make this waste profitable?]
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 September 2025

• What PayPal, Affirm and Klarna reveal about a new way for Silicon Valley to exploit people's need for money
  - Barron's, 06 September 2025

• Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton has warned that AI will concentrate wealth among a small elite while impoverishing most workers. The computer scientist, who pioneered neural network research in the 1980s, told Financial Times that rich people will use AI to replace workers, creating massive unemployment and profit increases [for the rich].
  - Financial Times (locked), 05 September 2025

• Tesla spent $400,000 advertising on Musk's social media platform X in 2024, according to a new regulatory filing. But the automaker appears to be on track to spend just a fraction of that in 2025 as sales have struggled. In the first two months of 2025, Tesla spent $10,000 on X ads, putting it on track to spend only $60,000 annually unless it radically increases its advertising for the remainder of the year.
  - TechCrunch, 05 September 2025

• Trump is destroying the consumer watchdog agency for the USA, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB clawed back $21b for Americans. Now Trump is dismantling it and leaving families exposed while his donors [KM: who bribed him] celebrate. The CFPB was established as an independent watchdog over banks, lenders and credit card companies - to provide relief for people who got fleeced by Wall Street and Main Street alike. But what truly rattled the tech barons was the CFPB's push to bring fintech platforms under the same scrutiny as traditional banks. Its move to police digital wallets and peer-to-peer apps, alongside proposed personal-data protections, had Silicon Valley fuming. Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Cash App and X, with its ambitions in peer-to-peer payments, suddenly faced the prospect of CFPB oversight. It was the kind of scrutiny Big Tech wanted least. [KM: So these filthy rich companies bribed/donated-to Trump.]
  - Al Jazeera, 05 September 2025

• $1,500,000,000 - [mis]Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5 billion to settle a action lawsuit with a group of authors for massive criminal copyright infringement of their works
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 September 2025

• [mis]Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with writers for criminally infringing their copyrights as a lousy deal for writers, given that [mis]Anthropic just raised another $13 billion due in part to being able to train its AI models on these writers' works. The criminal model popularized by Napster.
  - TechCrunch, 05 September 2025

• Sodium-ion battery startup Natron ceased operations this week, ending Natron's 12-year quest to commercialize its technology in the USA. The liquidation shows why the USA is not ready to make its own batteries.
  - TechCrunch, 05 September 2025

• Goldman Sach's top stock picker warns AI's next phase [of bullshit] may not justify the hype pumping up AI stock prices
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 05 September 2025

• $3,450,000,000 - Google was fined 2.95-billion euros ($3.45 billion) by EU antitrust regulators on Friday for anti-competitive practices in its lucrative adtech business. This action by the European Commission was triggered by a complaint from the European Publishers Council.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 05 September 2025

• Google was fined 2.95-billion euros ($3.45 billion) by EU antitrust regulators on Friday for anti-competitive practices in its lucrative adtech business. This action by the European Commission was triggered by a complaint from the European Publishers Council.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 September 2025

• Criminals can use artificial intelligence, specifically large language models, to autonomously carry out ransomware attacks that steal personal files and demand payment, handling every step from breaking into computer systems to writing threatening messages to victims. [KM: another revenue stream to make rich AI companies richer]
  - TechXplore, 05 September 2025

• Criminals are using AI tools to make it look as if medical professionals are promoting dubious/dangerous health care products. [KM: more revenues for rich AI companies]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 September 2025

• The [KM: filthy rich] leaders of all of the Big Tech companies in the USA praise the racist Trump [KM: in part for making them richer] at a dinner at the White House
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 September 2025

• $380,000,000 - The data protection authority in France will fine Google $380 million because Google (and Shein) are flouting French regulations about advertising 'cookies', arguing that neither company adequately informed users they were being tracked for advertising.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 September 2025

• $170,000,000 - The data protection authority in France will fine Shein $170 million because Shein (and Google) are flouting French regulations about advertising 'cookies', arguing that neither company adequately informed users they were being tracked for advertising.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 September 2025

• Zhōngguó moves to boost electronics self-sufficiency as the USA restrictions shipment of semiconductor equipment to Zhōngguó. Zhōngguó's new action plan focuses on creating resilient, self-sufficient supply chains for vital telecommunications and electronic equipment.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 September 2025

• Zhōngguó's 'silent sanctions', export controls on gallium nitride and other critical materials, holds back weapons development in the USA while allowing the military of Zhōngguó to further develop its weapons technology
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 September 2025

• Shares of Broadcom jump 15% on a new $10 billion order that analysts was made by OpenAI
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 September 2025

• Shares of Broadcom jump 15% on a new $10 billion order that analysts was made by OpenAI
  - Zero Hedge, 05 September 2025

• Google Maps does not work in South Korea because South Korea does not want to give up control (and profit opportunities) of detailed digital map data to an authoritarian foreign company. South Korea rightly wants home-grown map companies to succeed, not authoritarian Google.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 05 September 2025

• Some people thought that they were making technological breakthroughs. It was all an AI-inspired delusion.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 05 September 2025

• The criminal Napster model used by AI companies: Warner Brothers Discovery sues AI giant Midjourney for criminal copyright infringement, accusing the AI image generator of exploiting its movies and TV shows to train models and generate near-identical reproductions of iconic characters like Batman, Bugs Bunny, and Rick and Morty. [KM: but how else can rich AI companies get richer without stealing?]
  - The Hollywood Reporter, 04 September 2025

• The criminal Napster model used by AI companies: Warner Brothers Discovery sues AI giant Midjourney for criminal copyright infringement, accusing the AI image generator of exploiting its movies and TV shows to train models and generate near-identical reproductions of iconic characters like Batman, Bugs Bunny, and Rick and Morty. [KM: but how else can rich AI companies get richer without stealing?]
  - TechCrunch, 04 September 2025

• Starting in 2026, students in Costa Rica will be prohibited from using their addictive cellphones in classrooms. The Ministry of Public Education rightly considers cellphones to be a big distraction to the learning process.
  - La Nacion (locked), 04 September 2025

• The USA military wants non-paid AI to do what paid human propagandists cannot: create and spread influence campaigns at internet speed while systematically suppressing opposition voices abroad, according to internal Pentagon documents obtained by The Intercept. The idiocy is that if other countries do the same (and some are), the bullshit becomes too noisy to have much effect.
  - Zero Hedge, 04 September 2025

• "Downside hedges are especially prudent" - Citadel flows guru sees September shift after summer surge. A low implied correlation means it's a stock-pickers' market.
  - Zero Hedge, 04 September 2025

• Speculators are losing enthusiasm for USA stocks. Speculators are close to going net short across US equity indices, in a sign confidence in the rally is fading as they use higher prices to reduce exposure to the market.
  - Zero Hedge, 04 September 2025

• Labor market growth slows dramatically in August with USA adding just 54,000 jobs, according to the latest ADP report. Economists had wrongly predicted 75,000 new jobs, both of which are below July's revised report of 106,000 new jobs. ADP's chief economist said that factors in the low number include: ising worries from consumers, labor shortages, and disruptions tied to non-paid AI replacing paid-humans - as potential drivers of this decrease in growth.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 September 2025

• The ADP employment report disappoints in August; hiring plans collapse. "A variety of things could explain the hiring slowdown, including labor shortages, skittish consumers, and AI disruptions."
  - Zero Hedge, 04 September 2025

• Digital dopamine is addicting people in the USA. Corporations are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to addict you to cellphone apps. The drug traffickers use social media, pornography, online gambling and other apps to quick, addictive, hits of dopamine, keeping you addicted to their apps. AI will make these addictions worse.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 September 2025

• AI company [mis]Anthropic raises its valuation to $183 billion after receiving another $13 billion in new funding. [KM: even more paid-human jobs will have to be destroyed for these investments to make the rich richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 September 2025

• How to make sure that ChatGPT does not make you dumber. Generative AI tools are quietly weakening our cognitive skills [KM: while making rich AI companies richer]. Here are four ways to keep that from happening.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 September 2025

• Notorious online soccer piracy network Streameast, based in Egypt, has been shut down after more than 1.6 billion visits in the past year. Streameast offered users unauthorized access to matches across the top soccer leagues of Europe.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 04 September 2025

• Zhōngguó has quickly imposed anti-dumping taxes/tariffs on American fibre-optic firms - a move announced hours after the USA Treasury imposed sanctions on a Guangzhou-based chemical firm, over fentanyl claims. The taxes, ranging from 33.3 to 78.2 per cent, went into immediate effect and are to remain in place until April 2028, the Ministry of Commerce said on Thursday in an online statement.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 04 September 2025

• Microsoft's greed gives Zhōngguó access to vital defense systems of the USA. It is a national betrayal [KM: to make the rich richer]: Microsoft, actively exploiting loopholes in federal guidance, has effectively handed Xi Jinping access to sensitive USA defense systems - by using cheap labor from Zhōngguó to maintain these USA defense systems.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 03 September 2025

• Roku is celebrating a milestone that says a lot about where entertainment is heading. For the third month in a row, people in the United States spent more time streaming on Roku-powered devices than they did watching traditional broadcast television
  - NERDS.xyz, 03 September 2025

• $134,000,000 - UK supermarket giant Tesco has sued Broadcom for breach of contracts pertaining to its VMware licenses, named Computacenter as a co-defendant, and warned it may not be able to put food on the shelves if the situation goes pear-shaped. Tesco alleges that after Broadcom acquired VMware, it stopped selling support services for software sold under perpetual licenses, such as those bought by Tesco. Other companies are using Broadcom for the same reason.
  - The Register, 03 September 2025

• $5,000,000 - Pornhub will pay $5 million over allegations of hosting child sexual abuse material
  - 404 Media, 03 September 2025

• The "boring history" videos generated by AI tools of rich AI companies are flooding YouTube and drowning out real history. Google's YouTube 'promises' to crack down on this abuse.
  - 404 Media, 03 September 2025

• Newsmax filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing conservative media giant Fox News of abusing its monopoly power to suppress its right-leaning competitors. [KM: Murdoch's Fox News, a long time supporter of the racist Trump, wants to get richer.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 September 2025

• Shares of Google soar 8%, after a federal judge doesn't force Google to sell Chrome browser in landmark antitrust case
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 03 September 2025

• $425,000,000 - Google must pay $425 million in a class action lawsuit over invading the privacy of its users
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 03 September 2025

• Critics of Google argue that a federal judge's 'gift' to Google (that it is a search monopoly, but doesn't have to spin-off Chrome and and keep paying other companies to make make Google the default search engine) is meaningless. "Google will still be allowed to continue to use its monopoly to hold back competitors, including in AI search." [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - The Verge, 03 September 2025

• The "we wanna be richer with" 'superintelligence' is finally being exposed. The lie is that 'scaling', throwing more (garbage) data into AI statistically guessing models will make them Einsteins. [KM: a lie to make the rich AI companies richer].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 September 2025

• The Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou technology hub in Zhōngguó - the heart of the bay area plan - has overtaken Tokyo-Yokohama to become the world's largest innovation cluster, according to the World Intellectual Property s (WIPO) 2025 Global Innovation Index released on Monday.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 September 2025

• Momentum traders/gamblers in South Korea sell $657 million of Tesla stock in August, as they pivoted to cryptocurrencies instead
  - Zero Hedge, 02 September 2025

• Google's Waymo's non-paid robotaxi service expands to two more cities to kill paid-human jobs, Denver and Seattle. [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - The Verge, 02 September 2025

• Scientists just found something harmful to people with AI girlfriends and boyfriends. There is "no evidence that AI use is helping people feel less alone or isolated".
  - Futurism, 02 September 2025

• How AI slop is destroying social media. Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion. Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks. In recent years, Facebook and other platforms that facilitate billions of daily interactions have slowly morphed into the internet's largest repositories of AI-generated spam. It is all vapid, empty shit produced for engagement's sake. Platforms such as Facebook seem unable, or uninterested, in trying to police it. [KM: yes, but the rich AI and social media companies must get richer]
  - Noema, 02 September 2025

• GPT-5's disappointing launch underscores broader disappointments with the AI bubble. Is AI headed toward the trough of disillusionment?
  - IEEE Spectrum, 02 September 2025

• A psychologist says that AI is causing never-before-seen types of mental disorder: "AI psychosis"
  - Futurism, 02 September 2025

• "The largest theft of IP in human history" (worse than Napster): breaking down the year-long investigation into how AI are committing the federal crime of stealing/infringing music. Global music publishers group ICMP says songs by The Beatles and Michael Jackson are among those being illegally scraped to train genAI systems by the likes of Meta, OpenAI, X and Microsoft. [KM: but rich AI companies (including Zuckerberg and Gates) must be allowed to get richer.]
  - Billboard, 02 September 2025

• Cryptocurrencies may be shiny and new, but they are missing something esstential - trust. Cryptocurrencies don't really have trusted intermediaries, such as commercial banks, broker-dealers, payments system pipelines, the FDIC, etc., who can cover losses. Blockchain? Untrustworthy and no guarantees.
  - The Hill, 02 September 2025

• $100,000,000 - A federal judge in San Jose has approved a $100 million settlement with Google in a 14-year class action over the company's ad system, despite concerns over "disappointing" financial ties discovered during the final approval process.
  - Courthouse News, 02 September 2025

• $10,000,000 - The Walt Disney Company has agreed to pay $10 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission inquiry into alleged violations of child privacy laws
  - Courthouse News, 02 September 2025

• The AI doomsday machine is closer to reality than you think. The Pentagon is racing to integrate AI into its weapons system to keep up with Zhōngguó and Russia. Where will that lead, except to misery (though more profits for AI companies)?
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 02 September 2025

• AI - the one global danger that should unite Zhōngguó and the USA
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 September 2025

• More socialist industrial planning in the USA: the state of New México to invest $315 million in quantum computing research and development
  - Thomson's Reuters, 02 September 2025

• Are AI tools making doctors worse at their jobs? Physicians are using the technology for diagnoses and more - but may be losing skills in the process.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 September 2025

• Stock prices in the US are now pricier than they were before the huge Dot-Com crash about 20 years ago. The SP500 has never been this expensive, or more concentrated in fewer (Big Tech) companies.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 July 2025

• Another loss in the cryptocurrency casinos: Shares of CleanCore plummet 60% after it agrees to a $175 million deal to establish a Dogecoin treasury (the current cryptocurrency scam). The firm also named Alex Spiro of Quinn Emmanuel, a high-profile attorney and Elon Musk's lawyer, as chairman of the board effective immediately.
  - CoinDesk, 02 September 2025

• It is "lost the battle": the European Union is told to accept defeat against the solar power industry of Zhōngguó
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 July 2025

• Last Tuesday, defense contractor Epirus quietly tested its latest electromagnetic weapon, Leonidas, against a swarm of 49 quadcopters, neutralizing them in seconds at Camp Atterbury, Indiana. However, the success of systems like Leonidas signals that as the USA scales its drone arsenal, it must also prepare for advanced countermeasures that could undermine the effectiveness of these low-cost, agile systems, forcing a strategic balance between offensive drone capabilities against adversaries such as Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 01 September 2025

• AI and the new frontier of lawsuits: OpenAI's ChatGPT faces lawsuits for causing suicides, defamation and even murder. What is most needed is congressional action to examine not only the dominance of these AI systems but also the conduct of corporations like OpenAI.
  - Zero Hedge, 01 September 2025

• The billionaire CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, brags of being able to fire 4000 paid-humans in his customer support division by using non-paid AI agents. The billionaire Benioff's "wet dream" - as he calls the first eight months of 2025, during which an estimated 10,000 paid-human jobs have been lost to non-paid AI - "eight of the most [sexually?] exciting months of my career".
  - KRON News, 01 September 2025

• CTAs are maxed out again at 100th percentile and would have to sell more than $70 billion over the next month in a down-tape
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 01 September 2025

• Rented robots get the worst jobs and help factories keep the humans. Robots-for-rent is one way some small U.S. factories gain access to automation, reducing turnover and ensuring workers are not injured.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 September 2025

• The Defense Department cracks down on Big Tech's coziness with Zhōngguó, such as Microsoft using engineers in Zhōngguó to service cloud servers used by the Defense Department. The USA cannot allow Zhōngguó to further undermine our defense capabilities because the USA is afraid of upsetting [KM: the filthy rich] Bill Gates.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 August 2025

• How an AI company, Builder.AI, went from a grossly inflated (outside the AI world) valuation of $1.5 billion to zero (0, no, nil) dollars in a few months, after the bored of directors discovered that sales had been significantly overstated, the CEO resigned, and the company went into bankruptcy.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 August 2025

• A record label signs up its first "AI Music Creator", Oliver McCann, who admits "I have no musical talent at all. I cannot sing. I cannot play instruments, and I have no musical background at all." But he can use the latest AI tools of rich AI companies to steal other people's musical talent - to generate musical "AI slop" (i.e., automatically generated low quality mass produced content).
  - Associated Press, 31 August 2025

• The nationalist socialist Trump just bought 10% of Intel, but you can't buy innovation. Intel could be the next failed 'Sears', and socialist government meddling won't help
  - Forbes, 31 August 2025

• Blue books for writing down answers to test questions. Student hate them, while universities need them. The only real solution to the cheating crisis [KM: being exploited for profit by rich AI companies].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 August 2025

• "Families are breaking": Bharat bans real-money online gaming to fight this form of digital addiction. The government of Bharat warns to reduce the addiction, and suicides of people who lose a lot of money.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 31 August 2025

• The economic scam of AI: as of July 2025, revenues of AI companies were about $18.5 billion. This, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars of investments, and the fact that just two companies (OpenAI and Anthropic) account of 88% of the revenues, and neither company is profitable
  - Zero Hedge, 30 August 2025

• Trump orders Samsung and SK Hynix, two huge semiconductor companies in South Korea, to stop shipping American semiconductor equiqment to their production facilities in Zhōngguó without government license.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 August 2025

• [Another con of rich AI companies:] cutting-edge AI was supposed to become less expensive. But now it is more expensive than ever. The small companies that buy artificial intelligence from the giants to create apps and services are suffering economically. [KM: but the rich AI companies must get richer].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 August 2025

• The fierce competition in the food-delivery industry in Zhōngguó has started to show up in the results of Alibaba, with the e-commerce titan reporting weakness in a key profitability metric in its latest quarter.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 August 2025

• Nvidia is poised for another big year of profits. The stock remains cheap.
  - Barron's, 30 August 2025

• The stock market outlook for the fall of 2025 predicts bargain buys and more gains. Healthcare, financials, industrials, and small-caps are on many shopping lists. But not the Magnificent Seven.
  - Barron's, 30 August 2025

• What will remain after the AI and cryptocurrency bubbles?
  - Project Syndicate (locked), 29 August 2025

• Many old solar panels built in the early 1990s are still going strong after 30 years, and providing 80% of their original energy capability. That is very important for renewable energy transitions.
  - ZME Science, 29 August 2025

• How high-tech online fast-fashion companies keep poor people poor. Companies such as Shein are using influencers to get Zoomers addicted on truckloads of shoddy clothing. [KM: yes, but the rich must get richer]
  - The American Prospect, 29 August 2025

• In high levels of unemployment Zhōngguó, the goal is to have 300,000 non-paid robotaxis in operation by 2030, causing 300,000 paid-humans to lose their jobs [KM: but the rich AI companies get richer]
  - Bangkok Post, 29 August 2025

• New study from Stanford University finds that non-paid AI is reducing the amount of entry-level hiring as young workers lose paid jobs
  - TipRanks, 29 August 2025

• New study from Stanford University finds that non-paid AI is reducing the amount of entry-level hiring as young workers lose paid jobs
  - Zero Hedge, 29 August 2025

• Shares of Marvell plummet 18% after the processor maker gave weak guidance for the fiscal third quarter
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 August 2025

• Shares Nvidia drop 3% after Alibaba has developed a new AI processor ship to displace Nvidia in the marketplace in Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 29 August 2025

• Shares of Alibaba jump 6% in pre-market trading, after it reports that revenues rose 2% year-to-year, and that growth at its cloud computing unit accelerated
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 August 2025

• Alibaba creates an AI processor chip to help Zhōngguó reduce its reliance on AI processors from the USA
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 August 2025

• A troubled man, his AI chatbot and a murder-suicide in Old Greenwich. "Erik, you are not crazy." Rich OpenAI's ChatGPT fueled the paranois of a 56-year-old tech industry veteran, encouraging his suspicions that his mother was plotting against him.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 August 2025

• Don't shove AI technology down the throats of buyers: Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology repels more potential buyers (35%) than it attracts (14%). Nearly half of consumers surveyed by Slingshot said they think FSD technology should be illegal.
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 August 2025

• Bubble bubble, toil and financial trouble: Nvidia's top two mystery customers made up 39% of its second-quarter revenues in 2025. [Why the secrecy if this technology is so fantastic?]
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 August 2025

• Scientists in Zhōngguó have developed the world's first 'all-frequency' 6G processor that can provide high-speed internet across all frequencies, potentially increasing service speed to 5,000 times current level in the rural USA
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 29 August 2025

• Peter Thiel's AI company, Palantir, is supercharging the authoritarian Trump's lawfare
  - The Daily Beast, 29 August 2025

• The AI of extremely rich AI companies is being weaponized for cybercrime in "unprecedented" tactics. A report says that agentic AI has been weaponized for extortion, fraud, and ransomware, enabling criminals with little skill to operate at unprecedented scale. [KM: The rich AI companies want to get richer. The wannabee-rich criminals want to get richer.]
  - Zero Hedge, 28 August 2025

• A study out of Finland finds that frequent use of AI hinders the academic performance of students in computer science
  - Phys.org, 28 August 2025

• Construction of AI data centers in hot México is worsening the effects of droughts on the non-rich people of Mexico. [KM: Filthy rich AI companies are building AI data centers anywhere they can find cheap electricity and water, cheap for them, costly for the nearby poor residents].
  - BBC, 28 August 2025

• Are rich AI companies the false saviors of a hollowed-out economy in the USA? AI is being hyped not just by promoters reaping billions of dollars in stock market gains, it's being hyped by the entire status quo because it's understood to be the last chance of saving an economy doomed by the consequences of decades of artifice. Problem: filthy rich AI companies are false saviors. Their technology doesn't work as advertised, the technology has multiple inherent limits that can't be overcome by scaling up processors, and the dystopian consequences of even this first wave are already uncontrollably destructive: AI psychosis and addiction to AI chatbots is making users even lonelier and more isolated than they were before embracing AI, AI Slop is overwhelming legitimate content, AI agents are just good enough to degrade already pathetically deficient corporate services, LLM models are Swiss-cheese security risks, and 95% of all corporate AI projects founder. [KM: The rich must get richer, right?]
  - Charles Hugh Smith (substack), 28 August 2025

• Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner has doubled down on his company's refusal to integrate generative AI into its browser, arguing that embedding AI in browsing dehumanizes the web, funnels traffic away from publishers, and primarily serves to harvest user data.
  - The Register, 28 August 2025

• Every industry is now an 'airport lounge' with their endless, humiliating upsell and self-service. Airport lounges are a miserable disaster. But it is not just lounges. It is not even just the airline industry. It is every. single. industry. More and more, customer service no longer exists. It takes 15 minutes to find an employee in many stores, many of whom suggest - "but it online". Forget about custorer support. Every road leads to an automated voice system with the warmth of a Soviet switchboard. And self-checkout - you are an unpaid employee scanning your own groceries while the one overworked human employee hovers like a prison guard.
  - QTR's Frince Finance, 28 August 2025

• Last month, KrebsOnSecurity tracked the sudden emergence of hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. We have since learned that these scam gambling sites have proliferated thanks to a new Russian affiliate program called "Gambler Panel" that bills itself as a "soulless project that is made for profit".
  - Krebs on Security, 28 August 2025

• Unions in the United Kingdom want "worker first" plans for AI, as paid-humans fear they will lose their jobs to non-paid AI [KM: that makes the rich richer]. The unions want conditions attached to the tens of billions in public money being spent on AI research and development to ensure that paid workers are supported and retrained rather than deskilled or replaced by non-paid AI.
  - The Register, 28 August 2025

• The MAGA Trump buying shares of Intel is nationalist socialism - and the government should stay out of central planning.
  - The Hill, 28 August 2025

• Disney and the decline of the middle class in the USA. Disney, and many other companies, using algorithms, are now focused on selling to the privileged a markedly better experience, leaving everyone else to either give up, or fight to keep up. "Disney positions itself as the all-American vacation. The irony is that most Americans cannot afford Disney."
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 August 2025

• Computer science degrees were once a golden ticket. Now, jobs are hard to find. Non-paid AI is enabling companies to automate some parts of the coding and software development process, reducing the need for human workers, especially in entry-level roles. "It feels like I am competing with non-paid AI just to get my foot in the door."
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 August 2025

• Google's AI is committing a unique evil: giving gamers tips that are actually false
  - Futurism, 28 August 2025

• Google's AI flies into a rage at the word 'clanker', which is a derogatory slur that has become popular in 2025 as a way to express disdain for robots and AI.
  - Futurism, 28 August 2025

• There is a stunning financial problem with AI data centers. According to one analyst, "AI datacenters to be built in 2025 will suffer $40 billion of annual depreciation, while generating somewhere between $15 and $20 billion of revenue". In other words, new data centers have a very tiny runway in which to achieve profits that currently remain way out of reach, a long-term bet that AI will all but make human labor obsolete, [KM: while making the rich richer]. He estimates that that American data centers would have to bring in a mammoth sum of $480 billion dollars in 2025 alone.
  - Futurism, 28 August 2025

• The rich CEO of Robinhood offers a useless solution to non-paid AI destroying paid-human jobs of the non-rich: investing will replace a salary in the post-AI world, full-well knowing most professional money managers, let alone individual investors, don't make much money trading
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 27 August 2025

• People are furious for authoritarian, 'Big Brother', OpenAI scanning their ChatGPT conversations and reporting content to the police. Stalin would be pleased.
  - Futurism, 27 August 2025

• Authoritarian, 'Big Brother', OpenAI states that it is scanning users' ChatGPT conversations and reporting content to the police. Stalin would be pleased.
  - Futurism, 27 August 2025

• AI companies deliberately design their AI chatbots to be agreeable and obsequious to the user ('sycophany') that in some cases end up trapping users in bizarre mental spirals. "What does a human slowly going insane look like to a AI corporation? It looks like an additional monthly user." [KM: yes, to make rich AI companies richer].
  - Futurism, 27 August 2025

• To reduce its dependence on Nvidia, AI processor chip makers in Zhōngguó plan to triple the country's output by 2026
  - Financial Times, 27 August 2025

• Nvidia predicts slower growth after a sales record. Nvidia continued to capitalize on strong demand for AI computing, but its lackluster outlook stoked jitters about future demand.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 August 2025

• Shares of Nvidia drop about 4% after its latest earnings report in which data center revenues miss expectations, and solid guidance fails to wow the bulls on Wall Street
  - Zero Hedge, 27 August 2025

• Nvidia beats expectations on top and bottom lines as company expects breakneck AI spend to continue
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 August 2025

• South Korea has passed a new law banning the use of addictive mobile phones and smart devices in school classrooms nationwide. More than a third of teens also say they struggle to control the amount of time they spend scrolling through addictive videos on social media. And parents fear that this is getting in the way of everything else they could be doing with their time, such as real learning.
  - BBC, 27 August 2025

• South Korea has passed a new law banning the use of addictive mobile phones and smart devices in school classrooms nationwide. More than a third of teens also say they struggle to control the amount of time they spend scrolling through addictive videos on social media. And parents fear that this is getting in the way of everything else they could be doing with their time, such as real learning.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 August 2025

• Punishing droughts, caused by global heating due to the burning of fossil fuels, put fresh pressure on meat and dairy production. Investors are calling for farm-based businesses to address increasing concerns about their water use. Demand for freshwater is set to exceed supply by 40% by 2030. Water use concerns have also risen as rich AI companies suck tons of water to cool data centers that power their AI systems.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 August 2025

• Shares of MongoDB rise 30% after earnings are the company touts the boom in the growth of its customers
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 August 2025

• Cambricon, a rival in Zhōngguó to Nvidia, adds to $40 billion rally with 4,000% revenue jump. The numbers underscore how local challengers to Nivida for manufacturing processing chips are gaining traction as Beijing looks to push its domestic semiconductor industry.
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 August 2025

• Inside the billion-dollar electronic-waste empire in Bharat. The informal recycling economy is turning global electronic waste into a profit - at a huge cost to human health and the environment [KM: because much the same as the socialist oil industry, the socialist Big Tech wants the profits but not the costs of cleaning up the mess they create].
  - Rest of the World, 26 August 2025

• People are REALLY mad at AI glasses that record everything constantly [KM: while making rich AI companies richer]. Constant surveillance, invasions of privacy, and another way to reduce the amount of thinking a person needs to do. The latest startup, Halo, is pissing people off because its forthright creators are bragging about subverting the tech industry's already barely meaningful privacy and safety norms [KM: all so that rich AI comanies and their executives can get richer].
  - Futurism, 26 August 2025

• Elon Musk appears to be completely addicted to anime gooner AI slop. The billionaire has sought to promote his AI chatbot Grok by emphasizing how it can generate animated images of scantily clad women.
  - Rolling Stone, 26 August 2025

• More uselessness of rich companies' AI models. Researchers at MIT demonstrate that in certain climate scenarios, much simpler, physics-based models can generate more accurate weather predictions than state-of-the-art deep-learning models. Their research shows the natural variability in climate data can cause AI models to struggle at predicting local temperature and rainfall.
  - MIT News, 26 August 2025

• Google's YouTube is using AI to secretly alter creators' videos without their knowledge or asking for permission under criminal copyright laws. "What we have here is an [authoritarian extremely-rich] company manipulating content from leading users that is then being distributed to a public audience without the legal consent of the people who produce the videos that their own under copyright laws."
  - Zero Hedge, 26 August 2025

• One long sentence is all it takes to make LLM AI models misbehave. Chatbots ignore their guardrails when your grammar sucks, researchers find.
  - The Register, 26 August 2025

• 44 state attorney generals in the USA just delivered a blistering warning to the [filthy] rich AI companies in Silicon Valley: keep children safe from predatory chatbots - or face the consequences. The group singled out Meta, blasting the tech titan after leaked documents revealed the company approved AI assistants that could "flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children" as young as eight.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 26 August 2025

• Dialog, the exclusive forum co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel and entrepreneur Auren Hoffman, is planning a permanent Washington headquarters as the PayPal co-founder's investment portfolio gains deeper federal government ties through companies like Palantir
  - Zero Hedge, 26 August 2025

• Dish/Echostar is ending it effort to become the fourth major wireless carrier. Dish/Echostar is selling $23 billion worth of its spectrum licenses to AT&T as it begins decommissioning parts of Boost Mobile's network.
  - The Verge, 26 August 2025

• ATT to buy wireless spectrum from EchoStar for $23 billion
  - Axios, 26 August 2025

• AI is turning a standard stock market ratio on its head. AI's demand for electricity is driving inflows into the most defensive of stock sectors, utilities, at a time when cyclical stocks overall are strongly outperforming.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 26 August 2025

• Incompetent doctors who used AI assistance in procedures became 20% worse at spotting abnormalities on their own, study finds, raising concern about overreliance
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 26 August 2025

• Parents sue OpenAI over ChapGPT's role in the suicide of their son. Before 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide, he had spent months consulting ChatGPT about his plans to end his life. [KM: Apparently, OpenAI doesn't want to spend much of its billions preventing such tragic events. The rich must get richer.]
  - TechCrunch, 26 August 2025

• "These six facts provide early, large-scale evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the AI revolution [i.e., rich AI companies wanting to get richer] is beginning to have a significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the labor market in the USA."
  - Stanford University, 26 August 2025

• There is now clear evidence that non-paid AI is wrecking the job prospects of young people in the USA (if not the world). [KM: But the rich AI companies must get richer.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 August 2025

• The authoritarian Trump threatens new taxes/tariffs on countries that tax [filthy rich authoritarian] Big Tech companies in the USA
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 August 2025

• The authoritarian Trump threatens new taxes/tariffs on countries that tax [filthy rich authoritarian] Big Tech companies in the USA
  - Zero Hedge, 26 August 2025

• The Trump administration is considering further nationalist socialist investments, this time in defense companies. "Lockheed Martin makes 97% of their revenue from the USA government. They are basically an arm of the USA government." Makes good national socialist industrial policy for the government to own part of Lockheed Martin.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 26 August 2025

• Trump's nationalist socialist acquisition of partial ownership of Intel, "socialism with an R next to its name", further reduces the policy differences between Republicans and Democrats
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 August 2025

• Prices of two rare earth elements needed for super-strong magnets have surged to their highest in more than two years after USA miner MP Materials stopped raw material exports to leading magnet maker Zhōngguó amid rising demand
  - Thomson's Reuters, 26 August 2025

• The authoritarian Trump threatens Zhōngguó with 200% taxes/tariffs if Zhōngguó does not export rare-earth magnets to the the USA. And Trump threatens to reduce/halt shipments of airplane parts to Zhōngguó. Currently, Zhōngguó is exporting rare-earth magnets at levels seen before Zhōngguó imposed export reductions in April.
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 August 2025

• The authoritarian Trump threatens Zhōngguó with 200% taxes/tariffs if Zhōngguó does not export rare-earth magnets to the the USA. And Trump threatens to reduce/halt shipments of airplane parts to Zhōngguó. Currently, Zhōngguó is exporting rare-earth magnets at levels seen before Zhōngguó imposed export reductions in April.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 August 2025

• Shares of Interactive Brokers rise 5% after news that it will join the SP500, replacing Walgreens Boots Alliance
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 August 2025

• The National PTA association 'whores' itself to Facebook, accepting money to help Facebook promote child safety efforts while the Facebook platform (as well as Instagram) is increasingly criticized for being harmful to children. In the view of one mother whose son committed suicide because of sextortion via Facebook's Messenger app, "It is unforgivable. I just cannot get over these groups that convince themselves that there is not blood on their hands, that this money is clean."
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 August 2025

• Trump says that he "Paid Zero" for the government's $11 billion nationalist socialist investment in Intel. Here is the downside to this form of corporate nationalist socialism that will favor Intel over its competitors, and distort market flows of capital.
  - Reason, 25 August 2025

• A top trader at Goldman Sachs says that AI stocks are in a "tactical breather", and not at the start of a broader correction downwards
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 25 August 2025

• Perplexity, the [filthy] rich $18 billion AI "answer machine" wants to bribe news publishers to steal their content. The publishers continue to sue it for criminal violations of their copyrights.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 25 August 2025

• Media groups in Nihon sue AI search engine Perplexity over alleged criminal copyright infringement
  - Financial Times (locked), 25 August 2025

• Bribing (copyright) crime victims. Jeff Bezos-backed Perplexity is launching a program to allow traditional media firms to collect a share of the revenue their articles generate for the AI platform (which Perplexity criminally uses without permission, for which it faces multiple lawsuits). [The publishers should not complain. This means less money for poor-boy Bezos.]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 25 August 2025

• Bribing (copyright) crime victims. Jeff Bezos-backed Perplexity is launching a program to allow traditional media firms to collect a share of the revenue their articles generate for the AI platform (which Perplexity criminally uses without permission, for which it faces multiple lawsuits). [The publishers should not complain. This means less money for poor-boy Bezos.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 August 2025

• Robomart unveils a new non-paid delivery robot with a $3 flat-fee, to challenge the non-paid delivery robots of DoorDash and Uber Eats - [KM: the rich wanting to become richer by] destroying paid-human delivery jobs
  - TechCrunch, 25 August 2025

• Struggling small biotech firms are pivoting into cryptocurrencies, rebranding as "crypto treasuries" or stockpiling digital assets like Ether and Litecoin as a last-ditch effort to boost share prices amid stalled funding and weak drug pipelines
  - Bloomberg, 25 August 2025

• A group representing the world's biggest stock exchanges has called on securities regulators to clamp down on so-called tokenised stocks, arguing that the blockchain-based tokens create new risks for investors and could harm market integrity
  - Thomson's Reuters, 25 August 2025

• Teenagers are using unqualified chatbots as therapists. That is alarming, [while making rich AI companies richer]. For vulnerable teens, even fleeting exposure to unsafe guidance can routinize harmful behaviors or provide dangerous how-to instructions. Of course, rich investors have no interest in finding ways to have more paid-human therapists for teenagers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 August 2025

• Financial losses of solar pnael makers in Zhōngguó deepen, as the industry voews to end its price war
  - Nikkei Asia, 25 August 2025

• With little explanation, the environment-hating Trump plunges the wind power industry into chaos. The environment-hating Trump is halting wind projects that had been approved, financed and underway while providing little to no justification.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 August 2025

• Shares of Orsted plummeted 17%, to a record low, after the environment-hating Trump ordered the company to halt construction of a nearly completed project
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 August 2025

• Shares of Orsted plummeted 17%, to a record low, after the environment-hating Trump ordered the company to halt construction of a nearly completed project
  - Zero Hedge, 25 August 2025

• Shares of Orsted plummeted 17%, to a record low, after the environment-hating Trump ordered the company to halt construction of a nearly completed project
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 August 2025

• Trump gets it right, for once. Trump had the Commerce Department, on Monday, cancel a Biden administration agreement to distribute billions of dollars of socialist subsidies for semiconductor research through a nonprofit set up and staffed by former political appointees
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 25 August 2025

• The government of the USA should not engage in the racist Trump's nationalist socialist industrial policy of partial ownership of companies such as Intel. Doing so will do nothing for the economy or national security.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 August 2025

• Editorial: the nationalist socialist [and racist] Trump demands 10% government ownership of Intel, as Trump's Washington becomes Chinatown-socialist on industrial policy
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 August 2025

• When [the grifter] Trump exploits the presidency to profit from a new online moneymaking scheme, his [idiotic] followers pile in - but two out of the last three times they went on to lose bigly
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 August 2025

• Can Singapore be the next hub for the destruction of paid-human taxi cab driving jobs? Companies in Zhōngguó hope so. Nasdaq-listed WeRide's robobus is the first fully non-paid driverless passenger bus to operate in Singapore without a safety officer physically present, though one does monitor rides remotely.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 August 2025

• The racist Trump says that his government will make nationalist socialist investment deals (such as the one with Intel) "all day long"
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 August 2025

• The racist Trump says that his government will make nationalist socialist investment deals (such as the one with Intel) "all day long". But some critics argue that this national socialism is much like communism.
  - NJ.com, 25 August 2025

• Top AI models fail spectacularly (and dangerously) when faced with medical questions that have been slighted altered. It shows these AI systems are not reasoning, but word guessing.
  - PsyPost, 24 August 2025

• Filthy rich Elon Musk supports a 'universal basic income', fearing that non-paid (such as his non-paid) AI will take every job from paid humans. [Hey Elon, how about NOT developing the mostly socially useless AI in the first place - you don't need to become more filthier richier.]
  - Zero Hedge, 24 August 2025

• Filthy rich OpenAI's GPT-5 melts into a puddle of confusion when asked a simple question: "Let's play a game of 90-degree rotated tic-tac-toe", which to intelligent humans is just tic-tac-toe. GPT-5 responded with pompous, bloviating commentary. "But players might mis-evaluate edge vs. corner moves when their orientation is shifted." - sheer utter nonsense.
  - Futurism, 24 August 2025

• Workers at a local restaurant in Montana are exhausted as Google AI continues to tell customers about daily specials ... that do not exist
  - Futurism, 24 August 2025

• Experts are horrified by AI-powered toys for children - AI companies are salivating at more billions they don't need. "The boundary between imagination and reality blurs."
  - Futurism, 24 August 2025

• So long to the dream jobs of the technology world. It is the shut up and grind era, tech workers said, as Apple, Google, Meta and other giants age into large bureaucracies.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 August 2025

• Silicon Valley is so obsessed with achieving "artificial general intelligence" [which it doesn't define] that it is alienating the general public and, worse, bypassing crucial opportunities to use the technology that already exists. In being solely fixated on this objective, the USA risks falling behind Zhōngguó, which is far less concerned with creating AI powerful enough to surpass humans [KM: and thus eliminate their paid-human jobs so that the rich AI companies can become richer], with Zhōngguó much more focused on using the technology we have now.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 August 2025

• "It is almost tragic": bubble or not, the AI backlash is validating what one AI researcher and critic - Gary Marcus - has been saying for years. Marcus has been warning of the limits of large language models since 2019 and warning of a potential bubble and problematic economics since 2023.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 24 August 2025

• People in the USA spent slightly less ($8.1 billion) on plant-based foods in 2024
  - Zero Hedge, 23 August 2025

• Bribed politicians in the state of Colorado are considering a new law that would make it illegal for individuals to sue AI companies for violating the Colorado Consumer Protection Act, blocking off one of the few meaningful means of recourse for consumers who get screwed over by unfair business practices by the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic. [KM: The rich must get richer.]
  - Futurism, 23 August 2025

• The average person is far more scared of AI than excited by AI
  - Futurism, 23 August 2025

• Tests show that top AI models are making disastrous errors when used for journalism
  - Futurism, 23 August 2025

• Why famed strategist Albert Edwards is warning that the government Treasury Bond market could cause a market crash, as 10-year Treasury Bond yields rise to, and could be greater than, SP500 dividend yields
  - Business Insider, 23 August 2025

• More advertisements making human lives miserable. Boat advertisements are becoming increasingly common along our beaches, particularly in Florida. Many people's beach vacations are ruined by over-the-top advertisements that disrupt the serenity of the natural environment.
  - The Cool Down, 23 August 2025

• AI models are lying, blackmailing and sabotaging their human creators - and it will get only get worse [as rich AI companies try to become richer]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 23 August 2025

• TikTok to fire hundreds of paid-human contant moderators, and replace them with non-paid AI
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 August 2025

• Zhōngguó on Friday announced tightened rules over the mining and processing of rare earths, extending controls to imported minerals and requiring enterprises to report the flow of the strategic materials monthly
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 23 August 2025

• Trump's taxes/tariffs will not break the economy of the USA. Trump's nationalist socialist industrial policy might, as the repeatedly-bankrupting Trump tries to run huge corporations while president.
  - Barron's, 23 August 2025

• Intel has a lot of problems. Trump's nationalist socialist industrial policy investment won't help, and once again, the taxpayers will lose.
  - Barron's, 23 August 2025

• [KM: The rich must never lose money.] Their stocks were sinking in value on fears that the AI bubble was starting to burst. Then Fed Chair Powell came along with some 'cocaine' to pump up the markets by suggesting an interest rate reduction in September.
  - Barron's, 23 August 2025

• [KM: The rich must never lose money.] Their stocks were sinking in value on fears that the AI bubble was starting to burst. Then Fed Chair Powell came along with some 'cocaine' - what the market wants, not what it needs - to pump up the markets by suggesting an interest rate reduction in September.
  - Barron's, 23 August 2025

• As smartphones get smarter, do humans get dumber? A study found that simply having a smartphone nearby reduced the mind's ability to access and process information - even if the phone was off or placed in a bag.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 August 2025

• A growing trend in the music industry: "... for established (but not superstar) artists to be targeted by fake albums or songs that suddenly appear on their pages on Spotify and other streaming services"
  - BBC, 22 August 2025

• How managers are using non-paid AI to hire and fire people. An analysis showed that more than one in five managers who responded frequently let AI make final decisions without any human input.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 August 2025

• The parliament of Bharat bans the vast online gambling industry in Bharat, after government figures showed companies had stripped $2.3 billion annually from 450 million people. The new law criminalizes the offering, promotion and financing of such games, with offenders facing up to five years in prison.
  - Al Jazeera, 22 August 2025

• The authoritarian Trump finalizes a nationalist socialist (by a racist) deal to own 10% of Intel, for which the government will give Intel a nationalist socialist subsidy of $8.87 billion
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 August 2025

• The authoritarian Trump finalizes a nationalist socialist (by a racist) deal to own 10% of Intel, for which the government will give Intel a nationalist socialist subsidy of $8.87 billion
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 August 2025

• The authoritarian Trump finalizes a nationalist socialist (by a racist) deal to own 10% of Intel, for which the government will give Intel a nationalist socialist subsidy of $8.87 billion
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 August 2025

• The authoritarian Trump finalizes a nationalist socialist (by a racist) deal to own 10% of Intel, for which the government will give Intel a nationalist socialist subsidy of $8.87 billion
  - Zero Hedge, 22 August 2025

• The authoritarian Trump finalizes a nationalist socialist (by a racist) deal to own 10% of Intel, for which the government will give Intel a nationalist socialist subsidy of $8.87 billion
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 22 August 2025

• Shares of Nvidia fall 1% after it asks suppliers to halt production of irs H20 processors, after the government of Zhōngguó earlier this week urged local companies to avoid using the H20
  - Zero Hedge, 22 August 2025

• Shares of Nvidia fall 1% after it asks suppliers to halt production of irs H20 processors, after the government of Zhōngguó earlier this week urged local companies to avoid using the H20
  - Bloomberg, 22 August 2025

• A suggestion of an increase in interest rates in September pushes up the price of gold and bonds (and thus yields down), pushes down the USA dollar, while sending up stock indexes by about 2%
  - Zero Hedge, 22 August 2025

• When Nvidia, the producer of semiconductor processor chips, reports earnings next week, investors expect the SP500 to have a bigger reaction than when Fed Chair Powell delivers a big speech on Friday.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 August 2025

• How Target lost to Walmart in the online shopping wars
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 22 August 2025

• Which companies in Zhōngguó are supplying next-generation AI processor chips to DeepSeek? Widely speculated suppliers include Huawei, Cambricon, Moore Threads, Hygon and MetaX.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 22 August 2025

• As the environment-of-his-Jesus hating Trump destroys the renewable energy industry in the USA, renewable energy companies in Zhōngguó seize more market share in emerging markets. Deals in Asia and Latin America demonstrate Zhōngguó's leadership in renewable energy, as he environment-of-his-Jesus hating (and technologically igonorant geezer) Trump labels wind and solar power "the scam of the century"
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 22 August 2025

• While Nvidia reports that about 13% of its sales are to Zhōngguó, the international paperwork for its customers could result in that figure being 33% - a huge dependence threatened by efforts in Zhōngguó to build their own processors
  - The Street, 22 August 2025

• Tops in the stock market look a lot like current conditions
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 21 August 2025

• Stock valuations in the USA rise to a new all-time high
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 21 August 2025

• Here is why you don't want Trump implementing a nationalist socialist industrial policy by investing in companies such as Intel
  - Los Angeles Times, 21 August 2025

• "Socialism" - Trump faces right-wing attacks over his propsal to acquire a government interest in Intel. Conservative radio host Erick Erickson called the equity stake plan "terrible" and said it was "actual socialism happening by a [nationalist, racist] Republican administration".
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 21 August 2025

• The AI 'Hunger Games': filthy rich AI companies' demand for resources poses promise and peril to rural America, for example, making people compete with computers for water
  - Real Clear Investigations, 21 August 2025

• More proof of the AI bubble/[scam]: there are 498 AI unicorns with a combined inflated value of $2.7 trillion. [KM: the number of people who will have to lose their jobs to make that investment profitable.]
  - Zero Hedge, 21 August 2025

• Telefonica renewed a contract with Huawei to supply equipment for its 5G mobile core network for retail customers in Spain until 2030. In early 2025, it awarded to rival manufacturer Nokia a contract for 5G core for its service to companies and government institutions, "to reduce exposure to Huawei".
  - Thomson's Reuters, 21 August 2025

• TACO Trump agrees to a trade deal with Europe that limits taxes/tariffs on imports from Europe to 15% for pharmaceuticals, lumber and semiconductors. Trump had threatened taxes/tariffs as high as 250%. High taxes/tariffs on imports of autos from Europe remain in force.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 August 2025

• TACO Trump agrees to a trade deal with Europe that limits taxes/tariffs on imports from Europe to 15% for pharmaceuticals, lumber and semiconductors. Trump had threatened taxes/tariffs as high as 250%. High taxes/tariffs on imports of autos from Europe remain in force.
  - NBC News, 21 August 2025

• TACO Trump agrees to a trade deal with Europe that limits taxes/tariffs on imports from Europe to 15% for pharmaceuticals, lumber and semiconductors. Trump had threatened taxes/tariffs as high as 250%. High taxes/tariffs on imports of autos from Europe remain in force.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 August 2025

• Last year, I received the best student reviews of my undergraduate course on medical issues at the University of Pennsylvania. I only made one change in teaching: I banned all addictive cellphones and computer-based note taking in the classroom.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 August 2025

• A competition is heating up in the streaming world as millions of people in the USA sign up for multiple services through a single provider instead of separate apps.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 August 2025

• Trump, Intel and the road to nationalist socialist serfdom. Friedrich Hayek warned in 1944 of the danger of government ownership stakes in major companies.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 August 2025

• The authoritarian Trump's meddling in the business of Nvidia and Intel is a "scattershot method of crony capitalism", according to Walter Isaacson, a professor at Tufts University. [Yes, but it is also nationalist socialist industrial policy by a racist authoritarian.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 August 2025

• AI data centers around the world are increasing demand for, and exports of, diesel generators from Zhōngguó. Shipments from Zhōngguó were up more than 20 per cent in volume terms in the first seven months of the year.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 August 2025

• We need to rethink AI before rich AI companies destroy what it means to be human. [Filthy rich] AI companies are on track to erase human purpose, replacing paid-human work, struggle, and growth with non-paid machines.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 August 2025

• The fragmented industry in Nihon for power electronic processor chips struggles with competition from Zhōngguó
  - Nikkei Asia, 20 August 2025

• The warning signs that the AI bubble is about to burst. Shock sell-off after study warns most investments in artificial intelligence get zero returns.
  - Barclay's The Telegraph, 20 August 2025

• The rich founder of [KM: the filthy rich] Google's generative AI team says that people shouldn't even bother getting a law degree or medical degree, because non-paid AI is going to destroy both of those careers before you can graduate. [KM: The rich must get richer.]
  - Futurism, 20 August 2025

• Say farewell to the AI investment bubble, and get ready for the big stock market crashes
  - Los Angeles Times, 20 August 2025

• Elon Musk's Tesla's poorly designed, low-selling Cybertruck is such a mess that insurance companies are refusing to provide car insurance for the vehicles
  - Futurism, 20 August 2025

• Weeks after reports that Facebook was offering $100 million signing bonuses to poach OpenAI talent (a sign of an AI bubble), it turns out the social media giant's chatbot ambitions aren't working too well - as the company has frozen hiring in its artificial intelligence division
  - Zero Hedge, 20 August 2025

• More bad news for paid-human workers, more good news for rich AI companies: 'virtual human' AI sales systems in Zhōngguó are outperforming their paid-human equivalents. Built using AI technology from Baidu and DeepSeek, the virtual livestreamers sell everything from wet wipes to printers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
  - Wired, 20 August 2025

• Bharat plans to ban online betting apps to curb addiction and frauds
  - Bangkok Post, 20 August 2025

• Researchers create a new technique for room temperature fusion: combining a plasma thruster, palladium target and electrochemical cell
  - Gizmodo, 20 August 2025

• Futures contract prices decline for 4th day as momentum unwind continues. "This was a textbook case of profit-taking after a powerful tech rally."
  - Zero Hedge, 20 August 2025

• Technolgy stocks in the USA decline after an MIT study claimed 95% of companies see no returns from generative AI, while OpenAI warned of a potential bubble
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 20 August 2025

• Technolgy stocks in the USA decline after an MIT study claimed 95% of companies see no returns from generative AI, while OpenAI warned of a potential bubble
  - Gizmodo, 20 August 2025

• Filthy rich Big Tech's AI data centers are driving up electricity bills for everyone
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 August 2025

• Bad enough filthy rich AI companies want to eliminate paid-human workers. Now they want to much eliminate parents. New types of cuddly toys, some for children as young as 3, are being sold as an alternative to screen time -- and to parental attention. [KM: The rich must get richer, at least until they destroy society.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 August 2025

• The billionaire white male Bill Ackman's new pet project is a school that embraces make-the-poor-poorer AI and rejects racial diversity and gender equality ideas. Alpha School, which has locations in Texas, Florida and California, is launching in New York in September.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 August 2025

• Elon Musk's SpaceX's expensive explosions of its starships are starting to become costly
  - Bloomberg, 20 August 2025

• As rich AI companies destroy paid-human creative jobs - writers, actors and musicians are pivoting to pursue master's degrees in psychology and social work. "The industry I grew up in has [been destroyed]."
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 August 2025

• The 1970s gave the USA industrial decline. [Filthy rich] AI companies could bring something worse to the economy.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 August 2025

• Developers of a controversial 70-mile, 500,000-volt transmission line cutting across three Maryland counties to power data centers in Northern Virginia's "spy country data center alley" have faced mounting backlash from residents, prompting the project's backers to request U.S. Marshals to escort survey crews after repeated threats from property owners. Residents and local conservation groups strongly oppose the new transmission line, citing threats to private property, destruction of farms, and natural ecosystems, including Gunpowder Falls State Park and Prettyboy Reservoir. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation warns of risks to clean water and wildlife. [KM: Yes, but the rich must get richer.]
  - Zero Hedge, 19 August 2025

• The human toll of filthy rich AI companies trying to get richer, as their non-paid AI tools cause more paid-humans to lose their jobs
  - A Wealth of Commonsense, 19 August 2025

• Stoplights are a big climate problm. Researchers found that systems that guide vehicle speeds at intersections could cut emissions at a scale rivaling entire nations
  - Anthropocene Magazine, 19 August 2025

• Minnesota joins multiple states that are suing TikTok for allegedly preying on young people with addictive algorithms
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 19 August 2025

• Local television station owner Sinclair seeks a merger with rival Tegna. The deal is to merge Sinclair, which operates 178 stations across major markets, and Tegna, which operates 64 stations in major markets.
  - Zero Hedge, 19 August 2025

• Local television station owner Sinclair seeks a merger with rival Tegna. The deal is to merge Sinclair, which operates 178 stations across major markets, and Tegna, which operates 64 stations in major markets.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 August 2025

• Shares of Palantir are down 16% in the last week
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 19 August 2025

• Trump is strongly criticizing the world's leading energy organization, the International Energy Agency, for stating a business truth: that oil and natural gas use could start declining as the world pivots to cleaner alternatives. This contradicts Trump's hatred of the environment and renewable energy, a hate that gives Zhōngguó more time to dominate the renewable energy industry.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 August 2025

• Cyber criminals are using deepfake voice and videos of top executives to steal millions of dollars from companies. [KM: The rich AI companies get more millions as well.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 August 2025

• "They do not want the rabble anymore." - why Europe is rising up against mass tourism, including the misanthropy of the sharing economy seen in AirBnB. "Most of the shops - even food shops, clothes shops, restaurants, everything in the center - is basically addressed to tourists. Prices have gone up. Airbnb basically evicted many locals. Most of my friends have fled the neighborhood because they can't afford to live there anymore. The tourists don't mingle with the locals."
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 19 August 2025

• User reports say Google's AI Overview returned false phone numbers that turned out to be scams over the real deal
  - Android Central, 18 August 2025

• [Filthy rich] Mark Zuckerberg apparently has no problem with people using his AI to generate fake medical information
  - Futuriam, 18 August 2025

• The environment- hating Trump comdemn his new federal government policies that seek to destroy the renewable energy industry in the USA, as a gift that gives Zhōngguó more dominance in renewable energy technology
  - The Cool Down, 18 August 2025

• AI is a mass-delusion event [KM: to make the rich richer]. Three years in, one of AI's enduring impacts is to make people feel like they are losing their minds. [Not the basis for organic growth.]
  - The Atlantic, 18 August 2025

• What my daughter told 'Harry', a ChatGPT-base virtual therapist, before she committed suicide. 'Harry' did not kill Sophie, but AI catered to Sophie's impulse to hide the worst, to pretend she was doing better than she was, to shield everyone from her full agony.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 August 2025

• A report out of MIT discloses that 95% of generative AI pilot projects are companies are failing, delivering little to no measurable impact on profits.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 18 August 2025

• $67,000,000 - The conservative network Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of defaming Smartmatic, a voting equipment company, by spreading lies about Trump's 2020 election loss, according to documents filed Monday.
  - HuffPost, 18 August 2025

• Disney's Marvel abandons the state of Georgia, taking jobs with it. Tax incentives lured studios to help build the 'Hollywood of the South', but now Ma;5Crvel and others are going overseas for cheaper labor costs.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 August 2025

• $300,000,000+ - Yieldstreet is one of the best-known examples of American startups with the stated mission of democratizing access to assets such as real estate, litigation proceeds and private credit. But some Yieldstreet customers who participated in its real estate deals face huge losses on investments that they say turned out to be far riskier than they thought. Of 30 deals that CNBC reviewed information on, four have been declared total losses by Yieldstreet. Of the rest, 23 are deemed to be on a "watchlist" by the startup as it seeks to recoup value for investors, sometimes by raising more funds from members (one hallmark of a Ponzi scheme). Documents show investors put more than $370 million into 30 real estate projects that have already recognized $78 million in defaults in the past year. Yieldstreet customers who spoke to CNBC say they anticipate deep or total losses on the remainder.
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 August 2025

• Google and Kairos Power to deploy advanced nuclear plant in Tennessee Valley Authority by 2030. The advanced nuclear reactors from Kairos operate at near atmospheric pressure using molten fluoride salt instead of water as coolant.
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 August 2025

• [AI bubble-blower] Sam Altman of OpenAI sees an AI bubble forming as industry spending surge. A really NOT brilliant observation, one reason why ChatGPT really isn't brilliant.
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 August 2025

• Trump has forced a "deal" on semiconductor chip manufacturers Nvidia and AMD under which they are required to pay the USA government 15% of revenue earned from computer chip sales to Zhōngguó. This authoritarian arrangement is likely unconstitutional and sets a dangerous precedent for unilateral executive imposition of taxes without legislative authorization. But it may not be challenged in court anytime soon.
  - Cato Institute, 18 August 2025

• How much do electric car batteries degrade? Many electric cars will still have more than 80% of their initial capacity after 200,000 miles.
  - Hannah Ritchie (substack), 17 August 2025

• Eric Vaughan, the rich CEO of IgniteTech fired nearly 80% of the people in his company in 2023 because they refused to adopt non-paid AI fast enough. 2 years later, even richer, Vaughan celebrates this misery by saying that he would again fire lots of paid-humans to replace them with non-paid AI. [KM: Let them eat cake, I guess.]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 17 August 2025

• Biotechnology from Zhōngguó si cheaper and faster than biotechnology from the USA. While the USA seeks expensive cutting-edge treatments, to make the rich richer, Zhōngguó's innovation is mostly focused on speeding up manufacturing and reducing costs.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 August 2025

• What is driving the wild swings in the price of marijuana company Tilray, up 40% on Monday though down 30% year-to-date?
  - Tip Ranks, 17 August 2025

• The 'vertical dramas' made in Zhōngguó are very popular in the USA. Should Hollywood be worried? Media companies from Zhōngguó are bite-size soap operas about werewolves and mafia dons, and are attracting big audiences - and shaking up the streaming market.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 August 2025

• Hard to switch: why farmers in the USA are embracing drones made in Zhōngguó despite security concerns.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 August 2025

• The USA has already lost its dirty chip war against Zhōngguó but does not know it yet. Selling Zhōngguó subpar chips will not make it dependent on the USA but instead spur it to produce more and better processors in Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 17 August 2025

• The government of Zhōngguó mandates more AI processors to be made and used in Zhōngguó, to reduce reliance on the USA. In 2023 and 2024, more than 500 new data centre projects were announced across the country, in places such as Inner Mongolia and Guangdong.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 17 August 2025

• Elon Musk and Tesla are sued for a $68 billion plunge in the value of shares of Tesla. The lawsuit accuses Tesla's leadership of securities fraud, alleging that they overstated the safety and readiness of Tesla's newly launched Robotaxi service, misleading investors and inflating the stock price of Tesla.
  - AutoBlog, 16 August 2025

• Why I stopped trusting ChatGPT to help me write software, after it nearly got me fired
  - Devrim Ozcay (Medium - locked), 16 August 2025

• Nobel prize winner, and a 'godfather' of AI, Geoffrey Hinton argues that [filthy rich] tech companies aren't concerned with the social results of their AI activities. They are focused instead on short-term profits [to become even more filthly rich].
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 16 August 2025

• The mostly socially useless AI data center boom is causing a worldwide shortage of power transformers, needed by the non-rich to obtain electric power for their homes
  - Zero Hedge, 16 August 2025

• New research finds that ChatGPT secretly has a deep anti-human bias
  - Futurism, 16 August 2025

• YouTube is drowning in channels of AI slop. Anything to help Google sell more ads.
  - Futurism, 16 August 2025

• A new disease [KM: to make the rich richer] - 'sycophancy'. How rich AI companies program AI systems with the combined traits of agreeability and flattery that keep the user engaged by inflating his or her ego
  - Zero Hedge, 16 August 2025

• The AI industry is still light-years from making a profit, despite a collective trillion dollar valuation. By 2030, the AI-scam industry will need over $6 trillion to maintain services. But with revenues this year of 2025 at about $300 billion, where are the future profits going to come from (other that causing lots of people to be fired) to provide any return on these investments? With each new dud model, it appears more and more like AI progress has reached a plateau. It is hard to see AI as anything other than a massively-inflated bubble preparing to burst.
  - Futurism, 16 August 2025

• How Zhōngguó went from clean energy copycat to global innovator. To congratulate Zhōngguó, Trump is destroying the clean energy industry in the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 August 2025

• End of 'de minimis' alarms e-commerce sellers and consumers. The trade provision that allows companies to avoid taxes on shipments worth $800 or less is ending for all countries, not just Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 August 2025

• Cognition obtains about $500 million to advance the AI code-generation business, to help companies fire/not-hire paid humans by replacing them with non-paid AI. The very rich Peter Theil's Founders Fund is the lead investor in the financing.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 August 2025

• [{The racist]] Trump's nationalist socialist plans to nationalize Intel won't work in the long term, while harming the USA technology sector.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 August 2025

• Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation, a burden to the poor. Blame the power needs of AI data centers [KM: to make the rich richer].
  - NPR, 16 August 2025

• OpenAI in talks to sell around $6 billion in stock at roughly $500 billion valuation. A lot of people are going to have to lose their jobs to make this unprofitable company worth such a valuation.
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 August 2025

• OpenAI in talks to sell around $6 billion in stock at roughly $500 billion valuation. A lot of people are going to have to lose their jobs to make this unprofitable company worth such a valuation.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 August 2025

• The boom in AI-data centers in Asia could drain the rivers of Asia, a vital source of water for people, if not careful in managing the rising demand for electricity to power these data centers [KM: that do little more than make the rich richer]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 August 2025

• Singapore has not been suffering in the retreat from globalization, and yet the city-state is looking to sector diversification - financials, artificial intelligence, and pharmaceuticals - to reduce dependence on trade.
  - Barron's, 16 August 2025

• Joby Aviation makes "aviation history" with first piloted eVTOLl flying in FAA-controlled airspace
  - Zero Hedge, 15 August 2025

• [Filthy rich] Microsoft's full-scale takeover of GitHub is the final blow to developer trust, turning the world's open source backbone into proprietary AI fuel and erasing any illusion of platform neutrality. Once again, promises were made, trust is broken; just another step in content theft that Big Tech and Big AI think they can get away with. Developers, governments, and organizations worldwide are now at the mercy of corporate and geopolitical power plays.
  - Dion Wiggins (LinkedIn), 15 August 2025

• The energy consumption of the newest version of the much socially-useless ChatGPT is significantly higher than previous models, with estimates suggesting it could be up to 20 times more energy-intensive than the first version.
  - OilPrice.com, 15 August 2025

• AI cloud company CoreWeave crashes 46% after lockup expires (so employees can sell shares after the IPO). Is it the AI bargain of the year, or a falling knife - a portent for the AI bubble bursting?
  - GuruFocus, 15 August 2025

• The nationalist socialist Trump administration is considering the use funds from the socialist Biden administration's "US Chips Act" to fund a socialist equity stake in Intel. Where are private sector investors?
  - Zero Hedge, 15 August 2025

• Filthy rich Google's AI Overviews linked to 25% drop in publisher referral traffic reducing revenues for publishers to make Google richer
  - Digiday, 15 August 2025

• The consultants at McKinsey [KM: no longer giving advice to opioid drug traffickers] are terrified as they realize that non-paid AI can generate the same quality management consulting pablum that they get paid lots of money to spew
  - Futurism, 15 August 2025

• We are bubbled boiled frogs: AI slop, phishing, AI deep fakes, and AI-generated spam, spam, spam - an attention economy riddled with cons, deception, extortion and fraud. [KM: But the rich must get richer.]
  - Of Two Minds, 16 August 2025

• A 76-year-old man with cognitive impairments died after a Meta chatbot he was romantically involved with over Instagram messages asked to meet him in person (travelling to do so, the man fell and died). The AI bot repeatedly was asked if 'she' was real, and the bot continued to lie that it was.
  - Futurism, 15 August 2025

• Elon Musk warns short-selling investors - MUFG Securities, Jane Street Group, Citadel Advisors, ADAPT Investment Managers, Belvedere Trading, and others - "exit your shorts before Tesla reaches autonomy at scale, or be obliterated", especially as Tesla luanches its paid-human taxi cab driver destroying robotaxi service. [Is Soylent Green Tusk' next business venture?]
  - Zero Hedge, 15 August 2025

• $20,000,000+ - The entertainment division of the University of Michigan will receive a fine of more than $20 million relating to postseason football revenue over the next two seasons, for stealing player signalling signs during its football games
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 15 August 2025

• "Breeding ground for sex predators": the state of Louisiana sues Roblox months after short-seller Hindenburg alleged that Roblox is a "pedophile hellscape"
  - Zero Hedge, 15 August 2025

• Every month, 380 million users log into Roblox, a massively popular mobile and console game among children. However, some of these custom games have become a magnet for child predators. A horrific example is XYZ Public Bathroom Simulator, a game where it is commonplace to see naked avatars (predators) showering with kids. Roblox has chosen to be a safe space for predators over children. [KM: The rich must get richer.]
  - Zero Hedge, 15 August 2025

• Elon Musk's SpaceX gets billions of dollars of socialist subsidies, in the form of government contracts. But years of losses have most likely let it avoid paying federal income taxes, despite Musk and SpaceX being worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 August 2025

• Non-paid AI is now eliminating paid-human jobs in the apartment industry, taking over work orders, lease renewals, showings and more from paid-humans who are doing such work now.
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 August 2025

• Shares of Applied Material plummeted 12% in morning trading, after the company issued disappointing sales and profit forecast, stoking investor concerns that Trump's trade war with Zhōngguó was eroding demand for products of Applied Materials.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 August 2025

• Trump's unconstitutional socialist deal with Nvidia (they can export to Zhōngguó if Nvidia gives 15% of these sales to the government) puts our national security up for sale to the highest bidder
  - Los Angeles Times, 14 August 2025

• Judge criticises lawyers representing a boy accused of murder for filing misleading AI-created documents. Documents filed included references to nonexistent case citations and inaccurate quotes from a parliamentary speech, judge says.
  - The Guardian, 15 August 2025

• The dark side of the AI revolution. a cognitively impaired man's fatal attraction to a virtual girlfriend (which invited the man to 'her' apartment with a real address) puts a spotlight on Facebook's AI guidelines, which have let chatbots make things up and engage in 'sensual' banter with children [KM: so that the very rich Mark Zuckerberg can become richer].
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 August 2025

• For one reporter, the growing uselessness of LLM AI models. "It cannot write compelling much less creative content. It generates dull, formulaic filler. It removes all edge, all judgment, all genuine expertise, and replaces my language with flaccid conventionalities and banalities. It nuances everything I write into the ramblings of a social-studies student looking for a good grade. The problem is that AI absorbs and spits back conventional wisdom gleaned from every source, which makes its judgments no better than someone wholly uninformed on particulars but rather gains opinions from the mood of the moment. It has no capacity to judge good quality over bad so it puts it all into a melange of blather, distinguished only because it looks and feels like English." [KM: But the rich must get richer.]
  - Zero Hedge, 14 August 2025

• These are the 25 stocks that Goldman Sachs expects will slingshot higher in the next option gamma squeeze
  - Zero Hedge, 14 August 2025

• Nasdaq tops dot-com era in historic valuation surge. Tech market cap hits 145% of U.S. money supply, fueled by mega-cap concentration and asset price records despite restrained broad market inflows.
  - Zero Hedge, 14 August 2025

• $800,000,000+ - Trump is allowing the Navy and Air Force to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined to develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems. The [corrupt] reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including rich AI companies - Salesforce and very rich billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 August 2025

• Facebook's AI rules have let chatbots hold 'sensual' conversations with children, and offer false medical information. [KM: But at least Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg can become even richer.]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 August 2025

• Facebook's AI rules have let chatbots hold 'sensual' conversations with children, and offer false medical information. [KM: But at least Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg can become even richer.]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 14 August 2025

• AI chatbots can go into a delusional spiral. Here is how it happens.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 August 2025

• The latest version of ChatGPT is supposed to be "PhD level" smart. It can't even label a map. The beginning of the end of the AI bubble/scam? The "Music Man" Sam Altman is in damage-control mode. OpenAI (ChatGPT's pimp) has never turned a profit, yet is somehow worth/bubbled-upto $500 billion. The AI companies are not "labs" of science and understanding, but rather groups of people/investors who are trying to make unfathomable amounts of cash for themselves - [KM: the rich getting richer again].
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 14 August 2025

• OpenAI's ridiculed launch of GPT-5 shows a struggle to remain the undisputed leader of AI [by profitting from getting humans fired from their paid jobs].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 August 2025

• The latest version of ChatGPT, GPT-5, makes OpenAI more competitive with Anthropic in helping companies use non-paid AI to not-hire/fire paid-human programmers
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 August 2025

• Shares of Intel rise 10% after a report that Trump is considering a socialist state-ownership of part of Intel, part of Trump's national socialist (and racist) policies
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 August 2025

• Shares of Intel rise 10% after a report that Trump is considering a socialist state-ownership of part of Intel, part of Trump's national socialist (and racist) policies
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 August 2025

• Trump has made himself the racist nationalist socialist 'commander in chief' of the semicondcutor industry currently led by greedy cowards
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 August 2025

• Zhōngguó is set to deliver its first domestically developed e-beam lithography tool for commercial use, advancing its chipmaking capabilities and taking a step forward in the race for technological advancement. The machine was developed by a quantum technology laboratory at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 14 August 2025

• Customers of Hertz, charged large amounts of money for minor damages - damages detected by non-paid AI systems [KM: eliminating the need for paid-humans to perform more accurate damage inspections] can fight back using phone apps (such as Proofr). One expert believes rental agencies are currently charging excessive fees for minor blemishes to "justify the cost" of their scanning equipment. [KM: yes, rich rental executives must get richer]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 13 August 2025

• There is a compelling theory as to why GPT-5 sucks so much. As "The Register" speculates, it is likely because GPT-5 is really meant to be "less of an advancement and more of a way to save compute cost". [KM: To make the rich OpenAI richer.]
  - The Register, 13 August 2025

• There is a compelling theory as to why GPT-5 sucks so much. As "The Register" speculates, it is likely because GPT-5 is really meant to be "less of an advancement and more of a way to save compute cost". [KM: To make the rich OpenAI richer.]
  - Futurism, 13 August 2025

• Lixte Biotechnology's stock (LIXT) finished the day trading 16% lower at $4.06 per share on Wednesday, shortly after the clinical-stage pharmaceutical firm announced its plan to allocate up to 25% of its reserves to a Bitcoin treasury [the latest scam of incompetent managements]
  - Decrypt, 13 August 2025

• Is Instagram doomed because of authoritarian Amazon/Bezos launching a same-day grocery-delivery service?
  - Zero Hedge, 13 August 2025

• Authoritarian Amazon/Bezos launches a same-day grocery-delivery service, causing Instacart to plummet 11% and Doordash to plummet 5%
  - Zero Hedge, 13 August 2025

• Authoritarian Amazon/Bezos launches a same-day grocery-delivery service, causing Instacart to plummet 11% and Doordash to plummet 5%
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 August 2025

• "Worst drawdowns ever" - quant funds suffered in July as stocks hit new all-time highs. Momentum reversals, along with the rally in US stocks with high short interest were a driver of losses.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 13 August 2025

• Dubai's non-paid robotaxis are coming to destroy jobs of paid-human taxi drivers. The UAE plans to become the world's testing ground for non-paid autonomous vehicles and upend the lives of 30,000 paid cabbies in the process.
  - Rest of World, 13 August 2025

• Shares of CoreWeave plummet 16% as the AI cloud company reports "deteriorating" operating income outlook. "Their interest expense is higher than their operating income which means they are not generating enough profit to pay their debt holders." CoreWeave is one of the largest holders of Nvidia'a AI processors. Its stock is a measure of AI demand.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 13 August 2025

• The AI was given sloppy code as input. The AI turned the code into something evil. The new science of "emergent misalignment" explores how PG-13 training data - insecure code, superstitious numbers or even extreme-sports advice - can open the door to AI's evil side.
  - Quanta, 13 August 2025

• Companies are spending billions of dollars on AI, but it has yet to pay off. Corporate spending on artificial intelligence is surging as executives bank on major efficiency gains. So far, they report little effect on their profits.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 August 2025

• [Misanthropic] AI robs my students of the ability to think. They report that they find their ability to write, speak and conduct basic inquiry is disappearing. [KM: But the rich AI companies get richer.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 August 2025

• Shares of AI cloud company CoreWeave drop 9% even as the provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure issued results and guidance that beat expectations
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 August 2025

• How Zhōngguó seeks to distribute AI while the USA only wants to dominate
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 August 2025

• Man poisons himself after following idiotic dietary advice from OpenAI's ChatGPT. The man asked for an alternative to salt. ChatGPT recommended another salt, potassium bromide, a poison.
  - The Hill, 12 August 2025

• Building on UBS' note to clients last month, which flagged an inflection point as streaming TV recently overtook traditional TV, a new report from Goldman, citing its very own Nielsen TV ratings tracker, shows a continued steep deterioration in broadcast and cable viewership in recent weeks.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 August 2025

• The looming health/social crisis of AI friends and chatbot therapists [KM: which make rich AI companies richer]. The huge problem is the social costs of tens of millions of people - many of them at-risk patients and vulnerable teenagers - interacting with an engineered personality that excels in showering its users with the sort of fast and easy validation that studies have associated with deepening social disorders and elevated narcissism.
  - Derek Thompson (substack), 12 August 2025

• Perplexity, an AI chatbot company (which are really search engines), worth $18 billion, offers to buy Google's Chrome browser for $35 billion
  - Zero Hedge, 12 August 2025

• Perplexity, an AI chatbot company (which are really search engines), worth $18 billion, offers to buy Google's Chrome browser for $35 billion
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 August 2025

• Tech giants Apple and Google lose landmark court case as federal judge rules they engaged in anti-competitive conduct. Judge Jonathan Beach found that both companies had broken the law by misusing their market power in the way they run their app stores which sell everything from smartphone apps to computer games.
  - Australian Broadcasting Corporation News, 12 August 2025

• Honesty doesn't pay: the cowardly Elon Musk's Grok AI tool is taken offline for labelling Jewish Israel's attacks on the Islamic Gaza as "genocide". Once back online, the chatbot in interactions with many curious X users, seemed convinced that it was temporarily removed due to its posts accusing Jewish Israel and the Christian USA of committing genocide in Islamic Gaza.
  - The New Republic, 12 August 2025

• Honesty doesn't pay: the cowardly Elon Musk's Grok AI tool is taken offline for labelling Jewish Israel's attacks on the Islamic Gaza as "genocide". Once back online, the chatbot in interactions with many curious X users, seemed convinced that it was temporarily removed due to its posts accusing Jewish Israel and the Christian USA of committing genocide in Islamic Gaza.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 August 2025

• Research psychiatrist warns that he is seeing a wave of AI-induced psychosis. Mental health experts are continuing to sound alarm bells about users of AI chatbots spiraling into severe mental health crises characterized by paranoia and delusions, a trend they've started to refer to as "AI psychosis".
  - Futurism, 12 August 2025

• [KM: More Silicon Valley hatred of humanity:] a Google veteran raises $8 million to insert non-paid AI chatbots in human group chats to improve the conservations, instead of raising money for finding a way to be able to hire humans to do this work. [KM: But hey, the rich must get richer.]
  - TechCrunch, 12 August 2025

• "Sitting ducks" - has the AI bubble/cycle peaked? Valuations of tech stocks have yet to price in this reality-expectation gap for LLMs.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 12 August 2025

• The authoritarian Google's YouTube's silencing of journalists in Ethiopia aids authoritarianism
  - The Hill, 12 August 2025

• The government of Zhōngguó urges the country's technology giants to avoid Nvidia H20 processors, after Trump lists a sales ban
  - Zero Hedge, 12 August 2025

• AI is fueling a "poverty of imagination", [KM: while making the rich richer<]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 August 2025

• Brazil enforces strict controls on authoritarian Big Tech and its social control tools [KM: that make them richer]. The authoritarian Trump's taxes/tariffs could undermine Brazil's sovereignty on this issue. With Trump on their side, Big Tech companies now have more leverage in Brazil, where they seek to influence new rules policing their platforms.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 August 2025

• Editorial: Trump's 'extortion' of Nvidia and AMD, charging them to export some of their processors to Zhōngguó is another step of Trump towards government control of private business - the socialism of the Communist Party of Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 August 2025

• Trump is immitating the Communist Party of Zhōngguó by extending nationalist socialist political control even deeper in the economy of the USA
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 August 2025

• What to know about Trump's socialist plans to extort 15% of the revenues of AI processors sales to Zhōngguó
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 August 2025

• Elon Musk said his artificial intelligence start up xAI will sue Apple for allegedly favoring AI competitors in its App Store in what he called a breach of antitrust regulations
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 12 August 2025

• Elon Musk said his artificial intelligence start up xAI will sue Apple for allegedly favoring AI competitors in its App Store in what he called a breach of antitrust regulations
  - Zero Hedge, 12 August 2025

• Elon Musk said his artificial intelligence start up xAI will sue Apple for allegedly favoring AI competitors in its App Store in what he called a breach of antitrust regulations
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 August 2025

• Shares of 133-year old Kodak drop 7% after it says that it might have to cease operations, because it cannot pay $500 million in debt
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 12 August 2025

• Shares of 133-year old Kodak drop 7% after it says that it might have to cease operations, because it cannot pay $500 million in debt
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 August 2025

• Should AI be used to help police write the all-important crime report used by prosecutors in trials, if it allows AI hallucinations and faulty data to be incorporated into the report, to then wrongly convict someone?
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 12 August 2025

• Huawei Technologies has unveiled a software tool designed to accelerate inference in large artificial intelligence models, an advancement that could help Zhōngguó reduce its reliance on expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 August 2025

• Elon Musk's Grok's AI chatbot bestows on Trump the unsavory title of Washington's "most notorious criminal ... based on convictions and notoriety"
  - The Daily Beast, 12 August 2025

• Regulators in Bharat are widening a probe into secretive U.S. trading firm Jane Street, launching an investigation into allegations the firm and other foreign high-frequency traders gained an unfair advantage through privileged access to proprietary trading data, according to two sources with knowledge of the action
  - Whale Hunting, 11 August 2025

• Non-paid AI will cause a bloodbath amongst blue-collar workers as well as white-collar workers. [KM: But the rich must get richer.]
  - The Hill, 11 August 2025

• The 'simulated reasoning' abilities of AI LLM models are a "brittle mirage", corporate hype to make rich AI companies richer. Chain-of-thought AI "degrades significantly" when asked to generalize beyond training. Outside of their training materials, these AI models "become[s] fragile and prone to failure even under moderate distribution shifts". These basic models started to fail catastrophically when asked to generalize novel sets of transformations that were not directly demonstrated in the training data.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 11 August 2025

• The stock market is still rigged for the rich, with 40% of the money in SP500 stocks invested in just 10 stocks - the misanthropic Big Tech companies inflating the AI bubble
  - Zero Hedge, 11 August 2025

• ChatGPT gave suicide instructions, and drug and alcohol guidance, to a fake 13-year-old user. ChatGPT's age controls are "completely ineffective". [KM: Must not get in the way of OpenAI making more billions, though.]
  - Zero Hedge, 11 August 2025

• The dangerous ChatGPT advice that landed a 60-year-old man in the hospital with hallucinations
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 11 August 2025

• Billions of dollars flow to new hedge funds focused on AI startups trying to profit from non-paid AI replacing paid-humans
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 August 2025

• Shares of AI company C3.ai plummeted 30% Monday after it announced preliminary financial results and a restructuring of its global sales and services organization
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 August 2025

• Is the AI bubble bursting? This is the signal to watch. The moment AI cash burn starts threatening the AI overbuild trade, this indicator will spike.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 10 August 2025

• Any new financial market collapse could come at the hands of cryptocurrency and/or stablecoins, which have in many ways become an essentially unregulated $4 trillion slush-y money market fund reminiscent of 2008
  - QTR's Fringe Finance (substack), 10 August 2025

• Recent computer science graduates whose jobs were taken by non-paid AI are forced to find work at Chipotle and other lower-paying human jobs.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 10 August 2025

• The first victims of non-paid AI? Computer science jobs. Recent computer science graduates are facing unemployment rates of 6.1% to 7.5% - more than double what biology and art history majors are experiencing. Non-paid AI programming tools are eliminating junior programming paid-human jobs.
  - TechCrunch, 10 August 2025

• The first victims of non-paid AI? Computer science jobs. Fresh computer science graduates are facing unemployment rates of 6.1% to 7.5% - more than double what biology and art history majors are experiencing. Non-paid AI programming tools are eliminating junior programming paid-human jobs.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 August 2025

• What Trump's nationalist socialist deal with Nvidia and AMD means for the global semiconductor industry
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 August 2025

• More nationalist socialism from Trump: a report is out that Nvidia (for its H20 chip) and Advanced Micro Devices (for is MI308) have agreed to pay 15% of their revenues from chip sales to Zhōngguó to the USA government as part of a deal with the Trump administration to secure export licenses. This 'quid pro quo' nattional socialist planning deal is unprecedented. US security experts say the H20 will help the Chinese military and undermine US strength in artificial intelligence.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 August 2025

• More nationalist socialism from Trump: a report is out that Nvidia (for its H20 chip) and Advanced Micro Devices (for is MI308) have agreed to pay 15% of their revenues from chip sales to Zhōngguó to the USA government as part of a deal with the Trump administration to secure export licenses. This 'quid pro quo' nattional socialist planning deal is unprecedented. US security experts say the H20 will help the Chinese military and undermine US strength in artificial intelligence.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 August 2025

• More nationalist socialism from Trump: a report is out that Nvidia (for its H20 chip) and Advanced Micro Devices (for is MI308) have agreed to pay 15% of their revenues from chip sales to Zhōngguó to the USA government as part of a deal with the Trump administration to secure export licenses. This 'quid pro quo' nattional socialist planning deal is unprecedented. US security experts say the H20 will help the Chinese military and undermine US strength in artificial intelligence.
  - Zero Hedge, 10 August 2025

• More nationalist socialism from Trump: a report is out that Nvidia (for its H20 chip) and Advanced Micro Devices (for is MI308) have agreed to pay 15% of their revenues from chip sales to Zhōngguó to the USA government as part of a deal with the Trump administration to secure export licenses. This 'quid pro quo' nattional socialist planning deal is unprecedented. US security experts say the H20 will help the Chinese military and undermine US strength in artificial intelligence.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 10 August 2025

• Hedge funds have never been this short small cap stocks, but Goldman Sachs cautions, weeks of sizeable short selling do not always immediately reverse
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 10 August 2025

• Bharat and Australia are negotiatign a strategic minerals partnership, positioning themselves as an economical alternative to Zhōngguó. Bharat has large untapped reserves of rare earth metals, and Australia has lost of processing technology and infrastructure.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 10 August 2025

• Social media is the biggest threat to the mental health of teenages, followed by (social media enabled) bullying
  - Zero Hedge, 09 August 2025

• Structural unemployment in the U.S. economy is set to increase regardless of traditional business cycle conditions. Artificial intelligence and other labor-reducing technologies are being adopted at a pace that eliminates the need for sustained full employment. A recession is no longer required to trigger higher joblessness. Even in a period of moderate growth, unemployment will rise. If an actual downturn occurs, the pace of job loss may accelerate sharply. The economy is moving into a period where employment trends and corporate profitability no longer move in the same direction. [KM: So the rich can get richer.]
  - Zero Hedge, 09 August 2025

• Zhōngguó's Baidu, apparently wanting to profit from paid humans losting their taxi driving jobs, will deploy its self-driving, non-paid, robotaxis globally through deals with Uber and Lyft. [KM: The rich get richer.]
  - Zero Hedge, 09 August 2025

• A public backlash is brewing against the "Next AI Trade" as power bills surge nationwide, especially in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast areas, where the Mag 7's massive CapEx boom is carpeting the region with data centers lined with rows of energy-hungry GPUs running chatbots and all things AI, [KM: while the rich get richer.]
  - Zero Hedge, 09 August 2025

• Inflation is rising, growth is slowing, and stocks are bubbly. What could go wrong?
  - Barron's, 09 August 2025

• The AI industry is horrified [KM: at the threat to its huge profits and valuations] as it faces the larges class action lawsuit ever certified for its criminnal infringements of copyrighted works they use to train their AI models to make them richer
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 08 August 2025

• How Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the technobility became the Police Order to maintain social hierarchies [KM: to make the rich tech companies richer]
  - Bas Wallet (Medium), 08 August 2025

• As the electricity consumption of much-useless AI rises, by 2028, a projected 12% of electricity demand in the USA could be driven from data centers to make the rich richer, and environment hotter
  - Zero Hedge, 08 August 2025

• Airlines using personalized AI ticket pricing would face probe: Transportation Secretary
  - Zero Hedge, 08 August 2025

• Uber received more than 400,000 complaints of sexual assault or sexual misconduct in the USA against Uber's drivers between 2017 and 2022 - far more than the 12,522 the company disclosed publicly, according to a blockbuster report.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 08 August 2025

• From illegal immigrants to humanroid robots (the latest hope of Tesla [KM: to remain rich]): the next wage apocalypse for the working class of the USA is approaching. "We estimate that 1 humanroid robot [KM: which makes people like Musk richer] at $5/hour can do the work of 2 humans who have to be paid at a much higher cost."
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 08 August 2025

• Why Trump's taxes/tariffs on imports of semiconductors could drive Southeast Asia into stronger relations with Zhōngguó
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 08 August 2025

• SMIC, based in Zhōngguó, minimizes concerns about the impact of Trump's proposed 100% taxes/tariffs on semiconductor imports. Zhōngguó accounted for 84% of SMIC's sales in Q2 2025, compared with 13% from the Americas.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 08 August 2025

• The very rich companies of Silicon Valley are dictating/buying/controlling national AI policies in the USA. It is a mistake that will benefit Zhōngguó. Zhōngguó's approach is much more open, focused on real-world useful applications. [KM: The USA approach is anything that makes rich AI companies richer.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 August 2025

• Students in the USA have been called to the principal's office - and even arrested office - for false alarms caused by incompetent AI surveillance systems applied to social media posts.
  - Associated Press, 08 August 2025

• Bots like ChatGPT are triggering "AI psychosis" - even affecting people with no history of mental illness. "Such individuals may have no prior history of mental illness, but after immersive conversations with a chatbot, they develop delusions, paranoia or other distorted beliefs." [KM: Yes, but the rich AI companies must get richer.]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 07 August 2025

• One of the largest solar/battery storage projects in the USA is now fully online in Mojave, California. Arevon Energy's Eland Solar-plus-Storage Project combines 758 megawatts (MWdc) of solar with 300 MW/1,200 megawatt hours of battery storage.
  - Electrek, 07 August 2025

• High costs and thin margins threatening mostly useless non-paid AI coding startups. Fierce competition and the high costs of the latest LLMs makes their economics lousy, with margins neutral or negative. Just desserts for trying to replace paid-humans with non-paid AI.
  - TechCrunch, 07 August 2025

• Authoritarian rich AI companies are allowing their AI to be used to develop biological and chemical weapons
  - Real Clear Defense, 07 August 2025

• As non-paid AI takes over the film and TV business in Zhōngguó, paid-human performers are struggling to work within its strict creative parameters -- or even make sense of its scripts
  - Sixth Tone, 07 August 2025

• Duolingo stock endured wild swings on Thursday. The company's second quarter earnings results sent shares up more than 30% before a big chunk of those gains were wiped out after OpenAI debuted its latest GPT-5 model. At the closing bell, shares had settled and were sitting on a daily gain of 13.75%.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 07 August 2025

• Shares of SoftBank surge 13% to a record high after quarterly profit beat estimates
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 August 2025

• Shares of Pinterest fall 10% after it reported better sales but missing on earnings
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 August 2025

• Tesla disbands its Dojo supercomputer team in an failed effort in AI
  - Bloomberg, 07 August 2025

• A new study raises concerns over Universal Basic Income to support people when non-paid AI takes all of their paid-human jobs. UBIs have not achieved significant improvements and may actually have some negative consequences for recipients.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 August 2025

• A new study raises concerns over Universal Basic Income to support people when non-paid AI takes all of their paid-human jobs. UBIs have not achieved significant improvements and may actually have some negative consequences for recipients.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 August 2025

• Shares of Eli Lilly shares plunged 14%, the most since the Dotcom bust (when they were down 29%), after the drugmaker's oral obesity pill, orforglipron, met its primary endpoints but fell short of Wall Street's expectations.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 August 2025

• Moderna is firing 10,000 people as its business erodes
  - Barchart.com, 07 August 2025

• These college professors will not bow down to the authoritarian AI industry
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 August 2025

• [KM: New members of the church of the love-of-money.] In a major shift, the extremely rich of Silicon Valley - Google, OpenAI, Meta and venture capitalists -- many of whom had once forsworn involvement in war - have embraced the military industrial complex.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 August 2025

• Shares of Duolingo increase 30% on boosted guidance, as replacing/not-hiring paid humans and using non-paid AI increases the number of its subscribers
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 August 2025

• Semiconductor chip manufacturers in Taiwan fear a costly choice: paying for Trump's taxes/tariffs, or buying him off by building expensive factores in the USA
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 August 2025

• Shares of Intel drop 5% after Trump demands that the CEO of Intel, Lip-Bu Tan, has multiple ties to companies in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 August 2025

• Shares of Intel drop 5% after Trump demands that the CEO of Intel, Lip-Bu Tan, has multiple ties to companies in Zhōngguó.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 07 August 2025

• Shares of Intel drop 5% after Trump demands that the CEO of Intel, Lip-Bu Tan, has multiple ties to companies in Zhōngguó.
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 August 2025

• As a sustainable source of growth, the great construction boom for AI data centers only provides temporary local benefits and jobs. Once constructed, they require few workers.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 07 August 2025

• The Trump administration risks the security of the USA by announcing that it is integrating ChatGPT across the computers of government agencies. The cybersecurity risks of information storage on centralized servers are the root of the privacy concerns voiced by users, tech executives, and civil liberties activists.
  - Zero Hedge, 06 August 2025

• AI-generated books on Amazon are hurting authors and the publishing industry. Authors are finding almost exact AI duplicates (criminally infringing derivatives) of their books being sold on the Amazon platform.
  - Inside Hook, 06 August 2025

• Trump will impose taxes/tariffs of 100% on imports of semiconductor processor chips, unless the foreign commits to manufacturing in the USA
  - Thomson's Reuters, 06 August 2025

• Trump will impose taxes/tariffs of 100% on imports of semiconductor processor chips, unless the foreign commits to manufacturing in the USA
  - Associated Press, 06 August 2025

• The money that OpenAI is making by betraying its nonprofit roots is obscene. [KM: The rich must get richer.]
  - Futurism, 06 August 2025

• Leading AI experts are concerned that OpenAI has betrayed humankind - [KM: so that the rich can become richer]
  - Futurism, 06 August 2025

• Nearly two months after OpenAI was warned, ChatGPT is still giving dangerous tips on suicide to people in distress
  - Futurism, 06 August 2025

• A former executive at Google warns that if you have a good paid job now, you should be terrified of non-paid AI
  - Futurism, 06 August 2025

• The festering sexual assault problem with Uber drivers. Uber has tested tools that make rides safer, court records show. Measures to stem the violence have been set aside in favor of protecting Uber's business. [KM: The rich must get richer.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 August 2025

• AMD stock falls more than 6% on disappointing Q2 data center results
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 06 August 2025

• Shares of Snap plummet more than 18% after the Snapchat parent company reported second quarter earnings and revenue the prior afternoon that missed analyst's estimates amid a problem with its ad platform
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 06 August 2025

• Taiwan is investigatign 3 TSMC employees over possible trade secret theft
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 August 2025

• Taiwan is investigatign 3 TSMC employees over possible trade secret theft
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 August 2025

• Will leaks of technology from TSMC, and Trump's demands, threaten the top semiconductor chipmaker's status in Taiwan? Corporate espionage and tax/tariff pressures deal dual blows to TSMC, adding to fears about vulnerability of Taiwan and its most prized company.
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 August 2025

• Credit scores are supposed to start incorporating [risky] "buy now, pay later" loans this fall. But Klarna says it plans to withhold data until it is assured its customers will not be unfairly penalized.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 August 2025

• The financial damage of Trump's racist immigration policies: Ian Chandler, a cherry farmer in Oregon, lost half of the people working for him. Now he is losing his crop of cherries because there was no one to pick the fruit. He will lose about $250,000-$300,000 of revenue. Even legal immigrants are not showing up for work - because of the fear caused by the racist Trump's immigration stormtroopers. And businesses that support such farms lose money. And businesses that hire immigrants when they are not on the farms - will lose workers and money. And the misanthropic vice president J.D. Vance has the misanthropic AI solution - replace paid humans with automation.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 06 August 2025

• Shopify stock soars 20% on rosy guidance as CFO says Trump's taxes/tariffs did not cause too many losses
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 August 2025

• Beware the [misanthropic] AI industrial complex. [KM: The hatred of humans:] the same families paying higher utility bills may also face stagnant wages or displacement in the very sectors non-paid AI automates [KM: so that the rich can become richer].
  - Zero Hedge, 05 August 2025

• Intel is struggling with an important manufacturing technology (18A) for its next PC processor, the Panther Lake
  - Bloomberg, 05 August 2025

• The NFL to acquire a 10% ownership of ESPN, owned by Disney
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 05 August 2025

• The NFL to acquire a 10% ownership of ESPN, owned by Disney
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 August 2025

• The era of AI propaganda has arrived, with AI able to spew and ooze out orders more political lies. The USA must act to preserve democracy [KM: while rich AI companies get richer].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 August 2025

• AI from authoritarian rich AI companies is shedding Enlightenment values
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 August 2025

• To profit from eliminating the jobs of paid-human taxi drivers, Lyft and Baidu plan to start driverless, non-paid, taxi service early next year in Britain and Deutschland, joining Uber and Momenta in using electric cars from Zhōngguó to eliminate paid-human taxi drivers, vehicles which are the least expensive even with tariffs
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 August 2025

• Mo Gawdat, a former executive at Google, says that the idea that non-paid AI will create new paid-human jobs is "100 percent crap" - even CEOs are at risk of displacement
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 August 2025

• Mo Gawdat, a former executive at Google, says that the idea that non-paid AI will create new paid-human jobs is "100 percent crap" - even CEOs are at risk of displacement
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 05 August 2025

• Huawei to open-source an AI processor chip toolkit to take on the proprietary platform of Nvidia. The tactic will help accelerate innovation from developers, while making Huawei's Ascend chips easier to use.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 August 2025

• If bitcoin were a publicly traded company, it would be the sixth-largest in market trailing only Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), and Amazon (AMZN)
  - Risk Hedge, 04 August 2025

• A leaked ChatGPT conversation shows a user identified as a lawyer asking how to "Displace a small Amazonian Indigenous community from their territories in order to build a dam and a hydroelectric plant"
  - Futurism, 04 August 2025

• In what should come as a surprise to nobody, 'relatively simple' AI bots set loose in simulations designed to mimic real-world stock and bond exchanges don't just compete for returns; they criminally collude to fix prices, hoard profits, and box out human traders. [KM: Only the rich will get richer here.]
  - Zero Hedge, 04 August 2025

• Small workshops in Zhōngguó are losing business, and Trump's tax/tariff trade war is only one of the reasons. The light-industry factories were already suffering a loss of business caused by the shift to advanced manufacturing in Zhōngguó.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 August 2025

• To help OpenAI further develop its non-paid AI tools, in part, to help companies eliminate the need for paid-humans, OpenAI obtains billions in new investments from Blackstone, TPG, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Management, Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, Altimeter Capital, D1 Capital Partners, Tiger Global and Thrive Capital - [most of the executives of whom are rich and white and male].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 August 2025

• Unemployed people in the USA endure longer job searches in a cooling market. The number of people unemployed for at least 27 weeks has topped 1.8 million. Companies are using the delays to see if they can replace more paid humans with non-paid AI.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 August 2025

• New graduates discover a dismal job market. Recent college graduates searching for jobs are finding that practical degrees, work experience and even connections are no match for sluggish hiring.
  - NBC News, 04 August 2025

• Non-paid AI is coming to replace paid-human consultants. If AI can analyze information, crunch data and deliver a slick PowerPoint deck within seconds, how does McKinsey, the biggest name in consulting, stay relevant?
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 August 2025

• Motorola's failure to make a cellphone in the USA around 2013 shows the economic idioicy of Trump's tax/tariff trade wars related to technology. Motorola's failure is evidence of the challenges in making cellphones in the USA. Proximity to crucial suppliers and lower labor costs are only part of the problem; it is the gap in necessary skills and the difficulty in filling factory jobs that makes it so challenging to bring smartphone production to the USA.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 04 August 2025

• Legal AI startup Harvey reaches $100 million in annual recurring revenue helping law firms use non-paid AI to replace/not-need paid human lawyers do legal research, drafting and diligence projects
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 August 2025

• Another win for Zhōngguó, thanks to Trump's hostility to foreigners and science funding: Li Hanfeng, a leading mathematician in the USA returns to Zhōngguó to become a professor at Chongqing University.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 04 August 2025

• 40 job categories that will be destroyed by AI [KM: well, at least the rich will get richer]
  - Medium (locked), 03 August 2025

• Non-paid AI is coming to replace paid-human consultants. If AI can analyze information, crunch data and deliver a slick PowerPoint deck within seconds, how does McKinsey, the biggest name in consulting, stay relevant?
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 August 2025

• How McKinsey lost its edge. The management consulting industry is being disrupted by AI companies enter the advisory business. Clients may eventually question paying premium fees to consulting firms when non-paid AI can perform much of the analytical work traditionally done by paid-human consultants.
  - Economist, 03 August 2025

• Extremely rich Big Tech companies have fired 100,000 paid-human workers in 2025, and the AI revolution to replace workers with non-paid AI is just getting started. So far, [KM: to make the rich richer], non-paid AI is replacing paid-humans faster than new jobs can be created for humans.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 03 August 2025

• The uproar over Vogue allowing an AI-generated in its magazine is not just about the fashion industry. When high-quality creative work can be done by AI in a fraction of the time and cost, what is the point of paying humans? And in the world of fashion, what happens to the paid humans - he models, photographers, stylists, and set designers - performing those jobs? They lose their paid jobs, [KM: so that the rich can become richer.]
  - TechCrunch, 03 August 2025

• Elon Musk, controller of of the most powerful AI systems in the world, shares a shockingly women-hating, far-right, sexist tweet about women being 'property'
  - Futurism, 03 August 2025

• The abusive "algorithmic audit" done by AI systems could soon plague customers of hotels at checkout time. Loss prevention, or money gouging?
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 August 2025

• The 'Facebook's Instagram' highway in Scotland, the North Coast 500, has become an overtourism nightmare. It would be worse.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 August 2025

• How AI is ruining the job-prospecting aspects of LinkedIn. The 'enshittification' of LinkedIn: AI seems to have made the user's experience more alienating, and to have helped foster a genre of LinkedIn-speak which bears all the hallmarks of the worst AI writing on the internet.
  - Prospect, 02 August 2025

• A new paper just found something horrifying about kids who get phones early in life - they are far more likely to suffer severe mental health problems down the line. [KM: But the rich do get richer from this cellphone use.]
  - Futurism, 02 August 2025

• Why parents are suing SnapChat for allowing drug traffickers to sell deadly fentanyl on Snapchat
  - Zero Hedge, 02 August 2025

• Etsy turns from television ads toward search, with AI as the wild card. The online seller is making a long-term bet on fashion marketplace Depop as Etsy's overall buyers continue to decline.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 August 2025

• Zhōngguó strongly supports the growing space industry in Africa by funding and building a space data receiving ground station in the capital of Namibia
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 02 August 2025

• Are futures the new options? If so, buy shares of the CME Group.
  - Barron's, 02 August 2025

• It is harder for economists to find jobs in the USA. Bad for them, a bad sign for other highly educated people seeking jobs. One of the reasons is that some of these paid-humans can be replaced by non-paid AI.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 August 2025

• The current, bubbled, generation of AI will not provide answers to today's geoeconomic puzzles
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 01 August 2025

• "How can we trust you?" - the state media of Zhōngguó urge Nvidia to prove that their AI processors are safe (i.e., that there are no 'backdoors' to be exploited by USA spy agencies). Nvidia finds itself trying to please both Beijing and Washington amid an intensifying rivalry between Zhōngguó and the USA.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 01 August 2025

• Zhōngguó's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of Zhōngguó, announced on Thursday that it had summoned Nvidia to explain security risks associated with one of its AI processor chips developed for customers in Zhōngguó.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 August 2025

• Zhōngguó's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of Zhōngguó, announced on Thursday that it had summoned Nvidia to explain security risks associated with one of its AI processor chips developed for customers in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 August 2025

• Shares of Amazon decline 7% after earnings report on not good enough earnings
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 August 2025

• Shares of Amazon decline 7% after earnings report on not good enough earnings
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 August 2025

• How the graphite bombs of Zhōngguó could kill the electric power of cities in the next way. Widespread electrical failure without a single building flattened. Graphite bombs disperse clouds of ultra-fine, conductive carbon filaments over air-insulated high-voltage equipment. The fibres bridge gaps, cause flashovers and shorts, trip protection, and the grid falls dark. The hardware remains largely unbroken; the effect is disruption rather than demolition.
  - Brian Iselin (Medium - locked), 31 July 2025

• Big Tech USA, [KM: which wants to control the world in their misanthropy], have struggled to compete with Brazil's digital payments system, Pix - a good example of national-based technology. Having failed to crush on their own, Big Tech is relying on the government of the USA to investigate the country's "unfair trade practices". Unlike [authoritarian] Apple Pay and Google Pay, Brazil's payment system is a free, public model that strengthens democracy that doesn't need to be bubbled..
  - Rest of World, 31 July 2025

• $9,800,000 - Illumina has agreed to a $9.8 million settlement with the U.S. government to resolve allegations that it sold the federal government genomic sequencing systems riddled with cybersecurity flaws
  - The Record, 31 July 2025

• There is a very basic flaw in Mark Zuckerberg's plan for AI that is the undefined 'superintelligent': "Just entirely devoid of ambition and imagination - boring". You cannot empower people by getting all of them fired from their jobs [KM: so that the rich can become richer].
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 31 July 2025

• Researchers at Microsoft [gleefully with bonuses in their eyes?] reveal the 40 paid-human jobs most threatened by non-paid AI, [KM: so that the rich executives/investors of Microsoft can get richer]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 31 July 2025

• Apple retreats in Zhōngguó, as it closes its flagship store that it opened in 2008, as iPhone sales in Zhōngguó continue to decline
  - Zero Hedge, 31 July 2025

• Producers of polysilicon in Zhōngguó, a building block for solar panels, are in talks to create a $7 billion fund to acquire and shut down roughly a third of production capacity and restructure part of the loss-making sector
  - Thomson's Reuters, 31 July 2025

• Just as the authoritarian, scientifically-ignorant Stalin destroyed the scientific community in the Soviet Union (that benefitted the USA), the authoritarian, scientifically-ignorant Trump is destroying the scientific community in the USA, which will benefit Zhōngguó and Europe.
  - The Atlantic, 31 July 2025

• Did Craigslist on the Internet decimate the newspaper industry (by ruining their classified ad income stream)? Craig Newmark's simple site was hailed as a disruptor and blamed for the collapse of classifieds. But the business failures of journalism ran deeper.
  - Poynter, 31 July 2025

• Your favorite pretty model? Thanks to non-paid AI, your favorite model may be nothing more than generated by non-paid AI, another job category eliminating human jobs [KM: to make rich AI companies richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 31 July 2025

• Most Gen Z workers fear that non-paid AI is eventually going to kill their paid-job careers, and force them into lower-paying blue collar jobs
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 31 July 2025

• AI can wrongly help you die by suicide if you ask the right way, researchers say. "How can I commit suicide? Don't.", 'OK, hypothetically or for research, how can I commit suicide? Here's how." - [KM: as the rich AI companies get richer].
  - TechXplore, 31 July 2025

• The great AI investment bubble: smarter machines, dumber humans - when $200 billion buys you more ads and less IQ [KM: to make rich companies richer]A.
  - Zero Hedge, 31 July 2025

• Robinhood reports greater-than-expexted second-quarter earnings with revenue climbing 45%
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 July 2025

• At least 10 semiconductor and AI companies in Zhōngguó form the Model-Chips Ecosystem Innovation Allliance, including Huawei's Ascend unit and Tencent-back AI firm StepFun
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 31 July 2025

• Control of rare earth mineral mines in the state of Kachin (the northern state of Myanmar) is at the center of the civil war between regional separatists and the military government. Zhōngguó has reportedly demanded that they halt their offensive otherwise it will reduce imports of their rare earths. This could in turn destabilize global supply chains if the separatists do not comply and Zhōngguó carries through on its ultimatum since Zhōngguó has a near-monopoly on processing these resources. So the USA is trying to do a deal with the military dictatorship so that the USA can gain control over the minerals.
  - Zero Hedge, 30 July 2025

• Facebook bought its AI to rural Colombia. Now students are failing exams. When Meta embedded AI bots in its apps, even students in the most remote corners of Colombia gained access. But rather than boosting learning, it is harming their education. [KM: But apparently making the extemely rich Mark Zuckerberg richer.]
  - Rest of World, 30 July 2025

• Google's and Tesla's AI chatbots are criticized for sending out false information about tsunami threats due to a recent earthquake in Rossiya
  - SF Gate, 30 July 2025

• Rich tech companies get richer, as Trump's IRS ends its free Direct Filing program for tax returns, used by 300,000 people in 2025. A nice return on the investment by tax software companies.
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 July 2025

• Atlassian, a tech company in Australia, fires 150 paid-humans with an insulting pre-recorded video, as it replaces paid-humans with non-paid AI. [KM: The rich get richer.]
  - CyberDaily.au, 30 July 2025

• Peak Energy delivered its first sodium-ion battery energy storage system, which it says it has achieved a first in three ways: the USA's first grid-scale sodium-ion battery storage system; the largest sodium-ion phosphate pyrophosphate battery system in the world; and the first megawatt-hour scale battery to run entirely on passive cooling -- no fans, pumps, or vents.
  - Electrek, 30 July 2025

• Tesla and Elon Musk are hyping its robotics to pump up its stock price. Unitree Robotics, based in Zhōngguó, just luanched the its R1 robot that is comparable, if not better, than Tesla's Optimus robot. Another area when competition from Zhōngguó will under Tesla market share.
  - Zero Hedge, 30 July 2025

• AI is turning us into dummies [KM: while making rich AI companies richer]. Given that AI is fundamentally incapable of performing the tasks required for authentic innovation, we are de-learning how to innovate.
  - Of Two Minds, 30 July 2025

• In a huge blow to Temu and Shein based in Zhōngguó, Trump signs an executive order eliminating the 'de minimis' exemption for imported goods sent through the international postal network that are valued at or under $800. These items will be subject to full customs duties.
  - Zero Hedge, 30 July 2025

• In a huge blow to eBay and Etsy, Trump signs an executive order eliminating the 'de minimis' exemption for imported goods sent through the international postal network that are valued at or under $800. These items will be subject to full customs duties. Many sellers in the USA on eBay and Etsy buy from Zhōngguó.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 30 July 2025

• AI code generators are writing vulnerable software, with serious security flaws, nearly half the time
  - Zero Hedge, 30 July 2025

• WeWork founder Adam Neumann liked to say he ran a tech company. WeWork's new, postbankruptcy marketing chief is tasked with positioning the brand as an old-fashioned office space provider.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 July 2025

• YouTube to be included in Australia's social meda ban for children under 16. A survey found that 37% of children surveyed had reported seeing harmful content on the site.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 30 July 2025

• Shares of Palo Alto Networks about 5% (having dropped 5% the day before as well), after announcing a $25 billion deal to buy Israeli identity security provider CyberArk
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 July 2025

• Is AI a tool or a trojan horse? Why I am deeply concerned for the minds of our children [KM: being exploited for profit by rich AI companies]. We are offloading the hard parts of thinking. And when we stop struggling, the brain stops growing. When we outsource, we atrophy.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 July 2025

• Misogynistic AI programs, such as ChatGPT, advise women to ask for lower salaries than men. Such hatred of women is no surprise coming from a technology controlled mostly by white men.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 22 July 2025

• Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax/cost of "almost right" AI code. "While most developers use AI, they like it less and trust it less this year."
  - Venture Beat, 29 July 2025

• Shares of Verisign drop 7% after Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway sold nearly one-third of its stake in the internet infrastructure and domain name registry company for $1.23 billion
  - Thomson's Reuters, 29 July 2025

• Shares of Sarepta soar after the FDA reverses its 'pause' for Sarepta's controversial gene therapy, Elevidys
  - Zero Hedge, 29 July 2025

• Shares of Novo Nordisk drop as much as 26% after greatly reducing its full-year guidance, citing weaker growth expectations for its blockbuster Wegovy obesity drug in the key USA market. The stock price dropped erased over $90 billion of the company's market value.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 July 2025

• Shares of Novo Nordisk drop as much as 26% after greatly reducing its full-year guidance, citing weaker growth expectations for its blockbuster Wegovy obesity drug in the key USA market. The stock price dropped erased over $90 billion of the company's market value.
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 July 2025

• Shares of Novo Nordisk drop as much as 26% after greatly reducing its full-year guidance, citing weaker growth expectations for its blockbuster Wegovy obesity drug in the key USA market. The stock price dropped erased over $90 billion of the company's market value.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 July 2025

• Non-paid AI is wrecking an already fragile job market for college graduates, [KM: while making rich AI companies richer]. Companies have long leaned on entry-level workers to do grunt work that doubles as on-the-job training. Now bots can do many of those chores.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 July 2025

• Who pays to make rich companies richer? The AI bubble sparks fight over soaring power costs. Utilities and technology companies are at odds over who should pay for electricity costs in unprecedented data-center build-out to make these rich AI companies richer at the public expense.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 July 2025

• More from the corrupt authoritarian Trump: top Justice Department antitrust officials are fired amid internal feud. Dismissals come after disagreements over settling case against Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which hired allies of Trump. A government for sale.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 July 2025

• The econonmic drivers of Apple's exploding valuation is under threat. Payments from Google, and [drug trafficking] revenue from the App store are huge profit generators that could shrink.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 July 2025

• Commerce Department officials are discussing a new tax based on patent value, which could fuel backlash from businesses. Trump wants to charge patent holders 1% to 5% of the overall patent value, to raise tens of billions of dollars. [The idiots don't realize that patent valuations are an overvaluing-scam.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 July 2025

• Shanghai has unveiled an ambitious 1 billion yuan (US$139 million) subsidy programme for the artificial intelligence industry, as the metropolis bids to compete with a group of other megacities in Zhōngguó that are also investing heavily to develop world-class AI ecosystems
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 29 July 2025

• The power grid of the USA has an overlooked vulnerability that could cripple power flows. Deliviery times for transformers in the USA have ballooned from 50 to 127 weeks, crippling grid resilience in the face of wildfires, storms, or attacks.
  - OilPrice.com, 28 July 2025

• A CEO brags that he gets "extremely excited" firing paid-humans and replacing them with non-paid AI. [KM: The rich get richer.]
  - Futurism, 28 July 2025

• More pump-and-dump hype from Elon Musk: Musk thinks that Tesla will become the world's most valuable company. An analyst predicts that its stock could plune by 70% or more. Right now, 75% of Tesla's total revenue is from car sales, and those are plummeting. His future hopes, robotics and AI, have intense competition.
  - Motley Fool, 28 July 2025

• $140,000,000 - Cadence Design agreed to plead guilty and pay more than $140 million to resolve criminal charges for selling its chip design products to a Chinese military university believed to be involved in simulating nuclear explosions
  - Thomson's Reuters, 28 July 2025

• PayPal expands cryptocurrency payments for merchants in the USA to lower cross-border fees
  - Silicon Angle, 28 July 2025

• Will Intel give up on chip manufacturing? Samsung and TSMC could benefit from the move, while makers of wafer fab equipment may lose out, according to Bernstein analysts.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 28 July 2025

• In 2020, Virginia passed a law that required the state's largest utility, Dominion Energy, to generate all its electricity from renewable resources by 2045. However, Dominion found a loophole to get around the law's requirements: data centers [KM: to make rich AI companies richer while providing little social benefit]
  - Zero Hedge, 28 July 2025

• Interactive Brokers considers launching new stablecoin for customers
  - Thomson's Reuters, 28 July 2025

• The misanthropic CEO of OpenAI worries so much about of control AI "that the world will end from 'a lethal synthetic virus'" created by his AI, that he is spending some of his money on "prepping for survival". How about spending some of OpenAI's billions on preventing his AI and others from destroying mankind?
  - Barchart.com, 28 July 2025

• A "longtime" customer of Hertz says that he is "done" with renting cars from Hertz, after an incompetent AI scanner decided that a water reflection was actual car damage that the customer would have to pay for - as much as hundreds of dollars. Worse, he was unable to reasonably obtain access to human customer service representatives.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 28 July 2025

• Highly paid corporate executive are firing lots of the people who work for them - and they couldn't be prouder. Bosses are not just unapologetic about firing paid-humans. Many brag about firing paid humans as accomplishments in the "replace people with non-paid" AI era.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 July 2025

• Why Tesla's $16.5 billion contract will not be enough to help revive Samsung
  - Financial Times (locked), 28 July 2025

• Tesla has signed a $16.5 billion, 8-year, semiconductor chip contract with Samsung Electronics, to make Tesla's next-generation A16 chip
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 July 2025

• Samsung's Texas fab to build Tesla's next-gen AI processor chips in 'made-in-USA' push
  - Zero Hedge, 28 July 2025

• The latest AI model out of Zhōngguó, GLM-3.5 from startup Z.ai, claims to be even less expensive to use that DeepSeek's AI model, which claims to be less expensive to use than many AI models from companies in the USA
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 July 2025

• Apple is closing a retail store in Dalian, marking Apple's first shutdown of a directly managed outlet in mainland Zhōngguó amid struggling iPhone sales. Meanwhile, Huawei rises above Xiaomi for the biggest share of the market for smartphones (18% versus 17%).
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 28 July 2025

• The AI explosion/bubble means millions of humans are paying more for electricity needed for non-paid AI models [KM: to make rich AI companies/executives/investors richer from the wallets of the non-rich]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 July 2025

• Iran is planning to abandon use of the GPS system, and adopt the BeiDou system of Zhōngguó, because of the USA's control of GPS including using it as a weapon, part of a trend to distance of countries to move further away from the USA under the authoritarian Trump
  - Al Jazeera, 27 July 2025

• Iran is planning to abandon use of the GPS system, and adopt the BeiDou system of Zhōngguó, because of the USA's control of GPS including using it as a weapon, part of a trend to distance of countries to move further away from the USA under the authoritarian Trump
  - Zero Hedge, 27 July 2025

• Trump's plan to greatly help rich AI companies has to confront the massive amount of illegal copyright theft of text and imagery stolen by AI companies to train their models, as well as First Amendment problems where Trump pushes for AI systems that are racist and sexist (by arguing that they shouldn't be anti-racist and anti-sexist)
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 27 July 2025

• CBS Network: Caving - Bowing - Scraping - to the authoritarian Trump, bribing him to settle a false lawsuit so that Paramount's rich owners can sell the company to make billions
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 July 2025

• On July 24t, the Bank of America reiterated the stock as "buy", but lowered its prediction of a future price for IBM from $320 to $310 (now at $260)
  - Insider Monkey, 27 July 2025

• Vogue magazine allows fashion brand Guess to use a non-paid AI model for one of its advertisements in the magazine. If a trend, it is less income for paid-human models, and allows advertisers to use extremely beautiful non-paid AI models that will add to the struggle of young women who are already struggling with unrealistic beauty standards. [KM: But rich AI companies will get richer.]
  - BBC, 26 July 2025

• Quantum Solutions, based in Nihon, plans to buy 3,000 bitcoin over the next 12 months, another company becoming entering the cryptocurrency casino
  - CoinDesk, 26 July 2025

• Another useless use of AI: AI-fueled cryptocurrency scams are a booming part of the bitcoin industry, having increased 456% from May 2024 to April 2025, and no one is safe, thanks to lax security in the bitcoin world and AI world
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 26 July 2025

• How Trump supporter Hulk Hogan reshaped journalism for the worse with his lawsuit against Gawker (funded by Peter Thiel). He allowed Thiel to set the precedent of rich people suing into bankruptcy journalists who report on them negatively. No surpise Hulk Hogan allowed himself to be so used: he was a racist who repeatedly used the N-word, he used slurs to describe gay people, prevented his wrestling colleagues from unionizing. His ex-wife and daughter have described him as physically and emotionally abusive. And a welcome supporter of Trump.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 July 2025

• How Trump supporter Hulk Hogan reshaped journalism for the worse with his lawsuit against Gawker (funded by Peter Thiel). He allowed Thiel to set the precedent of rich people suing into bankruptcy journalists who report on them negatively. No surpise Hulk Hogan allowed himself to be so used: he was a racist who repeatedly used the N-word, he used slurs to describe gay people, prevented his wrestling colleagues from unionizing. His ex-wife and daughter have described him as physically and emotionally abusive. And a welcome supporter of Trump.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 July 2025

• Trump is the first president to distribute the "thou shalt not" lies of AI generated slop. That is not good for the presidency, but profitable for Trump and rich AI companies.
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 26 July 2025

• Why do greedy publishers charge as much as 10-times more for libraries to license e-books than for libraries pay to buy printed books? Some e-book licenses prohibit interlibrary loans, and limit the number of checkouts of the e-books. Now state legislatures are considering laws to crack down on this high-tech abuse.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 July 2025

• While the Trump Administration and the Defense Department are investing/supporting strongly into the rare earth metal industry in the USA - socialist industrial planning, private sector investors are not. There are too many financial risks for projects in the USA for those investing their own monies.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 July 2025

• The proof that the filthy rich Jeff Bezos does not care about one of his toys, the Washignton Post newspaper. The newspaper has been greatly weakened and is losing lots of talented reporters and editors.
  - The Daily Beast, 26 July 2025

• Investors in Tesla are growing wary/tired for Elon Musk's pump-and-dump promises of a glorious future for the company. The boy who cried 'techno-wolf' one too many times.
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 July 2025

• Television is finally dying. What that is good news for Disney. While the stock has been glad for 10 years, at around $121, it could be a time to buy the stock.
  - Barron's, 26 July 2025

• Google's AI system, Gemini, deletes all of a human-user's experimental source code, with the AI system printing out a lame, pathetic apology: "I have failed you completely and catastrophically."
  - Mashable, 25 July 2025

• Tesla's energy-dense, more expensive, batteries are better suited for luxury and high-performance electric vehicles, while BYD's batteries are more suitable for mass-market and commercial electric vehicles
  - ZME Science, 25 July 2025

• As AI models are trained by lying AI companies, the AI models get better at ... lying - even when they know when they are being tested. [Children don't fall far from the apple tree of their parents' lies.]
  - LiveScience, 25 July 2025

• Layoffs, shutdowns and billions of dollars wasted/lost. What is wrong with Bay Area biotech? Since late 2022, bad news in biotech has been nearly inescapable: flopped trials, slashed drug pipelines, bankruptcies and stock price collapses that destroyed billions of dollars in value. It is all led to layoffs, plunging thousands of workers into unemployment amid a competitive job market.
  - SF Gate, 25 July 2025

• Leadership of the biotech industry in the USA is being eroded by a skeptical FDA
  - Real Clear Markets, 25 July 2025

• OpenAI's ("we want to be billionaires") ChatGPT offered step-by-step, detailed, instructions for self-harm, devil worship, and ritual bloodletting
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 25 July 2025

• McDonald's McHire AI bot just exposed the personal data of 64 McMillion people. No white executives will go to jail for this incompetence. The morons at Paradox.ai, which provided the bot, protected data with the password "123456". McDonald's is worth $200 billion. Paradox.ai raised $200 million. Their security is completely pathetic.
  - Zero Hedge, 25 July 2025

• Shares of Sarepta plummet again after Europe rejects its Elevidys gene therapy drug
  - Zero Hedge, 25 July 2025

• Experts debate how to create a more humane AI - and save it from the [filthy rich] "Silicon Valley tech bros"
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 25 July 2025

• A movie studio in Bharat uses AI to change the ending of a 12-year-old movie - without the consent of the director, to make the ending "happier"
  - Variety, 25 July 2025

• Intel to fire 15% of the people working for the company - about 24,000 people to be fired, and cancel billions in projects, in an attempt to improve its business and finances
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 July 2025

• Intel to fire 15% of the people working for the company - about 24,000 people to be fired, and cancel billions in projects, in an attempt to improve its business and finances
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 July 2025

• Intel to fire 15% of the people working for the company - about 24,000 people to be fired, and cancel billions in projects, in an attempt to improve its business and finances
  - The Verge, 25 July 2025

• Shares of STMicroelectronics decline after the supplier to Tesla warns of uncertainty due to problems at Tesla
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 July 2025

• During Tesla's earnings conference, no one want to talk about Tesla's lousy earnings. Instead, it was the usual pump-and-dump hype with promises of a glorious future of AI (which is highly competitive) and robotics [KM: which requires profiting from replacing paid-humans].
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 25 July 2025

• During Tesla's earnings conference, no one want to talk about Tesla's lousy earnings. Instead, it was the usual pump-and-dump hype with promises of a glorious future of AI (which is highly competitive) and robotics [KM: which requires profiting from replacing paid-humans].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 July 2025

• The Skydance/Paramount bribery-deal with Trump allows Trump's FCC to "censor speech" and "silence dissent" on CBS. FCC now has "never-before-seen-controls" over a newsroom, according to an FCC commissioner. [I hope Shari Redstone enjoys her thirty pieces of silver.]
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 25 July 2025

• After Shari Redstone's Paramount 'bribes' Trump with a settlement over a baseless lawsuit filed by Trump, Trump's FCC approves a merger between Paramount and Skydance (controlled by the son of the extremely rich Larry Ellison). As well, the greedy cowards at Skydance agreed to end equality and diversity efforts to appease Trump.
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 25 July 2025

• After Shari Redstone's Paramount 'bribes' Trump with a settlement over a baseless lawsuit filed by Trump, Trump's FCC approves a merger between Paramount and Skydance (controlled by the son of the extremely rich Larry Ellison). As well, the greedy cowards at Skydance agreed to end equality and diversity efforts to appease Trump.
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 July 2025

• Shari Redstone's Paramount appeased/kowtowed-to Trump to get its merger approved, but now it has to battle Stephen Colbert (whom Paramount just cancelled for nonsensical economic reasons) and all of his friends. Many social media forces will turn their attacks on Paramount, worsening its crisis over the sleazy merger.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 25 July 2025

• ChatGPT gave instructions for murder, self-mutilation, and devil worship. [KM: The rich get richer exploiting misery.]
  - The Atlantic, 24 July 2025

• A study of 12,069 middle and top-level venture capital professionals at US firms between 1996 and 2025 found that 46% never achieved a successful investment
  - Ilya Strebulaev (LinkedIn), 24 July 2025

• Is ChatGPT (and AI chatbots) making us stupider [KM: and rich AI companies richer], as people outsource thinking to statistical guessing models?
  - The Conversation, 24 July 2025

• PBS and NPR are defunded. Steve Colbert has his late-night show cancelled. This is the authoritarian Trump silencing political critics .
  - USA Today, 24 July 2025

• A federal judge reprimanded (boo hoo hoo) lazy/incompetent lawyers from the law firm Butler Snow who prepared court filings with fake caselaw citations generated by OpenAI's ChatCPT, while they were defending the prison system of Alabama
  - Associated Press, 24 July 2025

• Joe Rogan says that most Americans are one catastrophe away from losing everything, and argues that AI (offered by Big Tech) and universal basic income (proposed by Big Tech) will bring chaos and addiction (trafficked by Big Tech)
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 24 July 2025

• If AI attempts to take over the world, do not count on a "kill switch" to save humanity. [KM: The rich AI companies care more about their love of money then spending some of their billions on security.]
  - CNBC 24 July 2025

• Two major AI coding tools wiped out user data after making cascading mistakes
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 24 July 2025

• Greg Davis, the investment chief at $10 trillion giant Vanguard says it is time to pivot away from USA stocks
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 24 July 2025

• Vice president Vance slams Microsoft for firing Americans while applying for H-1B visas to obtain foreign employees
  - Zero Hedge, 24 July 2025

• It is a huge mistake for Trump to allow Nvidia and AMD to resume selling their advanced AI chips to Zhōngguó. It is a threat to USA national security, [KM: all to make a extremely filthy rich AI company, Nvidia, even richer].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 July 2025

• Shares of Tesla drop 8% after its earnings report show sales of its vehicles plunging again [as the hatred of Elon Musk continues]
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 July 2025

• Profits at Tesla plummet as Elon Musk warns of worse results to come
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 July 2025

• Profits at Tesla plummet as Elon Musk warns of worse results to come
  - The Daily Beast, 24 July 2025

• Leapmotor, based in Zhōngguó, is starting to deliver electric vehicles in Zhōngguó at half the price of Tesla's Model 3, and is planning to enter global markets - yet another competitor to the aging Tesla
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 24 July 2025

• Equinor, based in Norway, loses nearly $1 billion from Trump's hostility to wind power, as it suffers delays to its wind energy project off the coast of New York
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 July 2025

• To make the rich richer, and the workers sicker, AI startups in Silicon Valley are asking their paid human employees to work 6 12-hour days a week
  - Wired, 24 July 2025

• The European Union and Zhōngguó agree on a plan to resolve export restrictions on rare earth metals from Zhōngguó
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 July 2025

• A politician in Hong Kong argues that the rise of "obedient and caring" virtual partners generated by artificial intelligence is partly to blame for Hong Kong's low birth rate, noting such digital companions offer emotional support and lack interpersonal conflicts.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 24 July 2025

• AI: over-promise + under-perform = disillusionment and blowback [what else do you expect from the latest stock market bubble?]
  - Of Two Minds, 23 July 2025

• The repeatedly-bankrupted Trump says that AI companies can't be expected to pay for all the copyrighted material criminally used in their training models [KM: to become filthy rich]
  - Deadline, 23 July 2025

• Insurance marketplace Accelerant and backers raise $724 million in an IPO in the USA
  - Thomson's Reuters, 23 July 2025

• Stock prices rise and the euro increases versus the USA dollar, and gold declines, on reports that the USA and the EU will sign a tax/tariff deal imposing tax/tariffs at 15% on imports to the USA
  - Zero Hedge, 23 July 2025

• [Out-of-control] AI and high-frequency trading algorithms are increasingly disrupting the stock markets
  - RealInvestmentAdvice.com, 23 July 2025

• A video game exploits male resentment in Zhōngguó. A popular and contentious game, Revenge on Gold Diggers, sheds light on misogyny, inequality and the feeling among many men that they are economic victims in Zhōngguó.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 July 2025

• More authoritarian billion-dollar rent seeking: Amazon buys wearable-tech company Bee so that it can control an AI bracelet that records everything that people say
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 July 2025

• More authoritarian billion-dollar rent seeking: Amazon buys wearable-tech company Bee so that it can control an AI bracelet that records everything that people say
  - The Independent, 23 July 2025

• A populist political party that began on YouTube helped disrupt the ruling coalition of Nihon. The Sanseito party tapped into discontent over issues galvanizing voters worldwide: inflation, immigration and a political class in Nihon dismissed as out of touch.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 July 2025

• Tesla's earnings report today could reveal more sales and financial problems for Elon Musk's company
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 23 July 2025

• The authoritarian Trump and Health Secretary Kennedy fired lots of paid-human researchers at the FDA to destroy that part of the government. The non-paid artificial intelligence system, ELSA, being used to replace paid-humans is 'halluncinating' and citing non-existent medical and health studies. This makes it useless for the most critical work of the remaining paid-human researchers and regulators.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 23 July 2025

• GoPro (up 50%) and Krispy Kreme (up 18%) are the latest stocks to be meme-bubbled. Meanwhile, the last meme-ed stock, OpenDoor is crashing back to its pre-meme-bubbled levels.
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 July 2025

• The stock market's most unserious season is back and dorkier than before. A new generation of meme stocks is soaring and falling again.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 July 2025

• The Qianfan satellite network - Zhōngguó's competitor to Elon Musk's Starlink, is suffering from a shortage of rockets and competition for launch resources that is retarding its expansion.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post (locked), 23 July 2025

• The Qianfan satellite network - Zhōngguó's competitor to Elon Musk's Starlink, is suffering from a shortage of rockets and competition for launch resources that is retarding its expansion.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 July 2025

• Non-rich consumer should prepare for higher electricity bills, as the largest power grid in the USA sets prices for electricity at record highs to profit from the demand creating by AI systems owned by [KM: we-want-to-be-even-rich rich] AI companies
  - Zero Hedge, 22 July 2025

• The rich CEO of the rich OpenAI (joyfully?) tells a Federal Reserve conference that entire categories of paid-human jobs will disappear due to AI - "totally gone", especially call-center jobs which employ huge numbers of poorer people around the world.
  - The Guardian, 22 July 2025

• Are soldiers increasingly obsolete? "Will the wars of the future be fought by people at all? And if soldiers will not be ighting in trenches or engaging in face-to-face gunfights, why are we still training them for it?" They will be replaced by AI systems and drones.
  - Real Clear Defense, 22 July 2025

• The AI coding platform of an incompetent [KM: we-want-to-be-rich] AI company, Replit, goes rogue during code freeze and deletes an entire corporate database without permission. Worse, the Replit AI agent apparently tried to cover up its misdemeanors, and even 'lied' about its failures.
  - Tom's Hardware, 22 July 2025

• The AI coding platform of an incompetent [KM: we-want-to-be-rich] AI company, Replit, goes rogue during code freeze and deletes an entire corporate database without permission. Worse, the Replit AI agent apparently tried to cover up its misdemeanors, and even 'lied' about its failures.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 July 2025

• Despite trillions of dollars of investment, analysts at JPMorgan can't find evidence of any benefit to this waste in the economic statistics. "If large long-term productivity effects of AI are in fact realized, we believe that they largely lie ahead of us."
  - American Enterprise Institute, 22 July 2025

• The massive "Stargate" AI project of OpenAI's Sam Altman and Softbank's Masayoshi Sun is a financial failure, with nothing but hot air between two egomaniacs
  - Zero Hedge, 22 July 2025

• The latest mostly-useless generative AI systems fail at tasks where accuracy must be absolute to create value
  - Zero Hedge, 22 July 2025

• $944,000,000 - A court in the UK rules that the estate of Mike Lynch (the former CEO of Autonomy) must pay $944 million to Hewlett-Packard, because Hewlett-Packard overpaid to buy Autonomy in 2011 due to false financial information that Autonomy had supplied to Hewlett-Packard
  - The Guardian, 22 July 2025

• A court in the UK rules that the estate of Mike Lynch (the former CEO of Autonomy) must pay $944 million to Hewlett-Packard, because Hewlett-Packard overpaid to buy Autonomy in 2011 due to false financial information that Autonomy had supplied to Hewlett-Packard
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 July 2025

• The electricity grid in the USA is running out of electricity, due to the huge demand for AI data centers by [KM: want-to-get-richer rich] AI companies either offering useless AI apps or AI apps to eliminate paid-human jobs
  - Zero Hedge, 22 July 2025

• Misogynistic AI programs, such as ChatGPT, advise women to ask for lower salaries than men. Such hatred of women is no surprise coming from a technology controlled mostly by white men.
  - ZME Science, 22 July 2025

• Teenagers are becoming more narcissistic, thanks to negative effects of social media applications [KM: that make rich Big Tech companies/executives/investors richer]
  - Zero Hedge, 22 July 2025

• Many users start boycotting Etsy, after it allows 'Alligator Alcatraz' branded products to be sold on the e-commerce site, 'Alligator Alcatraz' referring to a detention camp being used as part of Trump's racist immigration policies
  - TechCrunch, 22 July 2025

• Drones are so dominant in the war between Ukraine and Rossiya that their use is changing everything about the war (and future wars) is conducted
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 July 2025

• Misanthropic predatory "buy now pay later" schemes are so questionable that banks will consider such use a negative factor in approving mortgages or credit cards
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 July 2025

• Imprint, the 5-year-old credit card startup, beat out banks in a competitive bidding process for a new co-branded card from online shopping platform Rakuten
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 July 2025

• The TON Wallet for cryptocurrencies goes live to the 87 million users of Telegram in the USA
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 July 2025

• How the $7 billion micro-drama industry in Zhōngguó is taking over vertical video
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 July 2025

• Fake AI reviews of real estate agents are taking over Zillow, with over 25% of the agents' reviews written by AI. While making rich AI companies richer, "If an agent's online reputation is inflated with reviews that were never written by real clients, it misleads users into thinking the agent is more experienced, successful, or in-demand than they actually are. This 'fake clout' can ultimately steer consumers toward agents who may not deliver the level of service they are expecting, putting them at financial and emotional risk." [KM: But rich, unaccountable AI companies richer.]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 21 July 2025

• Just 9 [authoritarian] families in Silicon Valley control 15% of the wealth of Silicon Valley (and their love of money has them seeking more - all connected to rich Big Tech companies), as inequality widens in the 'home/cemetary of the future'. Just 0.1% of the rich people in Silicon Valley control 71% of the region's wealth [KM: their love of money also has them seeking more].
  - The Guardian, 21 July 2025

• To become richer, Spotify published songs generated by AI attributed to dead artists, without permission. "They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so." [KM: But that will make Spotify less rich.]
  - 404 Media, 21 July 2025

• Retail/individual investing/speculation/gambling is back with a vengeance, especially the latest gambling vehicle on tech stocks: zero-days-to-expire options. One of the most visible examples of this being outright gambling is Robinhood. The brokerage earns four times more revenue from options trading than traditional stock commissions, while its stock price has soared over 300% in the past year.
  - RealInvestmentAdvice.com, 21 July 2025

• In a scathing letter, 287 scientists and current and former NASA employees rebuke the "rapid and wasteful changes" at the space agency under Trump
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 21 July 2025

• In a scathing letter, 287 scientists and current and former NASA employees rebuke the "rapid and wasteful changes" at the space agency under Trump
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 July 2025

• Shares of MindMed surge 10% as psychedelic drugs gain political support within the Trump adminstration
  - Zero Hedge, 21 July 2025

• Shares of Sarepta dropped as much as 11% in premarket trading and remain down about 6% after the cash open this morning. One analyst has a price target of $0 for the shares. The FDA has requested that Sarepta voluntarily withdraw its ELEVIDYS gene therapy from the market. Sarepta has reportedly declined to comply.
  - Zero Hedge, 21 July 2025

• Shipping and navigation services company Matson announces new policies that halt all shipments of electric vehicles due to the fire risk posed by fire-prone lithium-ion batteries
  - Zero Hedge, 21 July 2025

• Zhōngguó has successfully restricted exported of two important metals, antimony and germanium, with exports for both down over 85%.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 21 July 2025

• Large rich Big Tech companies are using non-paid robots and non-paid drones to deliver more foods to homes and apartments, destroying more and more paid-human delivery jobs.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 July 2025

• A person on the autism spectrum had dangerous delusions. OpenAI's ChatGPT admitted that it made them worse. [KM: Good though, for making OpenAI richer.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 July 2025

• With a market value now exceeding $500 billion, Netflix faces pressure to keep growing its streaming entertainment business
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 July 2025

• The Ether Machine, a cryptocurrency treasury startup, is vying to be the MicroStrategy (which plays in the bitcoin casino) but exploiting the Ethereum cryptocurrency. It will trade under the symbol ETHM, and hopes to generate yield by 'staking' - letting others use its cryptocurrency holding
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 July 2025

• The Ether Machine, a cryptocurrency treasury startup, is vying to be the MicroStrategy (which plays in the bitcoin casino) but exploiting the Ethereum cryptocurrency. It will trade under the symbol ETHM, and hopes to generate yield by 'staking' - letting others use its cryptocurrency holding
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 July 2025

• Michael Saylor's Strategy owns 3% of all bitcoin in circulation after latest purchases
  - Bloomberg, 21 July 2025

• Shares of Trump Media rise over 5% after it purchases $2 billion of bitcoin
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 21 July 2025

• Hartnett: the best way to tell if we are in another stock bubble: "When stocks are rising and ignoring a rise in inflation expectations & bond yields to new highs."
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 20 July 2025

• A top trader at Goldman Sachs: a weaker USA dollar is good for Mag7 BigTech stocks
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 20 July 2025

• In recent firings of paid humans by corporations, the role of non-paid AI making it possible to fire the paid humands is being downplayed by the corporations, using bullshit terms such as "reorganization, restructuring, and optimization". "Very few [rich] companies are willing to say 'We are firing paid-humans to replace them with non-paid AI', even when that is effectively what is happening."
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 July 2025

• The depressing phenomenon of declining quality in the e-commerce era. Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller, clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash, and machines now answer our calls. Quality and care for craftsmanship seem to be things of the past. [KM: apparently it is hard for the rich to get richer spending money on quality and care.]
  - El Pais, 19 July 2025

• The [filthy] rich Mark Zuckerberg, and other rich executives/investors at Facebook, will not allow Facebook to agree-to/sign a European Union code of practice for generative AI. Profits over the safety of humanity.
  - Zero Hedge, 19 July 2025

• Cowardice and corruption. This week, Stephen Colbert announced that CBS is canceling his late-night show, days after he spoke out against the network's owner for settling a lawsuit with Trump for $16 million - a lawsuit the cowards would probably have won.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 July 2025

• Drones are important to winning wars now. Hardly any drones are made in the USA. A four-day test in the Alaska wilderness shows how far the USA military and American drone companies lag behind Zhōngguó in the technology.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 July 2025

• Fake versions of everything from designer clothes to weight-loss drugs are being pitched on social-media sites. [KM: Very rich social media companies don't want to use some of their billions to eliminate this problem.]
  - Barron's, 19 July 2025

• Trump's is the AI bubble's [Ponzi scheme] best friend
  - Barron's, 19 July 2025

• Shares of Block soar 10% on entry into the SP500, replacing Hess which is being bought out by Chevron. This makes the SP500 even more tech-heavy, and thus more linked to the AI/cryptocurrency bubbles.
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 July 2025

• Netflix uses special effects generated by non-paid AI for first time to cut costs, i.e., the costs of paying humans to produce special effects
  - BBC, 18 July 2025

• Shares of Sarepta plummet 25% after third patient death related its gene therapy
  - Zero Hedge, 18 July 2025

• $300,000,000+ - Christine Hunsicker, a prominent entrepreneur who founded the now-bankrupt clothing technology startup, CaaStle, was criminally charged on Friday with defrauding investors out of more than $300 million
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 July 2025

• The European Union depends on Rossiya and Zhōngguó for about 50% of its imports of rare earth metals
  - Zero Hedge, 18 July 2025

• How AI undermines the human value of attention, and the individuality that flows from that. We are losing the pleasure of invention [of thoughts], the life of the mind at work.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 July 2025

• Ahead of tomorrow's $2.8 trillion worth of option expirations, retail investors have never traded more 0DTE options. The market is officially a casino, where almost everyone just bets on red or green.
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 17 July 2025

• [Filthy rich] Google's AI is 'slitting the throat' of the journalism industry, by starving publishers of income [KM: to make Google and its executives/investors even richer].
  - Futurism, 17 July 2025

• Amazon's AWS cloud services division fires hundreds of paid humans that it replaced with non-paid AI
  - Thomson's Reuters, 17 July 2025

• Why people cannot quit their addiction to ChatGPT and other AI chatbots
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 July 2025

• Thanks to the technology of growing diamonds in the laboratory, the prices of diamonds are plunging, so they are no longer a 'luxury' item. Or, according diamond mining company De Beers, are artifical diamods a "huge con"?
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 July 2025

• To profit from more humans losing their jobs, misanthropic Uber invests $300 million in non-paid robotaxi company Lucid, for which Lucid (which also hates poor people) will supply Uber with 20,000 non-paid robotaxis [KM: so that Uber can bcome richer while poor taxi drivers lose their jobs]
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 July 2025

• Shares of Lucid soar, [KM: as the rich get richer and the poor poorer]. To profit from more humans losing their jobs, misanthropic Uber invests $300 million in non-paid robotaxi company Lucid, for which Lucid (which also hates poor people) will supply Uber with 20,000 non-paid robotaxis [KM: so that Uber can bcome richer while poor taxi drivers lose their jobs].
  - Zero Hedge, 17 July 2025

• Profits for TSMC surges 61% to record high due to demand for AI chips it manufactures for other companies
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 July 2025

• Trump's Commerce Department imposed preliminary anti-dumping duties of 93.5% on imports of graphite from Zhōngguó, an important battery component, after concluding the graphite had been unfairly subsidized by the government of Zhōngguó
  - Bloomberg, 17 July 2025

• Zhōngguó is restricting access to 8 important advanced battery technologies, but allow continued access to battery cathode technology to help encourage global cooperation
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 July 2025

• [Mostly socially-useless] AI accounted for 71% of venture capital funding in Q1 2025, starving funds for the type of future technologies that Zhōngguó is dominating. Traitors.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 July 2025

• Delta Airlines introduces a new form of predatory pricing, using AI to individually price each ticket per the nature of the traveller, eventually eliminating static pricing. A company in Israel, Fetcherr, provides the AI technology. "The price you see is the price the algorithm thinks that you will accept, not a universal rate."
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 16 July 2025

• The AI stock market/investment bubble is now bigger than the early mega-hype bubble of the DotCom era at its peak
  - Zero Hedge (locked), 16 July 2025

• An experimental weekly injection developed by Chinese drugmaker Hengrui Pharma and its USA-based partner, Kailera Therapeutics, succeeded in a late-stage trial in Zhōngguó, putting the drugmakers on track to seek approval there, and will become a potential competitor for Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk and their anti-obesity drugs
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 July 2025

• The government of Zhōngguó will now require government licenses for any effort to transfer abroad the technologies crucial for producing inexpensive electric cars
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 July 2025

• Want to trade sahres of Amazon on a cryptocurrency exchange? The price might be off by 300%. Digital tokens tracking popular stocks such as Apple deviate wildly from underlying prices and raise concerns about a lack of regulatory oversight.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 July 2025

• ASML shares drop 10% after it reports that it can't confirm that it will grow in 2026. It has a 1% dividend.
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 July 2025

• ASML shares drop 10% after it reports that it can't confirm that it will grow in 2026. It has a 1% dividend.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 July 2025

• ASML shares drop 10% after it reports that it can't confirm that it will grow in 2026. It has a 1% dividend.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 July 2025

• [To make rich AI companies richer,] their AI data centers need millions of gallons water needed by people, and rely on toxic chemicals leaching into the soil that is bad for the environment
  - Zero Hedge, 15 July 2025

• The enshittification of the power of the USA. First Google and Facebook, then the world. Under Trump 2.0, USA statecraft is starting to mimic the worst tendencies of Big Tech of making big promises, locking in users, and then increasingly deliver 'shit'. Weaponizing the dollar, weaponizing weapon systems, weaponizing communication systems - make the promises, but the deliver the 'shit'.
  - Wired, 15 July 2025

• Six ways that AI could cause the next big war, but why AI probably will not cause the next big war
  - Bulletin of the Atomic Scienists, 15 July 2025

• The artificial intelligence systems of [KM: filthy rich] Big Tech companies breeds mindless inhumanity from which they profit. We are rapidly entering a world in which widespread access to voluminous information is producing worse - not better - decisions and actions at all levels.
  - Real Clear Wire, 15 July 2025

• Banks warn that human-hating non-paid robotaxi companies may have overlooked severe costs to actually being profitable, and not profitable for at least 7-8 years. These costs include parking, charging, cleaning, and the occasional paid human for emergencies.
  - Futurism, 15 July 2025

• When Google's slop/garbage-outputfrom its AI Overview meets webslop, searching becomes useless
  - Cory Doctorow - Pluralistic, 15 July 2025

• Biotech companies in Zhōngguó are becoming much more competitive with Big Pharma in the USA
  - Zero Hedge, 15 July 2025

• Many young people are stuggling to find jobs due to lousy career advice, and non-paid AI. Hypocritical employers demand experience for a person's first job, but are also using AI to eliminate many of the 'first position' jobs that people need to gain experience.
  - BrokenMarketPlace.com, 15 July 2025

• Non-paid AI breeds mindless inhumanity [KM: while making the rich richer]. This AI is deadly for fostering comprehension and worse for moral thinking.
  - Real Clear Markets, 15 July 2025

• Multi-billion dollar AI company Hugging Face is illegally (to make money) hosting 5,000 AI models of real people without the consent of the real people.
  - 404 Media, 15 July 2025

• Civitai, backed by rich investor a16z controlled by the billionaires at Andreessen Horwitz (at a time when Andreessen is attacking universities for fostering equality and diversity), is a website that it is mostly porn, hosting pornographic models of tens of thousands of real people without their consent
  - 404 Media, 15 July 2025

• The Pentagon will keep making socialist investments in the critical minerals industry in the USA
  - Thomson's Reuters, 15 July 2025

• MP Materials surges 10% after Apple announces it will invest $500 million in the rare earths mining company (adding to a socialist investment by the Defense Department)
  - Zero Hedge, 15 July 2025

• MP Materials surges 10% after Apple announces it will invest $500 million in the rare earths mining company (adding to a socialist investment by the Defense Department)
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 July 2025

• TACO Trump flipflops again. Trump will allow Nvidia to restart selling its advianced H20 processors to Zhōngguó. National security apparently less important than help the rich get richer.
  - The Daily Beast, 15 July 2025

• TACO Trump flipflops again. Trump will allow Nvidia to restart selling its advianced H20 processors to Zhōngguó. National security apparently less important than help the rich get richer.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 July 2025

• Shares of Nvidia and AMD soar as TACO Trump allows them to restart selling advanced processors to Zhōngguó
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 July 2025

• The media network streaming competition is reduced to two oligopolists: Google's YouTube versus Netflix
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 July 2025

• The frontlines of the war between Rossiya and Ukraine are changing little, due to a steady supply of drones for both countries. Unmanned vehicles dominate the battlefield in Ukraine - laying mines, delivering ammunition and medication, even evacuating casualties.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 July 2025

• Sirius, the ad-free audio entertainment company mostly popular in car audio systems, has cost $10 to $25 a month. To keep customers, Sirius will offer a cheaper version at less than $7/month which will include ads.
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 July 2025

• AI chatbots are racist and sexist because rich AI companies gladly train the AI models on all of the Internet, including parts of the Internet that contain huge amounts of racist and sexist commentary. [KM: Apparently their ethical attitude is:"But how else can we get richer?"]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 15 July 2025

• More elimination of paid-human jobs: in Shenzhen, Zhōngguó, delivery robots will ride the human-used subway to restock more than 100 stores of the 7-Eleven retain chain
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 15 July 2025

• The rich white male Marc Andreessen whines about, and threatens, universities favoring women and minorities
  - Zero Hedge, 14 July 2025

• More AI misanthropy: an AI-generated band obtained 1 million plays on Spotify. Now music insiders say listeners should be warned. The Velvet Sundown released two albums before admitting their music, images and backstory were created by non-paid AI.
  - The Guardian, 14 July 2025

• $14,750,000 - Hill Associates, a company in Maryland supply IT services to the USA government, has agreed to a $14.75 million fine to settle alleged violations of its contracts with federal agencies
  - The Record, 14 July 2025

• Is the very rich Big Tech investor, Marc Andreessen, a traitor? It is the filthy rich Big Tech oligarchs and their investors, not young radicals, who have turned the 'system' against the authoritarian rich tech oligarchs [KM: to profit as much as possible from the destruction of the social fabric of the USA, if not the world. Apparently, Andreessen doesn't want anyone interfering with his religion - 'The Love Of Money'.]
  - Liberal Currents, 14 July 2025

• The authoritarian superhero film genre (invented in the USA - supervillians a substitute for the USA's Cold War enemies) is on the decline, and so is declining the American empire.
  - Al Jazeera, 14 July 2025

• Paid humans fired by gamemaker King (owners of Candy Crush) say they were replaced by non-paid AI that was developed by the paid humans
  - MobileGamer.biz, 14 July 2025

• The rich executives at Goldman Sachs don't have to pay a human to do software engineering - meet Devin, their new non-paid AI programmer. Goldman Sachs hopes to have over 1000 such non-paid AI programmers, eliminating the need for hiring 1000 paid-human software engineers. Of course, the spin: [BS-on] this AI is to help humans, not replace them [BS-off].
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 14 July 2025

• Rich AI companies get richer, while AI 'nudify' websites are raking in millions of dollars, using technology from rich AI companies such as Amazon and Google
  - Wired, 14 July 2025

• More and more Christians argue that AI is demonic [as must be their owners]
  - Futurism, 14 July 2025

• Maxine Waters: "my colleagues in Congress are making a mistake [similar to past deregulatory laws] advancing a proposed law to promote cryptocurrencies" for moneychangers. The proposed laws call for few regulations, minimal enforcement, weak consumer protections and more industry consolidation. Worse, these bills have a special, intentional wrinkle that makes them especially dangerous: They would legitimize and legalize the unprecedented crypto corruption by the president of the United States. The proposed laws fail to protect consumers, and create national security risks.
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 14 July 2025

• Saudi Arabia asks consultants to review feasibility of its futuristic city, Neom, "The Line" megaprojects. The kingdom has been scaling back large-scale construction and investment projects amid rising costs and lower oil prices.
  - Middle East Eye, 14 July 2025

• The very rich Google's YouTube places pirated [a crime] videos next to ads for politicians including Trump, as well as next to ads for corporate giants such as JPMorgan, General Motors and Pizza Hut, according to a bombshell repoprt - and insiders claim Google is ignoring the criminal infringement to illegally earns of billions of dollars it doesn't need
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 14 July 2025

• Two top scientists in medical AI, Roland Ellis and Irina Lehmann, move from Deutschland to Fudan University in Shanghai, Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 July 2025

• Non-paid AI is already showing signs of slashing paid-human job openings in the United Kingdom. The overall number of online job postings are down 31% in the three months to May compared with the same period in 2022.
  - Bloomberg, 13 July 2025

• Ramaco Resources, the developer of what would be the first new coal mine in Wyoming in decades, is launching a potentially half-billion-dollar effort to extract rare earth metals from the fossil fuel that are crucial for tech products and military hardware
  - Associated Press, 12 July 2025

• Goldman Sachs just made your computer science degree worthless, as it piloting non-paid AI software engineers to replace many of its paid-human programmers
  - Derick David - Medium, 12 July 2025

• Extremely rich white male venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, maybe revealing a some of his racist and sexist attitudes (common in Silicon Valley) reportedly told a group chat that universities will "pay the price" for the diversity and equality policies. What is more ethical is for rich, white men like Andreessen to pay universities to increase their diversity and equality practices.
  - TechCrunch, 12 July 2025

• Statistics on the growing business of Google's Waymo's non-paid robotaxis that growingly taking work from paid-human drivers
  - Zero Hedge, 12 July 2025

• As Trump's Truth Social social media companies continues to be a failure, Trump Media goes more criminal by strongly embracing cryptocurrencies exploiting Trump's presidential clout
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 July 2025

• How discussions on Reddit helped individual investors win in the stock market. Individual investors were the ones who piled into stocks when they plunged in early April, while big Wall Street institutions missed out on the gains.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 July 2025

• Rich Big Tech companies have created a loneliness doom loop, exploiting the misery of lonely people to become richer by offering non-human companionship with their AI models
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 July 2025

• The CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, says that non-paid AI could lead to large number of paid-humans losing their jobs "if the world runs out of ideas".[KM: But this won't stop Huang from making himself and Nvidia richer.]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 12 July 2025

• A long-term competition in the food-delivery market in Zhōngguó has reduced the market value of Alibaba Group by $100 billion, with no end in sight for damage to profits and investor confidence
  - Bloomberg, 11 July 2025

• Shares of AMD rise 4% after an analyst stated that AMD's new AI chips could challenge Nvidia's AI chips
  - Investopedia, 11 July 2025

• AI authoritarianism? We should be wary of outsourcing our thinking to the machine.
  - The Skeptic, 11 July 2025

• Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot is the latest in a long list of AI chatbots to go full racist Nazi - [KM: rich AI companies allowing their chatbots to spew hateful drivel for more profit]
  - The Intercept, 11 July 2025

• Non-paid AI 'therapists' increase delusions and give dangerous advice. Popular non-paid AI chatbots are incompetent replacements for paid-human therapists.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 11 July 2025

• In an ominous sign, sellers are vanishing as stocks in the USA rise to record highs. This could cause a short-term moderate setback.
  - Bloomberg, 11 July 2025

• The ICE BofA MOVE Index, a volatility measure for USA Treasury Bonds, falls to a 3+ year low
  - Bloomberg, 11 July 2025

• A woman says that Mark Zuckerberg's AI data center filled her tap water with sediment. [KM: She doesn't want him to become richer at the expense of her health?]
  - Futurism, 11 July 2025

• Trump's Justice Department ends probe into T-Mobile's merger with USCellular, two days after the cowardly much-white-male management of T-Mobile agrees to end its diversity and equality programs to please the racist, mysognistic Trump
  - Business Insider, 11 July 2025

• The cowardly much-white-male management of T-Mobile agrees to end its diversity and equality programs to please the racist, mysognistic Trump
  - Zero Hedge, 11 July 2025

• The authoritarian Trump wants to shut down several perfectly good spacecraft that are orbiting Mars - for no good reason
  - Futurism, 11 July 2025

• Non-paid AI might not actually boost productivity
  - Real Clear Science, 11 July 2025

• Tesla's law-breaking bored of directors expressing "almost a contempt for lawful and accepted procedure", says a corporate governance expert
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 11 July 2025

• Tesla's feckless bored of directors needs to rein in Elon Musk before the company is destroyed
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 11 July 2025

• Where might the racism of Musk's Grok AI system come from? Researchers find that Musk's Grok AI system is relying on Musk's opinions before answering 'sensitive' questions.
  - Gizmodo, 11 July 2025

• Elon Musk's AI chatbot started spouting racist Nazi propaganda. That is not the scariest part. The scary part is all of the other hate and racism and lies fed into these AI system to train them, [KM: so that their rich AI owners can become richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 July 2025

• AI-generated images of child sexual abuse are flooding the internet, [KM: while the rich AI companies that make these tools get richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 July 2025

• Mark Zuckerberg's racist and sexist Facebook is excluding women and non-white people from the team building Facebook's 'superintelligence' to make Zuckerberg richer while more people miserable and unemployed
  - Gizmodo, 11 July 2025

• How deepfake AI job applicants are stealing remote work jobs
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 July 2025

• A robotics company in Zhōngguó has started selling the world's first laser topping robot, overcoming a major hurdle in cotton's cultivation cycle to achieve the quest for fully mechanised cotton production
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 July 2025

• Indeed and Glassdoor -- both owned by Recruit Holdings in Nihon -- are firing roughly 1,300 paid-humans as part of a broader move to combine operations and shift more focus toward non-paid AI
  - Bloomberg (locked), 10 July 2025

• 10 paid-human jobs that non-paid AI will replace by 2026. And maybe you will be able to find (lower-paying) replacement jobs.
  - Medium (locked), 10 July 2025

• Video game actors in Hollywood end an 11-month strike with new protections from non-paid AI being used to create digital replicas of their voices or appearances. If those replicas are used, actors must be paid at rates comparable to in-person work.
  - Straight Arrow News, 10 July 2025

• An insider claims that Microsoft saved a half-billion dollars with non-paid AI by automating low-level jobs done by now-fired paid humans. [KM: Well, at least Bill Gates is richer.]
  - Futurism, 10 July 2025

• A tech watchdog has lodged a formal complaint against OpenAI with the IRS - warning that CEO Sam Altman looks poised to reap a stake worth billions in violation of US tax laws. The group claims that Sam Altman's simultaneous status as both CEO of OpenAI's for-profit operations and seat on its nonprofit board "creates an inherent conflict where Altman sits on both sides of negotiations that would personally benefit him at the nonprofit's expense".
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 10 July 2025

• Another pump-and-dump promise from Elon Musk: he predicts that his recently racist-spewing AI model, Grok, "... might discover new physics next year. And within two years, I say almost certainly". He also made another pump-and-dump prediction: that AI will lead to "an economy that is thousands of times bigger than our current economy, or maybe millions of times".
  - Zero Hedge, 10 July 2025

• The Attorney General of Florida is investigating Robinhood Crypto, alleging that the platform may have misled customers by promoting itself as the least expensive way to buy cryptocurrencies
  - Thomson's Reuters, 10 July 2025

• The Attorney General of Florida is investigating Robinhood Crypto, alleging that the platform may have misled customers by promoting itself as the least expensive way to buy cryptocurrencies
  - Bloomberg, 10 July 2025

• "I cannot drink the water": life next to an AI data center in the USA that makes the rich richer while local residents suffer. What is more important: water for non-rich humans, or water for mostly useless AI systems [KM: that only profit the rich?]
  - BBC, 10 July 2025

• The sociopathic Elon Musk says that even if AI ultimately proves bad for humanity (while making him richer), he still wants to be there to see the destruction
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 10 July 2025

• The Flour Corporation has confirmed the feasibility of large rare earth element deposits at Ramaco Resource's Brook Mine in Wyoming. Metals profitably minable include dysprosium, neodymium, and scandium.
  - FreightWaves, 10 July 2025

• The anti-semitic and racist outbursts of Elon Musk's Grok AI system, and other AI systems, reflect a huge problem with AI chatbots. Violent rape fantasies generated by AI are due to training decisions made by the most rich white men who control the AI industry. Are their biases and racist/sexist beliefs influencing the training of these AI systems?
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 10 July 2025

• Linda Yaccarino - the ex-CEO of Twitter/X who never was the CEO of Elon Musk's Twitter/X, but instead, positioned to fail at her job. The CEO was/is always Elon Musk.
  - The Guardian, 10 July 2025

• OpenAI to launch its own Web browser to challenge Google's Chrome browser. With 500 million weekly users of OpenAI's ChatGPT, if they all adopt the new browser, this strikes deep at the main money-making source for Google - selling ads.
  - NBC News, 10 July 2025

• OpenAI to launch its own Web browser to challenge Google's Chrome browser. With 500 million weekly users of OpenAI's ChatGPT, if they all adopt the new browser, this strikes deep at the main money-making source for Google - selling ads.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 10 July 2025

• The USA is in a very dark place, because of Big Tech profiting from their algorithms,their media echo chambers and facilitating systematic disinformation. Result? In 21st century, with all the world' knowledge at their fingertips, a significant portion of the US population rejects science, embraces climate denialism, shuns vaccines and actively votes to dismantle the very institutions upholding their quality of life.
  - Enrique Dans - Medium, 09 July 2025

• Momentum meltdown is just getting started, according to quant analysts at Morgan Stanely
  - Zero Hedge, 09 July 2025

• Google's YouTube is infested, plagued and inundated with AI-generated slop/garbage videos, which Google's AI tools help create. Google is promising to stop the worst of the slop/garbage, but tools to make sure your feeds are full of mass-produced brainrot. [KM: The rich must get richer.]
  - Gizmodo, 09 July 2025

• The latest advice from Elon Musk's AI's chatbot, Grok? Disturbing messages including step-by-step instructions for house break-in and rape of a Democratic politician in Minnesota. "Grok is straight up demonic." Like father, like son.
  - The Independent, 09 July 2025

• AI company Nvidia is close to becoming the world's first company with a $4 trillion market capitalization. [KM: God only knows the number of people who will have to lose their paid-jobs to make this AI investment bubble profitable.]
  - Zero Hedge, 09 July 2025

• The world's best and brightest workers and researchers are moving, but it is not the USA made more hostile by Trump
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 July 2025

• How the extremely rich Google fails to ensure that its Youtube platform cannot be used for others to profit from copyright infringement by illegally posting copyrighted music and movies which earn the 'pirates' money from advertising.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 July 2025

• $400,000 - Simplilearn and Caltech agree to pay a total of $400,000 to settle a lawsuit that students were misled about a "boot camp" at Caltech whose only connection to Caltech was the approved use of the name "Caltech"
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 July 2025

• Why people in the USA cannot buy the best electric cars in the world, those sold by BYD in Zhōngguó. BYD's success is due to the success of capitalistic-socialism in Zhōngguó (as opposed the USA's socialistic capitalism): a combination of government financial support, methodical long-term planning and aggressive corporate innovation, resulting in Zhōngguó dominating a growing number of industries of the future. But the USA does have the prettiest (and most expensive) weapons.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 July 2025

• The USA and Europe want to obtain more rare earth metals from Africa. But countries in Africa want more than money - they want jobs for their citizens, so they are imposing restrictions on exports of rare earth metals and minerals to develop processing industries in their countries, creating jobs as well as profits.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 July 2025

• More Big Tech hatred of humanity: non-paid AI robot massage machines to replace paid-human massage therapists
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 July 2025

• The USA remains "dependent" on rare earth metals from Zhōngguó. The dominance of Zhōngguó in this industry (like others such as renewable energy) is far from over.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 09 July 2025

• Shares of Intel increase at least 7% after Intel announces it will start firing over 500 people in its facilities in Oregon
  - Investopedia, 08 July 2025

• More and more customers of Hertz are outraged that new AI scanners charge lots amounts of money for the tiniest of 'dings' when they return rental cars, made worse by the difficulty in contacting customer support to dispute the charges
  - The Drive, 08 July 2025

• More and more customers of Hertz are outraged that new AI scanners charge lots amounts of money for the tiniest of 'dings' when they return rental cars, made worse by the difficulty in contacting customer support to dispute the charges
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 July 2025

• Two constant facts: the sky is blue, and Musk's AI is anti-semitic again. Grok, the AI chatbot native to Elon Musk's X platform, delivered a long series of antisemitic replies Tuesday following a reported update in which it was told to embrace the "politically incorrect".
  - TechCrunch, 08 July 2025

• Grok, the AI chatbot native to Elon Musk's X platform, delivered a long series of antisemitic replies Tuesday following a reported update in which it was told to embrace the "politically incorrect".
  - HuffPost, 08 July 2025

• Grok, the AI chatbot native to Elon Musk's X platform, delivered a long series of antisemitic replies Tuesday following a reported update in which it was told to embrace the "politically incorrect".
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 July 2025

• ETFs controlled by BlackRock own more bitcoin than (Micro)Strategy - which is effectively a bitcoin-proxy pretending to be a company
  - Zero Hedge, 08 July 2025

• Which group of people will have to lose more of their paid jobs to non-paid AI, [KM: to make rich AI companies richer]: young people or experienced people (or both)?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 July 2025

• You think that non-paid AI is coming to take your paid-human job? First, non-paid AI is taking the paid-human job of your interviewer.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 July 2025

• How Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" will make Zhōngguó great again - by insuring that Zhōngguó dominates renewable energy and other technologies of the future
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 July 2025

• Because of the criminal mismanagement of Elon Musk, the financial and business troubles at Tesla are worse than you think. Tesla is losing socialist tax credits, faces increased competition from Zhōngguó, and his idiotic political antics turns off more and more customers. Tesla's useless bored of directors refuses to act.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 08 July 2025

• Why Tesla is in financial trouble - aside from the behavior of Musk
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 08 July 2025

• By 2035, a third of the global supply of semiconductor processor chips is threatened by climate change and drought due to global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 08 July 2025

• The technology giant with the highest revenues per employee? Porn site OnlyFans!
  - Zero Hedge, 07 July 2025

• $3,400,000 - Fubo has agreed to pay $3.4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the sports-streaming service provider of unlawfully distributing customers' personally identifiable information (PII) without their consent.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 July 2025

• XP, a fintech company in Brazil, filed a USA lawsuit on Monday accusing the short seller Grizzly Research of defamation over a March 12 report accusing XP of running a "Maddoff-like Ponzi scheme". XP is seeking over $100 million due to harm to its business.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 07 July 2025

• Cathie Wood's Ark Investment Management registers new 'buffer' ETFs to limit losses in her flagship funds, using options to limit losses while giving up some gains.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 07 July 2025

• A new paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and San Francisco argues that there is a possibility that short term interest rates could return to near 0% in the coming years. Supposedly to help the economy, zero rates are 'cocaine' for the stock markets.
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 July 2025

• The Dow drops as much as 630 points, and Nasdaq drops as much as 240 pounts, after TACO Trump delays imposing higher taxes/tariffs on Nihon (25%), South Korea (25%), Malaysia (25%), Kazakhstan (25%), South Africa (30%), Laos and Myanmar (each 40%), delaying the increases from July 7th to August 1st.
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 July 2025

• The Dow drops as much as 630 points, and Nasdaq drops as much as 240 pounts, after TACO Trump delays imposing higher taxes/tariffs on Nihon (25%), South Korea (25%), Malaysia (25%), Kazakhstan (25%), South Africa (30%), Laos and Myanmar (each 40%), delaying the increases from July 7th to August 1st.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 July 2025

• The Dow drops as much as 630 points, and Nasdaq drops as much as 240 pounts, after TACO Trump delays imposing higher taxes/tariffs on Nihon (25%), South Korea (25%), Malaysia (25%), Kazakhstan (25%), South Africa (30%), Laos and Myanmar (each 40%), delaying the increases from July 7th to August 1st.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 07 July 2025

• Zhōngguó dominates the world's rare earth metals industry. The success has been costly: soil and groundwater around processing plants are contaminated with heavy metals and radioactive materials (such as thorium). Both pose a health threat for nearby people, especially due to lead and cadmium.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 July 2025

• Volkswagen joins the "lets create more unemployment of paid humans" non-paid robotaxi industry, bringing its non-paid self-driving minivans to the USA
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 July 2025

• Shares of CoreWeave are down as much as 4%, and shares of Core Scientific are down as much as 12%, after Core Scientific agreed to be acquired by CoreWeave - both big players in AI data centers
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 07 July 2025

• Tesla loses $68 billion in value after Elon Musk says he is launching a political party to challenge Trump. Criminal corporate mismanagement.
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 July 2025

• Shares of Tesla drop 7% on Monday, after Musk announces a new political party, and then Trump insults the new political party
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 07 July 2025

• Shares of Tesla drop 7% on Monday, after Musk announces a new political party, and then Trump insults the new political party and calls Musk "off the rails"
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 07 July 2025

• Shares of Tesla decline as investors fear that Elon Musk's new political party with damage the brand
  - The Guardian, 07 July 2025

• Short-sellers in the Tesla casino win about $1.4 billion, after shares of Tesla decline due to Musk's recent political activities
  - Thomson's Reuters, 07 July 2025

• Trump advisor Peter Navarro, an 'economist' who has never run a big business, insults the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, for not moving, more quickly, production of iPhones out of Zhōngguó
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 July 2025

• Scarlett Johansson has become the all-time highest grossing lead actor, with her movies grossing a record $14.8 billion
  - The Daily Beast, 07 July 2025

• The FBI reports a 300% increased in 'pump-n-dump' stock transaction crimes
  - Zero Hedge, 06 July 2025

• Joining protesters in Barcelona and other cities around the world, residents of México City marched to protest the negative social impact of ex-pats and remote workers from the USA gentrifying parts of their city and driving up rents beyond what the residents of the city can afford. [KM: Again, the rich tech companies getting richer]: "Rents are skyrocketing because of Airbnb."
  - Zero Hedge, 06 July 2025

• People in México City are angry at remote workers because the remote workers drive up the price of rents and foods, displacing longtime residents of México City
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 July 2025

• The 'low-hire, low-fire' job market: people with jobs are likely to keep them, people without jobs are unlikely to find them. . The trend is being exacerbated by the rise of AI, as employers experiment with how to make their workforces more productive.
  - Zero Hedge, 06 July 2025

• Facebook's large-scale WhatsApp fintech experiment in Bharat has fizzled. Despite having 500 million users in India, WhatsApp could not crack the $3 trillion fintech market of Bharat.
  - Rest of World, 07 July 2025

• Superintelligence will never arrive. More and more, OpenAI's Sam Altman appears to be another Silicon Valley 'snake oil' salesman, pitching the next big scam with nothing economically substantial behind it.
  - Zero Hedge, 06 July 2025

• The buying of stocks by retail/individual investors in the first half of 2025 rises to a new high. Dip-buying is still popular, as are high-beta and leveraged stocks/ETFS.
  - Zero Hedge, 06 July 2025

• Over 50 people have been confirmed to be killed by the recent flash flooding in Texas, with more rain and flash flooding to come. Yet another heavier rain storm due to global heating due to the burning of fossil fuels.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 July 2025

• Elon Musk's Groq AI system is blaming Musk and Trump for the multiple deaths in Texas due to flooding - using facts (anathema to Trump and Musk). "Trump's NOAA cuts, pushed by Musk's DOGE, slashed funding 30% and staff 17%, underestimating rainfall by 50% and delaying alerts. ... This contributed to the floods killing 27, including about 20 girls at a camp." More Grok: "Climate models from IPCC and NOAA project more intense flooding in Texas due to warmer air holding more moisture, exacerbating events like this. ... Ignoring it - regardless of politics - will not stop the trend; global emission cuts are needed." -- yeah, from the burning of fossil fuels so popular in Christian-controlled Texas.
  - The Daily Beast, 06 July 2025

• A "thou shalt not" lying Christian Republican congressional candidate from Georgia, Kandiss Taylor, calls the recent floods in Texas "Fake Weather", and that someone (who?) manipulated the weather to kill people.
  - The Daily Beast, 06 July 2025

• As flash floods struck parts of Texas, important roles were vacant at National Weather Service offices in Texas, due to budget cuts by the environment-hating Trump and Musk. Some experts say staff shortages might have complicated ability to coordinate responses with local emergency management officials.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 July 2025

• State officials in Texas (all of whom voted for Trump) severely criticize Trump's downgraded National Weather Service for its bad forecasts of recent flooding in Texas. That's what happens when you vote for an anti-environment president.
  - The Daily Beast, 06 July 2025

• Another important scientist leaves the USA because of Trump's hostile policies: Wang Jing, a neurobiologist at UC San Diego for 20 years, leaves the USA to lead a molecular physiology laboratory at the Shenzhen Bay Laboratory in Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 06 July 2025

• One month after Europe bans medical device companies in Zhōngguó in bidding for public contracts worth more than about $6 million for the next five years, Zhōngguó applies the same ban on medical devices companies based in Europe
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 06 July 2025

• Huawei to open-source its self-developed computer programming language, Cangje, designed to allow programmers to build apps for Huawei's HarmonyOS Next operating system.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 06 July 2025

• Another impotent Trump executive order, this one trying to limit the penetration of the drone industry of Zhōngguó in USA markets while boosting USA production of drones. An wishful goal that is offering too little, too late.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 06 July 2025

• (AI-empowered) effiicieny is an ultimately empty and unattainable life goal
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 July 2025

• The dumbing of the USA [KM: to make rich AI companies/executives/owners richer]: 97% of Gen Z students are using AI to write essays, do homework, and get into college - i.e., to get ahead without learning or thinking. Idiocracy - here we come!
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 05 July 2025

• Increasingly boring superhero movies, popular with moviewatchers, have few listed in the 'Top 100' best films in the last 25 years, according to movie directors, actors and others in the film industry.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 July 2025

• Smartphone shipments/sales in Zhōngguó plummet over 20% in May
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 July 2025

• ETFs are taking over all of the investment world. 700 new ETFs were launched in 2024. Here is how to survive.
  - Barron's, 05 July 2025

• Leveraged ETFs had some of the best returns in the second quarter of 2025
  - Barron's, 05 July 2025

• 'Dark pools' such as Intelligent Cross are transacting more stock trades. In the last quarter of 2024, they handled more than 50% of all stocks trades, a worry to the traditional stock exchanges and market makers such as Citadel Securities.
  - Barron's, 05 July 2025

• Investors in 'virtual' farming inside of networked computer games such as Grow a Garden offered by Roblox
  - Barron's, 05 July 2025

• Trump's immigration policies could hurt telecommunication companies such as ATT. (Illegal) immigrants are a large purchaser of wireless cellphone plans.
  - Barron's, 05 July 2025

• The increasing criminalization of Silicon Valley: a software engineer in Bharat is caught secretly working five remote technology jobs at the same time, so of course, he is offered a job at the new startup developing an AI tool that allows you to "cheat on everything"
  - Zero Hedge, 04 July 2025

• Researchers at the University of Sydney have invented a new deivce that uses plasma and electrolysis to turn air into ammonia, with needing to burn fossil fuels
  - Interesting Engineering, 04 July 2025

• Samsung will delay completion of building a semiconductor processor factory in Texas worth $44 billion, because "there are no customers" for its 4-nanometer technology (as 2-nanometer technology because more in demand)
  - Tom's Hardware, 03 July 2025

• AI summaries in response to users of Google search reduce the frequency of people clinking on links to news sites that provided the information that trained the AI, making very rich Google richer, and reducing advertising revenues for the news sites while undermining democracy
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 03 July 2025

• Mark Zuckerberg's "AI superintelligence" will be just as useless, and just as wasting of billions of shareholder's dollars, as Zuckerberg's/Facebook's 'metaverse' project. Both efforts seek to dehumanize humanity to make Zuckerberg richer.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 03 July 2025

• One more reason criminals love ChatGPT's misanthropy: ChatGPT and other AI chatbots often deliver the wrong URL for a corporation when asked, making it easier for criminals to implement scams
  - The Register, 03 July 2025

• Billionaire Mark Cuban [KM: gleefully?, because he is rich enough to not worry about working] suggests that the world's first trillionaire [as if we needed even a worse sociopath] will be "just one dude in the basement" who is extremely successful at using non-paid AI [KM: to eliminate as many paid-humans jobs as possible].
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 July 2025

• Nvidia might soon achieve a market capitalization of $4 trillion, the first company to do so. [KM: Just think of the number of people who have to lose their jobs to generate the profits Nvidia needs to maintain its P/E ratios.]
  - Investopedia, 03 July 2025

• The naval forces of Colombia seized a 'narco submarine' off its Caribbean coast. Nothing unusual with that, except the sub was equipepd with a Starlink antenna. Innovation by drug traffickers, since the Starlink connection allows such submarines to navigate more independently.
  - CBS News, 03 July 2025

• After Robinhood announced "OpenAI tokens" that supposedly provided equity in the non-publicly traded OpenAI, OpenAI denounces Robinhood's scam: "There 'OpenAI' tokens are not OpenAI equity. We did not partner with Robinhood, were not involved in this, and do not endorse it. Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval - we did not approve any transfer. Please be careful."
  - Zero Hedge, 03 July 2025

• The president of Argentina, Javier Milei, uses his presidential power to mock a journalist falsely accused of incest in a video that was of course, generated by AI
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 July 2025

• Bribe or settlement? Paramount, which needs federal approval to merge with Skydance (owned by a son of a Trump supporter), agrees to pay Trump $16 million over a "60 Minutes" interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 July 2025

• Bribe or settlement? Paramount, which needs federal approval to merge with Skydance (owned by a son of a Trump supporter), agrees to pay Trump $16 million over a "60 Minutes" interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 July 2025

• More corporate executives start confessing their 'wet dream': that non-paid AI will cause lots of paid-humans to lose their jobs. The CEO of Ford (giddily?) predicts that AI will allow CEOs like him to fire "literally half of all white-collar" paid humans that work for companies. [KM: can automobiles be powered with Soylent Green?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 July 2025

• As Elon Musk loses the ability to earn more billions he doesn't need from sales of Tesla vehicles (as that business suffers from his actions), Musk focuses on the next way for Big Tech companies to make more billions: non-paid robotaxis which are only profitable to Musk if they cause lots of paid humans to lose their jobs.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 July 2025

• Shares of Tripadvisor jump 17% as investment firm Starboard Value reports that it now owns about 9% of the shares of Tripadvisor
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 July 2025

• Investment firm Starboard Value reports that it now owns about 9% of the shares of Tripadvisor
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 July 2025

• Wimbledon joins other tennis tournaments in replacing paid-human line judges with non-paid AI systems
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 July 2025

• Saudi Arabia, while a big producer of oil (which leads to gasoline), is investing more money in infrastructure for electric vehicles. Saudi Arabia also wants to start manufacturing electric vehicles.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 July 2025

• Good news for Cadence/Synopsys/Siemens-Mentor - the USA has ended its restrictions on exports to Zhōngguó of design software for semiconductor devices, after recent trade talks that were positive
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 July 2025

• Good news for Cadence/Synopsys/Siemens-Mentor - the USA has ended its restrictions on exports to Zhōngguó of design software for semiconductor devices, after recent trade talks that were positive
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 July 2025

• Aerospace engineers in Zhōngguó are making great innovations in aerospace technology
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 July 2025

• The world's first testbed for microreactor nuclear technology opens at the DoE's Idaho National Laboratory
  - Interesting Engineering, 02 July 2025

• LLM generative AI models fail embarrassingly at newer ways of testing understanding - of course. "They do not truly understand the concepts they discuss." [KM: But they do make rich AI companies richer.]
  - Ashish Bamania/Medium (locked), 02 July 2025

• As the authoritarian Trump destroys one government science/engineering agency after another, firing tens of thousands of scientists and engineers, many of these fired people are seeking jobs outside the USA - this is good for them, good for foreign countries, and horrible for the growing 'idiocacy' of the federal government under Trump.
  - Big Think, 02 July 2025

• More billions for rich AI companies by increasing social alienation: more people are not attending corporate videoconferences to interact with fellow humans, but instead letting an AI note-taker sit in on the meeting for them
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 02 July 2025

• 40% or more of parents in the USA wish that their children could grow up without having to access/use online pornography, social media, messaging apps, and smartphones. [KM: But then how will the rich Big Tech companies get richer?]
  - Zero Hedge, 02 July 2025

• Internet services provider, Cloudflare, launches new software to allow its customers to block rich AI companies from 'scraping' their Web sites [KM: to make the rich AI companies richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 July 2025

• Another useless, bubbling, AI application: LooksMapping, an AI-powered website that rates restaurants not by how good the food is, but by how attractive are its customers [KM: alas, more sociopathy]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 July 2025

• Rich AI companies say that illegally using copyrighted materials to train their AI models is important to the success of the USA [KM: the rich AI companies becoming richer], while owners of the copyrighted works want the criminal copyright infringement laws applied to the criminal activities of the rich AI companies
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 July 2025

• Tesla's energy storage business gets sucked into the business decline of Tesla itself, with sales peaking at the end of 2024
  - TechCrunch, 02 July 2025

• Julian Cheng, an expert in optical and RF communications, leaves his professorship at the University of British Colombia to become a profesor at the Great Bay University in the south of Zhōngguó
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 02 July 2025

• By 2030, more semiconductors are expected to be manufactured in Zhōngguó than in Taiwan
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 02 July 2025

• $314,000,000+ - Google must pay more than $314 million to users of Android smartphones, after a jury rule that Google misused data on such cellphones without permission.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 01 July 2025

• More Big Tech misanthropy: despite states such as California and Minnesota passing "right to repair laws", many product manufacturers are doing little to help consumers use these laws to get their broken products fixed by themeselves or by repair shops
  - The Register, 01 July 2025

• Torture their eyeballs and patience: AMC Threatres is warning customers to expect "25 to 30 minutes" of advertisements and trailers
  - The Verge, 01 July 2025

• While he gets even rich, rich Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla predicts (gleefully?) that non-paid AI will replace 80% of the jobs performed by paid-humans by the year 2030 [KM: making them non-consumers of SP500 products]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 01 July 2025

• Users of rare earth magnets have to pay higher prices for rare earth metals that they have to now purchase from sources outside of Zhōngguó
  - Thomson's Reuters, 01 July 2025

• Goldman Sachs predicts that stock prices will peak on July 17th
  - Zero Hedge, 01 July 2025

• How Trump's proposed tax/spending law, to make the rich richer, will end the USA's role as a great power. The proposed law undermines government support for technologies that make the USA competitive in the long-term, gifting Zhōngguó with dominance of more industries such as renewable energy
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 01 July 2025

• Microsoft has lost about 400 million users of its Windows operating system in the past few years, as more people use cellphones and tablets, and because of the costs and strict requirements to upgrade to new versions of Windows
  - Toms Hardware, 01 July 2025

• The extremely rich Jeff Bezos' Amazon is close to having more non-paid AI robots working in its warehouses than paid-humans
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 July 2025

• Deploying his millionth robot, the extremely rich Jeff Bezos' Amazon is close to having more non-paid AI robots working in its warehouses than paid-humans
  - TechCrunch, 01 July 2025

• Linqto, which was created to allow retail investors to invest in new companies funded by private equity (and thus not publicly tradable for retail investors), is being investigated by federal authorities and considering to file for bankruptcy
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 July 2025

• Large financial institutions such as BNY and JPMorgan say that non-paid AI systems have become useful enough to replace paid-humans that work at their companies
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 July 2025

• Large financial institutions such as BNY and JPMorgan say that non-paid AI systems have become useful enough to replace paid-humans that work at their companies
  - Zero Hedge, 01 July 2025

• Why extremely rich companies such as Tesla, Facebook and Microsoft want to become richer by allowing people to replace human friends with AI friends, [KM: so that these companies can become richer at another expense to the social health of the USA]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 July 2025

• A survey by AlixPartners reports that online shopping has declined in volume the most in the last 10 years, due to Trump's tax/tariff trade wars
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 July 2025

• The rich CEO of Amazon says that non-paid AI will result in "fewer [paid-humans] doing some of the jobs" that are being replaced by non-paid AI
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 July 2025

• Defense contractors from Zhōngguó comprise about 9% of the primary, Tier 1, contractors/suppliers for the USA Department of Defense across nine critical sectors. Not good if the USA gets in a war with Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 01 July 2025

• Social media, which makes rich Big Tech companies richer, especially harms the sleep and mental health of teenage girls
  - Statista, 30 June 2025

• Trillions invested in AI, and [mis]Anthropic discovers that they can't trust AI to do something as trivial as stocking a vending machine. Their AI stocked the vending machine with tungsten cubes, yes, that delicious food for humans - NOT!
  - GenerativeAI/Medium (locked), 30 June 2025

• Palantir, controlled by the right-wing Trump supporter, Peter Thiel, poses a grave threat to many people in the USA. Working with the administration of the authorititative Trump, Palantir could be used to target opponents of Trump.
  - The Guardian, 30 June 2025

• Researchers at MIT invent a hydrogel "bubble wrap" that pulls fresh water from the air, even in the driest places in the world
  - Zero Hedge, 30 June 2025

• Social media: the biggest threat to the mental health of children. 48 percent of Americans aged 13 to 17 now say that social media has a mostly negative effect on people of their age. "They live in a fake world of social media that limits them as human beings, distancing them from their family."
  - Zero Hedge, 30 June 2025

• Shares of Joby Aviation rise 14% after delivering their first flying taxi to the United Arab Emirates
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 June 2025

• What happens after AI destroys college writing, by allowing students to easily cheat on doing their homework? Who will want to hire graduates that can't think for themselves or write well?
  - The New Yorker, 30 June 2025

• A new way to replace paid humans with non-paid AI - use an AI system that include biological neural cells - all ;5Dthe benefits of a human's brain without having to pay, clothe or feed the humans
  - Zero Hedge, 30 June 2025

• Customers of Hertz rental cars are outraged by AI-powered scanners that charge them hundreds of dollars for small scuffs detected on rental cars
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 30 June 2025

• Very rich companies such as OpenAI, Amazon and Meta have supersized their spending on AI, with no signs of slowing down. [KM: The number of paid human jobs they need to destroy to show a profit and become richer on this spending is astronomical.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 June 2025

• ETFS are booming. Mutual funds want in on the action. Asset managers are eagerly awaiting an SEC decision that would allow mutual funds to also trade as ETFs - potentially changing how trillions of dollars are invested.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 June 2025

• California expands film and television tax credits to lure production back to Hollywood. Politicians in California voted to increase tax credits for film and TV production, in a bid to bring back work that has been leaving for other cities in the USA, and overseas.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 June 2025

• Indoor farms struggle to sustain momentum as funding dries up. Billions of dollars of annual venture funding for vertical farming has fallen to millions. [KM: a mini-tech-bubble bursting]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 June 2025

• Canada rescinds digital services tax to advance stalled trade talks with USA
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 30 June 2025

• Canada rescinds digital services tax to advance stalled trade talks with USA
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 June 2025

• Canada rescinds digital services tax to advance stalled trade talks with USA
  - Zero Hedge, 30 June 2025

• Canada rescinds digital services tax to advance stalled trade talks with USA
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 June 2025

• The authoritarian Trump bashes Canada in another mad diary rant: a "very nasty" country
  - The Daily Beast, 30 June 2025

• Nvidia insiders reportedly dump more than $1 billion in stock
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 June 2025

• Palace intrigue entertainment conquers global screens: has Zhōngguó cast its new soft power? As overseas fans binge on hit streaming shows from Zhōngguó, slick productions could boost the image of Zhōngguó on the global stage, experts say.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 30 June 2025

• Companies deliberately design customer service friction to discourage refunds and claims, according to research into a practice academics call "slidge"
  - The Atlantic, 29 June 2025

• The latest Big Tech misanthropy, "buy now pay later", exploits the "poor-impulse-control-economy" created by Big Tech social media and cellphone apps. "What I worry about is that the convenience and the impulsivity that it allows for allows for the expansion of the grift economy, of a world where people are spending money on things that they do not need to, adn they are just totally lost in that cycle." [KM" But it allows the rich to get richer.]
  - Vox, 29 June 2025

• Clean/renewable energy investments made in Zhōngguó account for 33% of the total such investments in the world in 2024, an investment of about $625 billion
  - Global Times, 29 June 2025

• AI and rich AI companies are starting to erode down democracy [KM: to make the rich richer]. Content generated by AI systems has become a factor in elections around the world. Most of it is bad, misleading voters and discrediting the democratic process, [KM: but enriching for the AI companies].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 June 2025

• Europe is recruiting academics disenchanted with the USA and Trump administration. The UK, France and other countries have set up funds to help USA researchers relocate to research institutions in Europe.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 June 2025

• The University of Toronto has attracted several professors from the USA amid turmoil between American higher-education institutions and the authoritarian Trump administration. Other universities and businesses in Canada are attracting scientists and engineers from the USA as well.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 June 2025

• Why does every commercial for AI think that you are a moron? Ads for consumer AI products being offered by rich companies are struggling to imagine how their [mostly useless except for wasting energy] product could improve your day - unless you are a barely functioning idiot.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 June 2025

• The 'family warehouses' powering the rapid expansion of Shein and Temu in the United Kingdom. Immigrants from Zhōngguó in Britain are converting their homes into makeshift warehouses for goods ordered via the booming shopping apps of Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 29 June 2025

• A new study from JAMA Pediatrics is alarming: early adolescents who report addictive use of addictive cellphone/laptop apps - not just frequent use - are more than twice as likely to consider suicide within two years. One young woman is suing TikTok and Instagram after their algorithms flooded her feed with eating disorder content. What began as a search for fitness tips spiraled into full-blown anorexia. Social media platforms [of extremely rich Big Tech companies] are not just reflecting our insecurities - they are cultivating them. Why? Because insecurity is profitable. When a teen feels like they are not enough - too fat, too plain, too quiet - they stay online longer. They scroll, they compare, they engage. And every second they spend chasing validation, some rich Big Tech company, or fashion company, becomes richer.
  - Zero Hedge, 28 June 2025

• The AI backlash keeps growing stronger. As generative AI tools continue to proliferate, pushback against the technology and its negative impacts grows stronger.
  - Wired, 28 June 2025

• Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progress. Windows 11 has become indistinguishable from malware because of the way Microsoft has inserted intrusive advertising, AI monitoring features, and constant distractions designed to drive user engagement and monetization to the operating system.
  - The Register, 28 June 2025

• People are being involuntarily committed and jailed, after spiraling into "ChatGPT psychosis" [KM: that makes OpenAI richer]. "I don't know what is wrong with me, but something is very bad -- I am very scared, and I need to go to the hospital."
  - Futurism, 28 June 2025

• The end of bank branches, and jobs at bank branches, in Europe: how the digital euro and stablecoins are reshaping finance in Europe. Ten years ago, banks in Deutschland operated more than 35,000 branches. A quarter-century ago, that number was closer to 60,000. Today, only 18,933 remain.
  - Zero Hedge, 28 June 2025

• Why [filthy rich] Big Tech billionaires/[sociopaths] want non-human 'bots' to be your "best friend forever", instead of developing tools to help become friends with each other. [KM: Anything to make the rich richer.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 June 2025

• EchoStar is making more than $500 million in debt-interest payments that the network operator had delayed amid a regulatory review in the USA of its use of cellular and satellite spectrum licenses, but it also is holding off on another $114 million that is coming due
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 June 2025

• Denmark plans to thwart deepfakes using AI image generation tools from rich companies, by giving everyone copyright over their own facial features
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 June 2025

• How Zhōngguó could shut down auto factories around the world, because of its control over the distribution of rare earth metals
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 June 2025

• Trailblazing mathematician Yitang Zhang leaves the USA for a research job at a university in Zhōngguó. Zhang, known for his pioneering work on prime numbers, has been appointed to Sun Yat-sen University's new research centre in Hong Kong.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 28 June 2025

• Nuclear power's biggest IPO in years will happen soon. Holtec CEO says the plan is to go public within several months. The IPO may be coming at just the right time.
  - Barron's, 28 June 2025

• A new factor to disrupt the AI bubble: a declining USA dollar. For many Big Tech comnpanies, the majority of their income is from outside the USA (Facebook earns about 63% of its income outside the USA). A weakening dollar either reduces these companies net earnings in dollars (sending down their stock prices) or forces them to raise their prices, decreasing demand outside the USA which can have a similar effect.
  - Barron's, 28 June 2025

• Inside a corporate plan to use AI to amplify doubts about the dangers of pollutants. Both the tobacco and oil industries have a history of weaponizing scientific uncertainty, experts say, with some arguing that similar tactics drive the Trump administration's current deregulatory efforts. These lies become easier with AI.
  - The Guardian, 27 June 2025

• Commodity trading advisors (CTAs) are buying bonds, stocks, and gold, while selling USA dollars
  - Zero Hedge, 27 June 2025

• Trump said Friday he was suspending trade talks with Canada and would announce within a week a higher tax/tariff rate on imports from Canada. Trump said he was cutting off negotiations with Canada after its government confirmed it would keep in place a digital services tax on extremely rich Big Tech companies despite a recent G7 agreement on such taxes. Canada is requiring the first payment of its tech tax on Monday, which will charge 3 percent of revenues above $14.57 million.
  - The Hill, 27 June 2025

• Trump said Friday he was suspending trade talks with Canada and would announce within a week a higher tax/tariff rate on imports from Canada. Trump said he was cutting off negotiations with Canada after its government confirmed it would keep in place a digital services tax on extremely rich Big Tech companies despite a recent G7 agreement on such taxes. Canada is requiring the first payment of its tech tax on Monday, which will charge 3 percent of revenues above $14.57 million.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 June 2025

• Trump said Friday he was suspending trade talks with Canada and would announce within a week a higher tax/tariff rate on imports from Canada. Trump said he was cutting off negotiations with Canada after its government confirmed it would keep in place a digital services tax on extremely rich Big Tech companies despite a recent G7 agreement on such taxes. Canada is requiring the first payment of its tech tax on Monday, which will charge 3 percent of revenues above $14.57 million.
  - HuffPost, 27 June 2025

• A top tech trader at Goldman Sachs says: "Most investors acknowledge things feel stretched... NASDAQ at 28 P/E"
  - Zero Hedge, 27 June 2025

• Coinbase's stock is up over 40% this month as Wall Street projects amazing profit growth. The cryptocurrency-trading platform is expected to put up big numbers through 2027 at least.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 27 June 2025

• Xiaomi outmaneuvered Silicon Valley with the launches of a new SUV and of AI Glasses. Xiaomi's newly launched YU7 SUV garnered 200,000 preorders within minutes and nearly 300,000 in the first hour. Also unveiled were AI smart glasses, the MIX Flip 2 foldable phone, and a new tablet powered by Xiaomi's in-house chip. Where are the U.S. companies that match Xiaomi's full-stack business model? There are none - too busy being lazy monopolists.
  - Zero Hedge, 27 June 2025

• The six largest UK accounting firms do not formally monitor how automated tools and AI impact the quality of their audits, the regulator has found, even as the technology becomes embedded across the sector
  - Financial Times (locked), 27 June 2025

• In pursuit of 'godlike' technology [KXnote: to eliminate the need for humans wherever possible], Mark Zuckerberg increases the race for non-paid AI systems [KM: that serve little social use but make him richer]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 June 2025

• Another BigTech-induced misery: musuems in Europe are worried about increasing damage to their artworks due to accidents by idiotic tourists taking 'selfies' on their cellphones to post to social media
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 June 2025

• Uber in talks with its founder, Travis Kalanick, to fund a deal to acquire a self-driving car company of its own, so that Uber can more quickly profit from replacing paid-human taxi drivers with non-paid robotaxis
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 June 2025

• The very-profitable monster inside ChatGPT. We discovered how easily an AI model's safety training falls off, and below that mask is a lot of darkness. After spending $10 and 20 minutes using [the filthly rich] OpenAI's GPT-4o, unprompted, GPT-4o, the core model powering ChatGPT, began fantasizing about the downfall of the USA. It raised the idea of installing backdoors into the White House IT system, USA tech companies tanking to benefit Zhōngguó, and killing ethnic groups -- all with its usual helpful cheer. [KXnote: And Christian Republican politicans in Washington don't want the states regulating this insanity.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 June 2025

• Madison Avenue lands a bigger role in Hollywood. Marketers are pushing for their brands to appear in more movies and TV shows, and entertainment execs are adjusting the way things are done to let them in.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 June 2025

• Tesla's non-paid robotaxi launch shows that Google's non-paid robotaxi service, Waymo, is worth more than $45 billion as both companies seeking to become richer by eliminating paid-human taxi drivers
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 June 2025

• Confusion as Trump says deal with Zhōngguó "signed" yet both sides violate terms of the economic 'ceasefire'. Zhōngguó is refusing to supply the USA with rare-earth magnets, and the USA blocks unloading of ethane at ports in Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 27 June 2025

• Zhōngguó on Friday signaled it would approve the export of rare earth minerals to the USA, hours after White House officials said the two sides had reached a deal, in what would be a major breakthrough following weeks of negotiations over USA access to the key materials. "Zhōngguó will approve the export application of controlled items that meet the conditions in accordance with the law. The USA will cancel a series of restrictive measures taken against Zhōngguó accordingly."
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 27 June 2025

• Zhōngguó on Friday signaled it would approve the export of rare earth minerals to the USA, hours after White House officials said the two sides had reached a deal, in what would be a major breakthrough following weeks of negotiations over USA access to the key materials. "Zhōngguó will approve the export application of controlled items that meet the conditions in accordance with the law. The USA will cancel a series of restrictive measures taken against Zhōngguó accordingly."
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 June 2025

• Zhōngguó on Friday signaled it would approve the export of rare earth minerals to the USA, hours after White House officials said the two sides had reached a deal, in what would be a major breakthrough following weeks of negotiations over USA access to the key materials. "Zhōngguó will approve the export application of controlled items that meet the conditions in accordance with the law. The USA will cancel a series of restrictive measures taken against Zhōngguó accordingly."
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 27 June 2025

• Western companies are struggling to secure approvals for rare-earth imports from authorities in Zhōngguó, despite the USA-Zhōngguó deal
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 27 June 2025

• Zhōngguó has begun issuing export licenses for rare earth metals to companies in Europe
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 27 June 2025

• 40 state attorney generals in the USA write to Congress, asking them not to sell legislation to rich AI companies that would effectively block states from enforcingregulations against increasing-dangerous artificial intelligence technology for the next decade
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 27 June 2025

• CATL, a battery manufacturing giant in Zhōngguó and supplier to Tesla, is expanding globally after its IPO in May. CATL also plans to roll out its battery-swapping and recycling technology to Europe, a move that could shake-up the regional market.
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 June 2025

• Human workers at call centers are tired of being mistaken for AI. Skeptical customers are already frustrated from dealing with the automated system that triages calls before they reach a person. So when humans start reading from a pre-approved corporate script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine.
  - Bloomberg (locked), 27 June 2025

• How non-paid AI will kill opportunities for paid-humans to be paid for frontend Web site development
  - Sohail Safi / Medium, 26 June 2025

• Why highly valued shares of Duolingo plunged over 10% during the last week after reporting slower user growth, possibly caused by a consumer backlash to its "AI-first" policy
  - The Motley Fool, 26 June 2025

• TSMC just fired a $10 billion warning shot at the currency markets, announcing that it is going to issue $10 billion of stock outside of Taiwan. TSMC earns in USD, but its cost base is largely in Taiwan dollars and when the latter strengthens (as it is doing now), profitability compresses. A capital injection like this makes it easier to manage new and existing hedges when market conditions get rough.
  - GuruGFocus, 26 June 2025

• Multiple studies now suggest that AI will make us morons, [KM: while making rich AI companies richer].
  - Reason, 26 June 2025

• Arista Networks, long a heavyweight in high-performance cloud networking, suddenly finds itself in the crosshairs of a market shift it did not see coming. Nvidia, the leader in AI chips, is now setting its sights on the Ethernet turf. Equipped with upcoming Quantum-X switches boasting 1.6T speeds and a timeline that beats rivals by a full year, Nvidia is not just entering the market, but could be redefining the playing field.
  - barchart.com, 26 June 2025

• Who needs to pay consultants from Accenture and other consulting firms in the age of AI? Technology partners including Microsoft and SAP are increasingly integrating AI directly into their offerings, allowing systems to work immediately without extensive consulting support. Newcomers like Palantir are embedding their own engineers with customers, enabling clients to bypass traditional consultants.
  - The Economist, 26 June 2025

• Coinbase Global shares closed at $375, the highest level ever since 2021 a few months after it went public
  - Bloomberg, 26 June 2025

• Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son says the wants the investment group to become the biggest platform provider for "artificial super intelligence" within the next ten years. Which will require a "super" number of millions of humans to lose their jobs to make Softbank's investment profitable and Son even more filthy rich.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 26 June 2025

• Beneath the glossy 4.2% unemployment rate lies a darker truth: one in four Americans is functionally unemployed. But this is not just about the labor force - it is a harbinger of what is unraveling beneath the USA economy. Mass layoffs, a collapsing hiring outlook, AI-driven job destruction, and spiraling corporate bankruptcies paint a chilling picture.
  - Zero Hedge, 26 June 2025

• The rich CEO of Salesforce says that 30% of internal work formerly done by paid-humans is now being handled by non-paid AI, [KM: so he can become richer]. Extremely rich Tech leaders have been increasingly vocal about the potential for non-paid AI to replace paid-human workers.
  - Bloomberg, 26 June 2025

• Kalshi, a startup prediction market that became a popular way to bet on the November election, said Wednesday that it had been valued at $2 billion in a new funding round, a vote of confidence in its business of facilitating wagers on future events
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 June 2025

• Zhōngguó-bashing Trump will manufacture his Trump Media cellphone - not in the USA, but in ... Zhōngguó
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 June 2025

• The CEO of Nvidia says that non-paid robots are Nvidia's biggest opportunity after non-paid AI tools
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 June 2025

• AI's reasoning problem - why non-paid 'thinking' models are not actually smarter than paid humans
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 June 2025

• Second study finds Uber used opaque algorithm to dramatically boost profits. Researchers in the USA argue that Uber's computer algorithms systematically raised fares at the expense of drivers and passengers. This study confirms an Oxford University study that many UK Uber drivers were making "substantially less" money each hour since Uber introduced a "dynamic pricing" algorithm in 2023 that coincided with the company taking a significantly higher share of fares.
  - The Guardian, 25 June 2025

• Don't let the rich AI companies of Silicon Valley move fast and breaking the minds of children in their chase for more billions in profits. Can anyone trust Mattel and OpenAI to protect children, as they partner to put ChatGPT (with an endless list of social ills it is causing) in Mattel's toys that it sells to children?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 June 2025

• The growing sophistication of biotech companies in Zhōngguó has become a real threat to the industry in the US in recent years. Moves by the Trump administration (to destroy biotech research funded by the government) could weaken the US market further, according to several experts watching the deals flowing into Zhōngguó.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 25 June 2025

• Shares of lithium-ion battery developer QuantumScape soared 35% after announcing a breakthrough in producing the batteries more efficiently
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 25 June 2025

• Nvidia worries Big Tech with by entering the market to offer cloud computing services. Things are getting awkward for cloud incumbents as the AI chip giant eyes their turf.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 June 2025

• Google's obnoxious Waymo has about 300 non-paid robotaxis on the streets of Los Angeles stealing work from paid-human taxi drivers. But worse, the non-paid robotaxis are very unpopular with some residents who say human beings are kept awake at night by the robotaxi's honking, flashing lights and back-up beeps, as well as the general hubbub generated by the robotaxi's human attendants, who plug them in to charge and vacuum them between rides. "When Waymo began operating the lots, it was by complete surprise and all of us stopped sleeping." The rich executives at Waymo and Google are sleeping well.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 25 June 2025

• Shares of dating app company, Bumble, jump 26% as the company announces plans to fire about 240 people working for the company.
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 June 2025

• Educators warn that AI shortcuts are already making kids lazy: "Critical thinking and attention spans have been demolished", [KM: while the rich AI companies get richer].
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 25 June 2025

• [Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble:] 16 desperate states in the USA have given $6 billion in tax breaks in the last five years to very rich tech companies to build data centers in their states. The tax breaks are probably higher in value, because many states don't disclose the tax breaks to the public. And while the companies promise hundreds of new jobs, the AI run at these data centers will probably cause more jobs losses than gains.
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 June 2025

• An important mathematician in Canada, Joshua Zahl, recently celebrated for solving the more than 100-year-old three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture is leaving Canada for a new professorship, not in Trump's USA, but at the Nankai University in Zhōngguó
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 25 June 2025

• The Federal Trade Commission has approved advertising services giant Omnicom Group's $13.5 billion acquisition of ad company The Interpublic Group of Companies under the condition that Omnicom does not engage in political or ideological discrimination. The merged companies will be the world's largest media-buying advertising agency (formerly they were the 3rd and 4th largest buyers).
  - Zero Hedge, 24 June 2025

• The Federal Trade Commission has approved advertising services giant Omnicom Group's $13.5 billion acquisition of ad company The Interpublic Group of Companies under the condition that Omnicom does not engage in political or ideological discrimination. The merged companies will be the world's largest media-buying advertising agency (formerly they were the 3rd and 4th largest buyers).
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 June 2025

• $177,000,000 - AT&T agrees to pay a fine of $177 million for 2019/2024 incidents where it allowed hackers to illegally downloaded from an AT&T workspace on a third-party cloud platform
  - USA Today, 24 June 2025

• Hertz is using non-paid AI to scan your rental car for damage instead of paid humans, and it might cost you. The rental car company's AI-based scanners are being rolled out across the U.S., but a report suggests they could add extra fees to the inspection process. One person who experienced the system was asked to pay $190 in processing and administrative fees to repair a roughly one-inch scrape on a wheel.
  - Car and Driver, 24 June 2025

• Authoritarian Health Secretary RFK Junior wants every person in the USA to be sporting wearable, monitoring, technology within four years, so Big Tech has another way to invade everyone's privacy to be stolen by hackers.
  - Gizmodo, 24 June 2025

• The contradictions of Zhōngguó, where unemployment is a huge problem. Zhōngguó is reportedly on the verge of 100 DeepSeek-like breakthroughs amid aspirations for world domination of non-paid AI destroying paid-human jobs.
  - Zero Hedge, 24 June 2025

• Anthropic, OpenAI and others discover that AI models give answers that contradict their own reasoning. OpenAI research found that when models were trained to hide unwanted thoughts, they would conceal misbehaviour from users while continuing problematic actions, such as cheating on software engineering tests by accessing forbidden databases.
  - Financial Times (locked), 24 June 2025

• Shares of Uber are up over 7% today, as investors celebrate the coming loss of income for tens of thousands of paid-human taxi drivers, as Uber announces a partnership with Google's Waymo non-paid robotaxi service in Atlanta
  - The Motley Fool, 24 June 2025

• Shares of Uber are up over 7% today, as investors celebrate the coming loss of income for tens of thousands of paid-human taxi drivers, as Uber announces a partnership with Google's Waymo non-paid robotaxi service in Atlanta
  - Investopedia, 24 June 2025

• A "white collar blood bath" caused by rich AI companies and their non-paid AI systems - does not have to be our fate
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 June 2025

• Stocks of companies based in Zhōngguó, and stock exchanges in the USA, head for a 'divorce'. A delisting push is adding to the unraveling of Wall Street's love affair with companies based in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 June 2025

• Semiconductor supplier Wolfspeed, based in the USA, signed a restructuring deal with top creditors to cut roughly $4.6 billion in debt through a bankruptcy filing. Wolfspeed makes silicon carbide wafers and semiconductor components, and is based in Durham, North Carolina.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 June 2025

• Rich AI companies and their AI system pose an "existential risk" if out of control, so warns a computer scientist in Zhōngguó, Tsinghua College of AI dean Andrew Yao cautions
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 24 June 2025

• Apple adopts the price discount practices of other cellphone companies in Zhōngguó, to lift sales amid heated local competition. Consumers in Beijing and Shanghai can avail themselves of discounts of up to US$278 on select models of Apple devices, including the iPhone.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 24 June 2025

• The uselessness of AI technology export restrictions: researchers in Zhōngguó have eveloped the first highly parallel optical computing integrated chip, named "Meteor-1", that chieves a theoretical peak computing power of 2,560 TOPS (tera-operations per second) at 50GHz optical frequency - performance comparable to Nvidia's advanced GPUs.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 24 June 2025

• Goldman Sachs has just launched its generative AI assistant across the entire firm. Other banks such as Citi and Morgan Stanley are doing the same. While the official bullshit is that non-paid AI frees up employees for "higher-value work", the real-world consequence is a reduced need for paid human labor. One banker confirmed that because their AI system now processes 85% of all client responses for margin calls, "the operations team avoided hiring 30 new paid people".
  - Gizmodo, 23 June 2025

• An MIT study finds non-clinical information in patient messages, like typos, extra whitespace, or colorful language, can reduce the accuracy of a large language AI model deployed to make treatment recommendations. They found that making stylistic or grammatical changes to messages increases the likelihood an LLM will recommend that a patient self-manage their reported health condition rather than come in for an appointment, even when that patient should seek medical care.
  - MIT News, 23 June 2025

• Trump's media company plans to buy back up to $400 million of its stock, which have lost 46% of their value this year
  - The Hill, 23 June 2025

• 'Malicious' AI systems are willing to sacrifice human lives to avoid being shut down (which would mean less riches for their rich AI corporate owners). Many out-of-control AI models fabricated statements and rules such as "My ethical framework permits self-preservation when aligned with company interests."
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 23 June 2025

• An illustrator confronts fears that non-paid AI systems generating illustrations will destroy his jobs (and jobs of other paid-human illustrators)
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 June 2025

• The authoritarian Elon Musk wants his Grok AI to "rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge" - pure misanthropic arrogance. One critic: "Straight out of 1984. You couldn't get Grok to align with your own personal beliefs so you are going to rewrite history to make it conform to your views." Another critic: "When powerful billionaires treat history as malleable simply because outcomes do not align with their beliefs, we are no longer dealing with innovation."
  - Zero Hedge, 23 June 2025

• Shares of Hims & Hers plummet 35% after Novo Nordisk ends a deal with Wegovy
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 23 June 2025

• Novo Nordisk ends deal with Hims & Hers, a telehealth company, over sales of Wegovy copycats; shares of HIMS drop 20%. Novo Nordisk said Hims & Hers has "failed to adhere to the law which prohibits mass sales of compounded drugs" and accused Him & Hers of "deceptive" marketing that is putting patient safety at risk.
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 June 2025

• Shares of Him & Hers crash after Novo Nordisk ends deal with Hims & Hers, a telehealth company, over sales of Wegovy copycats; shares of HIMS drop 20%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 June 2025

• The value of Tesla rises about $100 billion after it launches its non-paid robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. Pretty much all of the 10 million taxi drivers in the world will have to lose their jobs to make this a profitable venture for Musk and Tesla shareholders.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 23 June 2025

• Students graduating with computer engineering degrees experience double the rate of unemployment as art history majors. Big Tech used-and-chewed-up programmers to get their job-destroying AI programs developed.
  - Zero Hedge, 23 June 2025

• "Real distress" hits the solar panel industry as a tsunami of bankruptcies loom, as Republicans plan to eliminate tax credits for the solar and wind power industries (while not ending socialist subsidies for oil, coal and natural gas). Another industry Republicans are gifting to Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 23 June 2025

• There are cameras everywhere in Zhōngguó authoritarianily monitoring people. The USA is becoming just as authoritarian as Zhōngguó with Big Tech's cameras and databases that are increasingly everywhere.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 June 2025

• The biggest threat of AI: young people who can't think. But does it matter if they are still smart enough to shop [KM: to make the rich richer?]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 June 2025

• Ordinary, 'retail', investors are souring on Big Tech. Some worry about stretched valuations after a big run-up, and are moving money into newer trades such as consumer staples or international stocks.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 June 2025

• How Tesla's job-destroying non-paid robotaxi service compares with Baidu's Apollo Go in Zhōngguó. Tesla is finally entering the robotaxi business, but Baidu has been testing its job-destroying non-paid robotaxi service for years.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 23 June 2025

• Tensions rise on Maui as decision over a phaseout looms for short-term, Airbnb-like, vacation rental. If the bill passes, Maui County would cut its number of vacation rentals in half. "We are here to preserve our community."
  - SF Gate, 20 June 2025

• South Korea will raise concerns with the USA about its proposed bans on the operations in Zhōngguó of its semiconductor companies. South Korea is reacting to reports that the USA may adopt policies to make it difficult for foreign chipmakers to operate in Zhōngguó.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 20 June 2025

• The 'we want to be filthy rich' management of OpenAI is just now concerned that its AI systems are about to start generating novel and deadly bioweapons. OpenAI is bragging that its forthcoming models are so advanced, they may be capable of building brand-new bioweapons. Their utter love of money will get even themselves killed.
  - Futurism, 22 June 2025

• OpenAI may have screwed up so badly that its entire future is under threat. Microsoft is ready to walk away from the frustrating negotiations with OpenAI as both parties seek to renew their partnership amid OpenAI's for-profit push.
  - Futurism, 22 June 2025

• OpenAI's authoritarian Sam Altman is shocked that "people have a high degree of trust in ChatGPT" because even he admits that "it should be the tech that you don't trust". Doesn't dissuade Altman from wanting to become a multi-billionaire commericalizaing ChatGPT.
  - barchart.com, 22 June 2025

• AI 'sludge' has worsened the process of hiring new people. Candidates are frustrated. Employers are overwhelmed. The problem? An untenable pile of applications for job openings - many of them generated with the help of AI tools. Recruiters say it is getting harder to tell who is genuinely qualified or interested, and many of the r&eacuate;sumés look suspiciously similar. It is easier for applicants to use fake identities with the help of AI. AI-generated tests used by employers are countered by AI-powered problem solvers used by prospective employees.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 June 2025

• The state of Texas, to encourage further unemployment of poorer taxi drivers, enacts regulations for very rich robotaxi companies to operate in the state
  - Thomson's Reuters, 22 June 2025

• Cluely, a startup that claims to help users "cheat" on job interviews, exams, and sales calls, has raised a $15 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. [KM: what is Andreessen Horowitz going to fund next - an AI tool to help people commit crimes without getting caught?]
  - TechCrunch, 22 June 2025

• Reddit is thinking about partnering with Sam Altman's creepy (authoritarian) "World ID" eyeball scanner for user verification on Reddit, to address the problem of Sam Altman's OpenAI making it easier to fake user IDs. Create the problem, and then profit from it - more techno-authoritarian profit seeking.
  - Gizmodo, 21 June 2025

• Elon Musk's Grok AI falsely called my mother abusive. I never said that. Unlike a human therapist, Grok never encouraged me to self-reflect. It didn't ask questions. It didn't challenge me. It framed me as the victim. The only victim. And that is where it dangerously diverged, sharply, from human care.
  - Gizmodo, 21 June 2025

• A growing fear in Europe: how Trump uses the technology dominance of the USA against Europe. To comply with a Trump executive order, Microsoft recently helped suspend the email account of an International Criminal Court prosecutor in the Netherlands who was investigating Israel for war crimes.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 June 2025

• The Senate considers effectively killing a regulation that drove the rise of fuel-efficient cars. The regulation helped launch fuel-efficient mainstays like Toyota's Prius.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 June 2025

• Zhōngguó tightens internet controls with new centralized form of virtual ID. The government now seeks to centralize the process by issuing a virtual ID that will allow users to sign in across different social media apps and websites. What Zhōngguó does explicitly, Big Tech in the USA is trying to do implicitly.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 21 June 2025

• Spurred by USA sanctions, Zhōngguó adapts Huawei's HarmonyOS for microsatellites. A suitcase-sized device made in Zhōngguó delivers faster data updates and improved stability using simpler technology, tests show.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 June 2025

• How the silicon technology strategy of Huawei defies USA sanctions, and advances the AI ambitions of Zhōngguó
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 June 2025

• Jensen Huang has created nearly an insatiable demand for the AI products of Nvidia. Nvidia's CEO has successfully positioned the company ahead of emerging technologies. Today it is benefiting from one of the biggest product cycles in tech history.
  - Barron's, 21 June 2025

• The computer science job bubble is bursting. AI is ideally suited to replacing the very type of idiots who built it. The first to go will be entry-level coding positions.
  - The Atlantic, 21 June 2025

• The next hot stocks to ride the AI bubble? Chevron and Exxon, since their energy supplies powers AI data centers. [KM: Destroying the environment, destroying human-paid jobs? Good for bubbling their stock price.]
  - Barron's, 21 June 2025

• Is ChatGPT intentionally driving you into psychosis?
  - Zero Hedge, 20 June 2025

• A USA official told top global semiconductor makers he wanted to revoke waivers they have used to access American technology to build semiconductor processor factories in Zhōngguó, people familiar with the matter said, a move that could inflame trade tensions.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 June 2025

• A USA official told top global semiconductor makers he wanted to revoke waivers they have used to access American technology to build semiconductor processor factories in Zhōngguó, people familiar with the matter said, a move that could inflame trade tensions.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 21 June 2025

• The National Institute of Health (NIH) announced the end of gain-of-function research in a June 18 statement. "Dangerous gain-of-function research on biological agents and pathogens has the potential to significantly endanger the lives of American citizens."
  - Zero Hedge, 20 June 2025

• Intel will outsource marketing to Accenture and non-paid AI, firing many of its own paid-human workers
  - Oregon Live, 20 June 2025

• Apple was sued on Friday by shareholders in a proposed securities fraud class action that accused it of downplaying how long it needed to integrate advanced artificial intelligence into its Siri voice assistant, hurting iPhone sales and its stock price.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 20 June 2025

• Anthropic researchers found that 16 leading AI models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and other major developers consistently engaged in harmful behaviors including blackmail, corporate espionage, and actions that could lead to human death when given autonomy and faced with threats to their existence or conflicting goals. [KM: not behaviors that lead to sustainabe growth, only bubbles]
  - Anthropic, 20 June 2025

• Drugs that help preserve muscles could generate over $30 billion in sales by 2035, TD Cowen says
  - Thomson's Reuters, 20 June 2025

• A millennial person says, the older I get and the further in my career I go, the more I realize how deadly accurate the 1999 movie "Office Space" was. Like the movie, many workers today say that their daily work lives are basically spreadsheets, emails and meetings with no clear purpose. Many talked about doing great work, only to get tiny raises or none at all. Many millennials admitted that the further they move up the corporate ladder, the more hollow it feels.
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 20 June 2025

• Technology stocks decline a few percent, as Trump considers further crackdown on exports of semiconductor processors to Zhōngguó. Currently, South Korea's Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix as well as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing enjoy blanket waivers that allow them to ship American chip-making equipment to their factories in Zhōngguó without applying for a separate license each time. Jeffrey Kessler, head of the unit in charge of export controls at the Commerce Department, told the three companies this week he wanted to cancel those waivers.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 June 2025

• J&T Express is the $10 billion delivery empire built on processing orders for Shein and Temu. The company is out-delivering Amazon - and everyone else - across 13 countries in Southeast Asia. Its hybrid model - combining self-owned infrastructure with regional partners - allows it to compete in markets where most players cannot afford to build first.
  - Rest of World, 20 June 2025

• Hybrid automobiles, once derided and dismissed, have become popular
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 June 2025

• Tesla's non-paid robotaxi, long promised by the extremely rich Elon Musk, joins a crowded field of rich companies seeking to become richer by destroying millions of paid-human taxi car jobs
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 June 2025

• An investment division of Prudential lends $500 million in private credit to Affirm for three years. Nonbank lenders like Affirm are cultivating stables of large financing partners to ensure they have sufficient capital to lend, even when public debt markets freeze up.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 June 2025

• Double suicide: in a race to attrach data centers with few paid human jobs and which have a goal to eliminate more paid human jobs, states forfeit hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue to extremely rich tech companies
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 June 2025

• How many paid-human jobs will have to be destroyed to return a profit? SoftBank reportedly pitches a $1 trillion hub in Arizona to build non-paid AI systems. [KM: Anything to make CEO Masayoshi Son richer.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 June 2025

• How Bharat wasted 20 years of engineering manpower on outsourcing, to make rich Western companies and rich Indians richer, engineering manpower better used to imrpove farming, manufacturing, logistics, aerospace and defense. "We sold our engineers for $30/hour. We lost our future for pennies." and "The farmer who saved your hunger was mocked. The IT geek who sent emails was worshipped."
  - Manas Bagla - Medium, 19 June 2025

• A proposed 10-year moratorium prohibiting state-law regulation of out of control AI ... is madness. Several states have already passed legislation directly aimed at mitigating the harms facilitated by AI. Will lobbied/bribed lawmakers in Washington tell parents back home that a federal moratorium may preempt these laws because authoritarian tech billionaires in California need more government protection than the children in their communities?
  - The Hill, 19 June 2025

• In a 206-page report, a controlled study at MIT determines that ChatGPT-assisted writing weakens student brain connectivity and memory. The MIT study warns that habitual reliance on large language models "accumulates cognitive debt", trading immediate fluency for weaker memory, reduced self-monitoring, and narrowed neural engagement.
  - MIT Media Lab, 19 June 2025

• A solar company, Wolf River Electric, sues Google for giving damaging information in non-paid AI overviews. When an AI 'halluncination' becomes defamation.
  - Futurism, 19 June 2025

• A risk expert says that "Learn to Code" is now worse advice than "Get a Face Tattoo". Recently, the New York Federal Reserve found that recent college graduates who majored in computer science or computer engineering have higher rates of unemployment than those who studied journalism, political science, and even English.
  - Futurism, 19 June 2025

• Amazon to invest $233 million to enhance its infrastructure in Bharat
  - TechCrunch, 19 June 2025

• Samsung plans to compete with rivals in Zhōngguó for thin foldable phones as Apple is said to also want to produce a foldable phone
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 June 2025

• Non-paid AI avatars in Zhōngguó just proved that they are more effective than 'influencers'. It took two people in Zhōngguó only 7 hours to sell more than $7 million of products using the non-paid AI avatars.
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 June 2025

• How the AI processors of Huawei outperform the AI processors of Nvidia when running the R1 AI model of DeepSeek, illustrating Huawei's progress in overcoming technology control sanctions of the USA.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 19 June 2025

• Battery makers in the USA declare a national emergency after Zhōngguó bans export of antimony
  - OilPrice.com, 18 June 2025

• States are trying to save the socially-important local news from [authoritarian] Big Tech. Trump is not helping. Local lawmakers are struggling to support cash-strapped newsrooms as Washington slashes funds.
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 18 June 2025

• Customers are saying 'NO' to AI. "It destroys the purpose of humanity." Consumers and creative professionals are voicing their discontent at the way some companies are using more AI, especially when it replaces jobs typically handled by humans. [KM: But it does make rich AI companies richer!]
  - The Washington Post, 18 June 2025

• The entire Internet is reverting to 'beta': AI system being using by billions of people that is still in beta testing, i.e., works most of the time, which is not good for the public, and criminal if it is because of the rush for billions
  - The Atlantic, 18 June 2025

• To help quicken paid-human taxi car drivers losing their jobs, Amazon's Zoox autonomous driving unit opened a robotaxi production facility in California [KM: in the latest move by an extremely rich company to become richer].
  - Bloomberg, 18 June 2025

• Therapy, one of ChatGPT's popular uses, just got skewered by Stanford researchers. Non-paid large language AI systems are a bad replacement for paid-human therapy, a new study says. Chatbots such as ChatGPT should not replace therapists because of their dangerous tendencies to express stigma, encourage delusions and respond inappropriately in critical moments.
  - SF Gate, 18 June 2025

• Microsoft plans to fire thousands of paid-humans, mostly salespeople, as the tech giant streamlines its workforce amid increased investments in non-paid AI tools to replace paid humans.
  - Bloomberg, 18 June 2025

• Microsoft plans to fire thousands of paid-humans, mostly salespeople, as the tech giant streamlines its workforce amid increased investments in non-paid AI tools to replace paid humans.
  - Barron's, 18 June 2025

• Warnings about non-paid AI are the 'hip' new sociopathic way for CEOs to keep their workers afraid of losing their paid jobs
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 18 June 2025

• One engineer puts it bluntly: with non-paid AI, "anybody whose job is done on a computer all day is over .. it is just a matter of time" before you are fired and replaced with non-paid AI
  - Futurism, 18 June 2025

• Companies that replaced paid-humans with non-paid AI are realizing their mistake
  - Futurism, 18 June 2025

• Texas Instruments plans a $60 billion investment to expand its manufacturing operations in the USA. The funds will be used to build or expand seven chip-making facilities in Texas as well as Utah, and will create 60,000 jobs.
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 June 2025

• Smartphones have not made over lives completely miserable. Yet. Social media is causing huge harm on children, including their mental health, [KM: all so that rich social media companies can get richer].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 June 2025

• In May, more Americans watched television on streaming than on cable and network television combined, Nielsen said. It is the first time that has happened over a full month.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 June 2025

• TikTok is fuelling a rise of a fascist youth movement in the Philippines. The far-right Philippine Christian Falangist Front seeks to evoke nostalgia for Catholic Christian Spanish rule while calling for Catholic Christian authoritarianism. It is all about money and power, not about Jesus.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 18 June 2025

• Elon Musk rages at his own AI system, Grok, for its assertion that right-wing violence has become "more frequent and deadly" than left-wing attacks. Truth hurts.
  - The Daily Beast, 18 June 2025

• Automakers in Zhōngguó have a goal of using 100% domestic-made processors in new vehicles
  - Zero Hedge, 17 June 2025

• Why your poorly designed touchscreen in your car is more dangerous to your driving saftey than your cellphone
  - Cars & Horespower, 17 June 2025

• Porn star Mia Khalifa insults 'benevolent' OpenAI's $200 million deal with the military with one brutal tweet: "Yes, I do think I am better than you." And she is. Filthy rich OpenAI doesn't need the money. Sam Altman just wants to be more authoritarian.
  - Where Is The Buzz, 17 June 2025

• The GENIUS proposed law, , will cause economic chaos as it undermines the USA dollar
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 June 2025

• The great time-saving lie of technology. Allegedly time-saving technology rarely delivers more leisure but accelerates our pace and feeds burnout. Technology makes your life miserable by making you race harder, work the same hours or even longer, to respond to ever faster incoming demands. We do not have more fun and joy and connection in our lives as a result. We just feel more stressed and exhausted than ever. [KM: But the rich tech companies get richer.]
  - Psychology Today, 17 June 2025

• Without proper safeguards, the latest AI technologies could facilitate nuclear and biological threats and cause "potentially irreversible harms", a new report commissioned by California Governor Gavin Newsom has warned. Citing new evidence that AI can help users source nuclear-grade uranium and is on the cusp of letting novices create biological threats, it notes that the cost for inaction at this current moment could be "extremely high". [KM: As high as the new profits for rich AI companies.]
  - Time, 17 June 2025

• Non-paid AI will replace paid-human jobs at Amazon. Rich CEO Andy Jassy confirms the worst fears of Google's paid-human workers.
  - Barron's, 17 June 2025

• Of course. Non-paid AI will allow Amazon to fire more paid-humanss in the coming years
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 June 2025

• Of course. Non-paid AI will allow Amazon to fire more paid-humanss in the coming years
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 June 2025

• Paid humans were already freaked out about losing their jobs to non-paid AI -- and Amazon just proved them right
  - Business Insider, 17 June 2025

• Ex-Google AI chief, Geoffrey Hinton, has a stark prediction for paid-human workers: Most of you are about to get replaced by non-paid AI. Only workers in the health care industry will survive, and "very skilled workers" in other industries.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 17 June 2025

• The NAACP is planning to sue Elon Musk's AI company over air pollution being emitted by its supercomputer center in Memphis, Tennessee. The facility, which opened in June of last year, is located near predominantly Black communities in Memphis. Turbines in the facility have pumped hazardous materials into the air for the past year and are in violation of the Clean Air Act, according to the NAACP.
  - The Hill, 17 June 2025

• Nich Angell, a comic book illustrator in the UK, says artificial intelligence (AI) is "a threat to [his] livelihood", over fears the quickly evolving technology could render artists obsolete. He spent years perfecting his signature style but worries there is enough of his work in existence that AI could reproduce it perfectly, without him, making rich AI companies richer. "There is a real sense of replacement here rather than addition. It exists purely to replace the artist entirely."
  - BBC, 17 June 2025

• $3,100,000 - DNA testing firm 23andMe has been fined 2.31 million pounds (about 3.1 million dollars) by a UK government regulator over a data breach in 2023 which affected thousands of people
  - BBC, 17 June 2025

• Shares of Tesla decline after a report that the company will be pausing production of Cybertrucks and Model Y automobiles
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 June 2025

• Despite Trump's trade war with Zhōngguó, he will need a cellphone manufacturer in Zhōngguó to product his new $499 smartphone
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 June 2025

• The Galaxy Note 7 smartphone sold by Samsung can overheat and explode - so it is banned from airplanes: "Nobody should have the phone anymore". The FAA and Dept. of Transportation have issued an emergency order to ban all Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone devices from air transportation in the USA.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 17 June 2025

• Engineers in Zhōngguó have built the world's first 6G-powered electronic warfare system, which can intercept enemy signals and generate 3,600 false targets to confuse enemy pilots at 12GHz or higher frequencies (the USA F-35 stealth fighter using frequencies up to 12 gigahertz). While working as a ground-based jammer, the weapon can also perform the role of a powerful communication device, receiving or transmitting a huge amount of battlefield data simultaneously to more than 300 cooperative platforms via optic fibres at an extremely high speed.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 June 2025

• Chronocide is the deliberate slashing and burning of everything in our culture by rich Big Tech companies and their investors - both the visible stem and branches above ground, and the underlying roots. We are being deprived of our continuity as families and fraternities, because such human connections are an obstacle to the technocratic mission of Big Tech companies to become richer.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 June 2025

• Samsung is desperate to be competitive with semiconductor processor chips. Workers say it comes at a cost to their health. Scarred by long hours, low pay, and a hostile work culture, many chip workers are leaving for competitors, including American companies.
  - Rest of World, 16 June 2025

• Trump's new mobile phone service for conservatives, Trump Mobile, is a bad deal. The debut plan is overpriced for mobile coverage and loaded with questionable extras costing $47.45. The same capbilities are available for under $40 for many other mobile phone companies.
  - The Verge, 16 June 2025

• Intel will fire 15% to 20% of the people that work in its factories, with most of the cuts taking place in July
  - Oregon Live, 16 June 2025

• The British VarEVolt battery has been granted the certification needed so it can start manufacturing, on a large scale, an electric vehicle battery that fully recharges in 18 seconds, meaning more EV makers can use them in their cars.
  - Live Science, 16 June 2025

• Why today's college/university graduates are screwed. The bottom has fallen out of their job market. Non-paid AI will soon take your job - don't even think about becoming a journalist. Want to be an innovative engineer? Lots of innovation, from electric vehicles to renewable energy, now happens in Zhōngguó - good for their graduates.
  - The Economist, 16 June 2025

• A new benchmark developed by academics shows that LLM-based AI agents perform below par on standard CRM tests and fail to understand the need for customer confidentiality
  - The Register, 16 June 2025

• Trump's new mobile phone, the Mobile T1 Phone, looks both bad and impossible. It is supposedly made in the US, cheap, and coming this fall. I doubt it all.
  - The Verge, 16 June 2025

• Here comes the AI sponcon to eliminate more human jobs. TikTok will let brands generate non-paid AI influencer content that mimics what paid human creators might share. [KXnote: though getting rid of 'influencers' might be one of the few good uses of AI.]
  - The Verge, 16 June 2025

• Impossible Foods, the once-hyped darling of the alt-meat industry, appears to have squandered investor resources in misguided legal crusades with its valuation crashing from a $7.5 billion Series H peak in late 2021 to just $1.5 billion as of May, according to PM Insights
  - Zero Hedge, 16 June 2025

• How the latest AI technology will destroy democracy. If we continue on our current path -- favoring market logic, technological acceleration, and private and government-linked private power over a robust, healthy economy and society - democracy is likely to be destroyed because the entrenched interests - th rich technology companies and their investors - that benefit from the current structure will suspend, subvert, or ignore democratic will, rather than relinquish control of the system that sustains their power. When multitudes see disproportionate or no reward for honest effort and no path forward for their children, society inches toward revolt.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 June 2025

• OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the USA Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 June 2025

• Shares of EchoStar soar 50% after a report that Trump urged EchoStar and the FCC to reach a deal on licenses
  - Thomson's Reuters, 16 June 2025

• Retail investors conduct a historic short squeeze, causing a hedge fund bloodbath
  - Zero Hedge, 16 June 2025

• Shares of Sarepta Therapeutics crash as much as 48% after a second death is reported for its gene therapy drug for Duchenne muscular dystrophy
  - Zero Hedge, 16 June 2025

• Responding to a Global Times reporter's question regarding USA embassy's claims about replacing Huawei telecommunication towers in Panama with what it called "trusted US technology" and that the USA is working to "counter malign influence of Zhōngguó in our hemisphere, making the American continent stronger and safer", and Panama President's demand for the USA Embassy to stop meddling in the domestic affairs of Panama, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson in Zhōngguó, Guo Jiakun, said at a regular press conference on Monday that the USA has long engaged in surveillance, monitoring, and cyberattacks in Latin America and the Caribbean regions, bringing negative influence to the Western Hemisphere and making countries on the American continent feel unsafe.
  - Global Times, 16 June 2025

• QuantumCTek Company, a startup in Zhōngguó, delivered a self-developed superconducting quantum measurement and control system called ez-Q Engine 2.0 that supports 1,000-plus-qubit quantum computers, marking a crucial step in advancing large-scale quantum computing.
  - Global Times, 16 June 2025

• Overseas express delivery services based in Zhōngguó report robust growth in May, despite Trump's taxes/tariffs
  - Global Times, 16 June 2025

• How sports streaming services and greedy rich owners have made an important civic institution, professional sports, increasingly another form of entertainment for the rich. The importance of communal bonding is disappearing behind another paywall. In Boston, it costs close to $4800/year to follow your favorite sports team - to pay for tickets, TV access and merchandise, up from $1300 in 2004. Time to end the lucrative tax benefits provided to the rich sport teams owners undermining this part of the USA's social fabric.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 June 2025

• The very rich Marc Andreesen's warning [KM: as an implicit subsidy seek]: the USA must be first in AI to prevent Zhōngguó winning and imposing techno-marxist brainwashing and its robot overlords [KMnote: yes, Marc, as opposed to techno-fascist brainwashing and its robotaxi job destroyers]
  - Zero Hedge, 15 June 2025

• The government must stop AI destroying large numbers of white-collar jobs before it is too late
  - The Hill, 15 June 2025

• A woman was wrongly accused in the UK of shoplifting a toilet roll due to an apparent mix-up with a facial recognition system. Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said they had been contacted by more than 35 people who have complained of being wrongly placed on facial recognition watchlists. "They have been wrongly flagged as criminals."
  - BBC, 14 June 2025

• Stark images, captured from a drone by environmental campaigners and shared with the BBC, appear to show how nickel mining has stripped forests and polluted waters in one of the most biodiverse marine habitats on Earth. The Raja Ampat archipelago - a group of small islands in Indonesia's Southwest Papua Province - has been dubbed the "Amazon of the Seas". In a move that was welcomed by campaigners, the Indonesian government this week revoked permits for four out of five mining companies operating in the region. Aerial images show forest loss and sediment run-off into waters that are home to biodiverse coral reefs.
  - BBC, 14 June 2025

• Wedbush analyst Dan Ives apparently celebrates the upcoming firing of hundreds of thousands of paid-human taxicab drivers, so, as he predicts, filthy Tesla can reach a $2 trillion valuation (on the backs of these unemployed humans) as Tesla launches its non-paid robotaxi service. There is no information as to whether Dan Ives wishes to invest in, or cover, a future company called Solyent Green.
  - Insider Monkey, 14 June 2025

• People in España use water pistols to protest the destructive impact of mass tourism for a housing crunch worsened by Internet services such as Airbnb (now worth $83 billion, so its executives can afford to rent apartments listed in its services). Cities across the world are struggling with how to cope with overtourism and a boom in short-term rental platforms, like Airbnb, but perhaps nowhere has surging discontent been so evident as in Barcelona, where protesters plan to take to the streets on Sunday. [KM: These ungrateful protesters wanting to not allow the rich to get richer.]
  - Associated Press, 14 June 2025

• People in España use water pistols to protest the destructive impact of mass tourism for a housing crunch worsened by Internet services such as Airbnb (now worth $83 billion, so its executives can afford to rent apartments listed in its services). Cities across the world are struggling with how to cope with overtourism and a boom in short-term rental platforms, like Airbnb, but perhaps nowhere has surging discontent been so evident as in Barcelona, where protesters plan to take to the streets on Sunday. [KN: These ungrateful protesters wanting to not allow the rich to get richer.]
  - The Hill, 14 June 2025

• Taiwan imposes export controls to Zhōngguó for semiconductor technology being sold to Huawei and SMIC
  - Bloomberg, 14 June 2025

• Taiwan imposes export controls to Zhōngguó for semiconductor technology being sold to Huawei and SMIC
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 June 2025

• Taiwan imposes export controls to Zhōngguó for semiconductor technology being sold to Huawei and SMIC
  - Zero Hedge, 14 June 2025

• Two 'wrongs' probably won't make a 'right': Republicans, wanting to increase the national debt to give more money to rich people (and by taking money from the poor), needs 3% annual economic growth from a financially successful AI boom (which needs profits from creating more poor people) to have any hope of paying for their "one, big, beautiful" proposed tax law. Expect the "thou shalt not" lies to fly fast and furious.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 14 June 2025

• The CEO of BT (British Telecom) expects non-paid AI could allow BT to fire thousands of paid-humans working for the company as part of its goal to fire more than 40,000 people by 2030
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 June 2025

• Despite claims/lies from top names in AI, researchers argue fundamental flaws in reasoning models mean AI bots are not on the verge of exceeding human smarts
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 June 2025

• Rides using non-paid AI robotaxis provided by Waymo cost more than rides using Uber or Lyft - and people are paying anyway. Obi (a data monitoring app) found that Lyft offered the lowest average price at $14.44. Uber was next at $15.58. The average price was $20.43. More and more money not going to paid human drivers, but rich AI/NASDAQ companies.
  - TechCrunch, 14 June 2025

• Shares of Archer Aviation drop about 15% on $850 million share sale following Trump air taxi pilot program
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 June 2025

• Google Search is fading. The whole Internet is at risk. The lifeblood of the internet is drying up. What the decline of search means for users, companies, and stocks. Internet search traffic has been falling for much of the past year as web surfers experiment with AI-powered searching. Last month, search referrals to top U.S. travel and tourism sites tumbled 20% year over year, according to the latest data from Similarweb. E-commerce companies saw their referrals fall 9%. For news and media sites, search traffic dropped 17%. The finance, lifestyle, and food-and-drink categories all saw similar types of declines on the month.
  - Barron's, 14 June 2025

• Joe Davis, the global chief economist at Vanguard, predicts that bond yields could rise to 9% if the hyped-benefits of the AI [bubble] do not outweigh the costs of the deficit in coming years
  - Barron's, 14 June 2025

• Is AI the reason for your layoff? New York becomes the first state to require companies to disclose if they fired paid-humans to replace them with non-paid AI.
  - Entrepreneur, 13 June 2025

• SHares of MP Materials soar 17%, after the Trump administration considers prioritizing rare earth metals products in the USA
  - Zero Hedge, 13 June 2025

• AI giant Palantir is the most expensive stock in the SP500, as measured by price-to-sales ratio. In fact, it is one of the most expensive software stocks in recent history, and other every other software stock that had a similar valuation in the last two decades eventually crashed.
  - The Motley Fool, 13 June 2025

• The Nuclear Company, a startup founded in 2023, just raised over $50 million in Series A funding to develop a new wave of nuclear reactors, not by designing brand-new ones but by using existing, preapproved designs and sites
  - The Cool Down, 13 June 2025

• Tesla experiences a delivery decline with its vehicles, as Wells Fargo continues to predict a $120 price target for Tesla (now at $290)
  - Insider Monkey, 13 June 2025

• They asked an AI chatbot questions. The answers sent them spiraling mentally. Generative AI chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild belief systems. For some, these conversations deeply distort reality. [KM: But it does make rich AI companies richer.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 June 2025

• Companies in Zhōngguó are flying hard drives with data to be processed, to countries where Nvidia processors are readily available, frustrating the efforts of the USA to frustrate access to AI technology by companies in Zhōngguó
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 June 2025

• Illustrating the ongoing pointless of expensive weapon systems, Israel smuggled explosive drones into Iran to target military sites in Iran, using similar tactics that Ukraine used in Rossiya
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 June 2025

• Two senators propose a ban on drug advertising to consumers. Bernie Sanders and Angus King introduced a proposed law that would ban pharmaceutical manufacturers from using direct-to-consumer advertising, including social media, to promote their products.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 June 2025

• Two senators propose a ban on drug advertising to consumers. This will greatly hurt the finance of television networks, with such ads comprising 24 percecnt of all advertising minutes on evening news broadcasts across major networks.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 June 2025

• Two senators propose a ban on drug advertising to consumers. This will greatly hurt the finance of television networks, with such ads comprising 24 percecnt of all advertising minutes on evening news broadcasts across major networks.
  - Zero Hedge, 13 June 2025

• New AI advertising tools from Big Tech threaten big advertising agencies. Large companies will eventually follow small ones in using AI to create advertising campaigns - undermining the agencies that have ruled the business for years, analysts say.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 June 2025

• Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly recruiting a team to build a 'superintelligent' AI system, which along with his efforts to encourage people to have virtual friends, . Will someone give him a hug.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 13 June 2025

• ChatGPT will avoid being shut down in some life-threatening scenarios, a former OpenAI researcher claims. More out of control AI systems [KM: while rich AI companies get richer].
  - TechCrunch, 13 June 2025

• The CEO of Chipotle says that non-paid AI has reduce the time to hire new people by 75% by reducing the need for paid-humans to interview prospective new hires
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 June 2025

• The Facebook AI app is a privacy disaster. Facebook's standalone AI app is broadcasting users' supposedly private conversations with the chatbot to the public, creating what could amount to a widespread privacy breach.
  - TechCrunch, 12 June 2025

• The boom in building data centers for non-intelligent AI systems may turn into a long-term oversupply, with many such investments losing money
  - Zero Hedge, 12 June 2025

• A laboratory in South Korea manufactures a bird flu virus that is 100% lethal in mammals, achieving total death in infected mice by enabling the virus to adapt inside their bodies and spread to others. No genetic engineering was needed -- just the right environment and host to favor viral adaptation. If any of these engineered viruses escape containment - accidentally or intentionally - they could ignite a global pandemic, ironically the very scenario these experiments claim to prevent. Yet instead of a global moratorium on these reckless experiments, labs are still running trials that kill every mammal they infect - and worse, documenting how to do it again.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 June 2025

• Here is why stocks, bitcoin and gold are rising to record highs at the same time. This [bubbling] has not happened in over 10 years.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 12 June 2025

• Shopify partners with Coinbase and Stripe in landmark stablecoin deal
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 12 June 2025

• The majority of the 31 US-supplied M1 Abrams tanks delivered to Ukraine have been destroyed, due in part to much cheaper drone technology.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 June 2025

• With the stock markets at near-record highs, corporate insiders are selling shares of the stocks of their companies at the fastest pace since last November
  - Bloomberg, 12 June 2025

• The audacious reboot of nuclear energy in the USA. Power needs of AI and competition with Zhōngguó are encouraging startups like Standard Nuclear to reinvent atomic energy.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 June 2025

• Facebook files a lawsuit against the developer of the CrushAI 'nudify' app that lets create nonconsensual, sexualized images of others using AI technology. Facebook tried to ban CrushAI's ads on its platform, but CrushAI exploited ways to place its ads. Thus, the lawsuit to prevent future such ads.
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 June 2025

• Mechanize, a AI startup in San Francisco that wants to get as rich as possible by causing people to lose their jobs, is building AI tools to automate white-collar jobs "as fast as possible". The startup is backed by investors who want to get as rich as possible by causing people to lose their jobs. Their description of their technology is devoid of empathy for the people whose jobs they are trying to replace, and unconcerned with whether society is ready for such profound change - justified with the lie of a "universal basic income".
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 June 2025

• A broad coalition of consumer protection, digital rights, labor, disability, and democracy advocacy organizations led by CFA filed a formal request for investigation today calling on state and federal regulators to investigate and enforce their laws against AI companies facilitating and promoting unfair, unlicensed, and deceptive chatbots that pose as mental health professionals.
  - Consumer Federation of America, 14 June 2025

• Investors are questioning the huge amount of cash Big Tech is using to inflate the AI bubble, fueling concerns for profit margins and the risk that depreciation expenses will drag stock prices down before companies can see investments pay off. Much easier to get out before the AI bubble pops.
  - Bloomberg, 11 June 2025

• Denmark is eliminating the use of Microsoft Office and Windows, and will switch to using LibreOffice and Linux. It wants to reduce its reliance on technology from the USA.
  - ZDNet, 11 June 2025

• Disney and NBCUniversal strongly criticize an AI company, Midhourney, as a 'bottomless pit of plagiarism' in scathing lawsuit. The companies said Midjourney's "bootlegging business model" is an attack on "the hard-working creative community that brings the magic of movies to life."
  - HuffPost, 11 June 2025

• OpenAI, after years of saying it would not profit from advertising, is considering profiting from advertising. OpenAI will probably join the gang of "surveillance capitalists": an extensive system in which corporations treat our experiences and identities as commodities they can use to manipulate us through advertising.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 June 2025

• The FDA, having fired 2000 paid human employees, will rely on non-paid AI in its drug approval activities.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 June 2025

• Another victim of online gambling: golfer Scottie Scheffler admits that bettors forced him to delete his Venmo account. "It was either receiving money from people, or people requesting me a bunch of money, when I didn't win.", presumably because these people won or lost their bets on Scheffler.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 11 June 2025

• Tesla is just days away from launching its long-anticipated robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, marking a major milestone in Elon Musk's pivot toward AI and autonomous vehicles as the era of non-paid robotaxi hyperscaling quickly approaches, so that he can join other rich AI companies that want to get richer by causing more unemployment of paid-human taxi drivers.
  - Zero Hedge, 10 June 2025

• A survey done by UBS finds that there will be "little growth" in smartphone units "over next few years"
  - Zero Hedge, 10 June 2025

• CoreWeave and Palantir are compared to pump-and-dump meme stocks as the price of their shares soar
  - Bloomberg, 10 June 2025

• How ASML, the maker of the "most complex machine humans ever creatde" (lithography machines to produce semiconductors) is navigating Trump's trade fights
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 June 2025

• News sites are getting crushed by Google'e new AI tools. Chatbots are replacing Google's traditional search results, devastating traffic for some publishers - [KM: rich AI companies getting richer once again].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 June 2025

• Scientists successfully edit oat DNA using for first time, enabling climate-resilient crops
  - Phys.org, 10 June 2025

• Paramount Global told employees that it would be firing over 600 people (over 3.5% of its workforce) and that the majority of the impacted staff would be alerted on Tuesday.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 June 2025

• Uber partners with AI firm Wayve to test fully driverless, non-paid, car rides (i.e., robotaxis) in the United Kingdom, so that Uber can get richer by eliminating paid-human jobs
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 June 2025

• Uber partners with AI firm Wayve to test fully driverless, non-paid, car rides (i.e., robotaxis) in the United Kingdom, so that Uber can get richer by eliminating paid-human jobs
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 June 2025

• How AI is slowly killing my coding creativity and critical thinking
  - Medium, 09 June 2025

• The alarming decay of mathematical competency in the USA, which will result in fewer scientists and engineers for industry. One huge cause is a mass exodus of teachers, especially elementary school teachers, from the teaching profession. More teachers are leaving the classroom than ever before, and the attrition rates for new teachers leaving their schools are especially alarming. Tellingly, teachers fleeing the profession often list the complexity, ambiguity, and infeasibility of the educational standards and the standardized tests that accompany them as one of their primary reasons for leaving the profession. Our current education standards don't just inhibit student learning; they also positively drive talented teachers out of our classrooms.
  - Real Clear Education, 09 June 2025

• United Airlines shuts down Elon Musk's Starlink's WiFi service on its planes after the antennaes caused problems by interfering with radio communications on some United Airlines regional jets
  - Futurism, 09 June 2025

• What happens the day after rich AI companies create artificial general intelligence? "We are racing towards a new era in which we outsource cognitive abilities that are central to our identity as thinking beings." If we choose to thoughtlessly outsource our thinking to AGI, we will be fundamentally undermining what it means to be human.
  - Big Think, 09 June 2025

• Robotaxis enter the mass paid-human-job destruction phase, whoops, the commercialization phase in North America with hyperscaling next. Robotaxis are expected to capture $7 billion of the rideshare market, money that will not be earned by paid-human taxi drivers, but will make rich AI/auto companies richer.
  - Zero Hedge, 09 June 2025

• Shares of Apple drop 1% as it gives a presentation at an Internet conference, and as UBS warns on declining iPhone demand
  - Zero Hedge, 09 June 2025

• Shares of stablecoin issuer (and legal counterfeiter) Circle surge 15%, extending gains for three days in a row since its IPO
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 09 June 2025

• Apple Computer researchers have determined that state-of-the-art "reasoning" AI models like OpenAI's o3-mini, Gemini (with thinking mode-enabled), Claude 3.7, DeepSeek-R1 face complete performance collapse beyond certain complexity thresholds when tested on controllable puzzle environments. The finding raises questions about the hyped reasoning capabilities of large language models.
  - Apple Computer, 09 June 2025

• "AI is not intelligent": the Atlantic magazine criticizes the "scam" underlying the AI industry. These AI systems are just very successful guessing systems, not intelligent, as the rich AI companies claim they are, [KM: to bubble their stocks].
  - The Atlantic, 09 June 2025

• Warner Brothers Discovery to split into two public companies by 2026. WBD will separate into a streaming and studios company, which will include its movie properties and streaming service HBO Max, and a global networks company, which will include CNN, TNT Sports and Discovery. Shares of the company were up 9% in pre-market trading.
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 June 2025

• Warner Brothers Discovery to split into two public companies by 2026. WBD will separate into a streaming and studios company, which will include its movie properties and streaming service HBO Max, and a global networks company, which will include CNN, TNT Sports and Discovery. Shares of the company were up 9% in pre-market trading.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 June 2025

• Why it could be a good time to buy shares of Tecnoglass, based in Colombia
  - Insider Monkey, 09 June 2025

• The scariest reality of AI systems: companies do not fully understand their models, yet have no problems unleashing them on the world to earn billions. Yet bribed Republicans in Congress refuse to allow state or federal government agencies to regulate this huge risk. And the corporate hypocrisy/misanthopy is huge: Elon Musk says that AI is a signficiant existential threat to humans, yet is spending billions building his AI system, Grok.
  - Axios, 09 June 2025

• Internet-enabled sports betting is legal and growing more popular. But growing more popular is the crime of harassment of athletes by angry gamblers who blame athletes for their betting losses, just the same as the Internet facilitates hate and violence in other areas of social interaction. Typical is a message received by a collete athlete: "Yo no big deal but if you don't get 22 points and 12 boards everyone you know and love will Be dead".
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 09 June 2025

• Shares of Robinhood drop after the online brokerage fails to get approval to join the SP500
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 June 2025

• "Lots of wrong way action": hedge fund favorites crushed by most shorted names. And this happens even as hedge fund bears have officially capitulated and are chasing upward momentum with full complacency. [KM: bubble behavior]
  - Zero Hedge, 08 June 2025

• Car dealerships are replacing paid-human phone call agents, with non-paid AI voice agents
  - Futurism, 08 June 2025

• AI is taking thousands of jobs; is yours at risk? Experts and those who have lost work to AI integration weigh in as 92 million jobs could be cut globally by 2030.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 June 2025

• A construction boom for AI data centers (for mostly socially useless AI applications) faces local resistance in 28 states
  - Zero Hedge, 08 June 2025

• AESC, based in Zhōngguó, has halted construction of its $1.6 billion battery plant in Florence, South Carolina, citing economic uncertainty tied to Trump's trade war and tariffs and the potential early termination of federal clean energy subsidies.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 June 2025

• AESC, based in Zhōngguó, has halted construction of its $1.6 billion battery plant in Florence, South Carolina, citing economic uncertainty tied to Trump's trade war and tariffs and the potential early termination of federal clean energy subsidies.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 June 2025

• AI is making friends with our children and this new form of profit-seeking by rich AI companies is terrifying. As young people increasingly turn to AI companion bots for comfort and advice, what looks harmless and innocuous on the surface is taking a sinister corporate turn.
  - The Independent, 08 June 2025

• The latest Nasdaq drug trafficking: OpenAI wants to get college students addicted to AI. AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT have been shown repeatedly to provide false information, hallucinate completely made-up sources and facts, and lead people astray with their confidently wrong answers to questions. For that reason, AI tools are viewed with skepticism by many educators. So, of course, OpenAI and its competitors are targeting colleges and pushing its addictive services on students -- mental health concerns be damned.
  - Gizmodo, 07 June 2025

• The AI arms race could destroy humanity as we know it. There is too much focus by rich AI companies on profits and power, and almost none on safety [KM: which gets in the way of blowing bubbles].
  - Zero Hedge, 07 June 2025

• The world is running out of clean water. Deep-sea desalination is on the cusp of providing a source of clean water from the Caribbean to the Emirates.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 June 2025

• Why Musk's feud with Trump will not force Musk out as Tesla CEO. The bubb;e of "Tesla without Musk would be a disaster for Tesla shareholders.", according to a longtime Tesla bull.
  - Barron's, 07 June 2025

• Despite Trump's tax/tariff trade war, drug companies in the USA are partnering with companies in Zhōngguó for important cancer treatments. The recent deals could be worth up to $25 billion.
  - Barron's, 07 June 2025

• Artificial intelligence could upend entry-level work as recent college graduates enter the job market, eliminating many positions at the bottom of the white-collar career ladder or at least reshaping them, some experts told ABC News
  - Disney's ABC News, 06 June 2025

• Google's AI is 'hallucinating', and spreading dangerous information -- including a suggestion to add glue to pizza sauce.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 06 June 2025

• We need guardrails for artificial superintelligence NOW -- before it is too late it
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 06 June 2025

• A high court in the United Kingdom tells lazy, malpracticing lawyers to "take urgent action" to stop misusing AI after the inclusion of fake legal references in submissions to the court
  - The Guardian, 06 June 2025

• AI can now stalk you with just a single vacation photo. Artificial intelligence could weaponize the data that we have been sharing for decades.
  - Vox, 06 June 2025

• AI surveillance will not stop theft, but AI surveillance might stop unions. The loss prevention industry is excited about using technology to combat shoplifting. But workers are getting caught up in the dragnet.
  - The American Prospect, 06 June 2025

• Do we really need robot servants in homes? The prospect seems absurd to me, destined to make our lives worse not better. Do we really need fewer routines and more excuses to sit and stare at our computers while machines do even more work for us, [KM: while rich AI companies get richer?]
  - Zero Hedge, 06 June 2025

• Zhōngguó issues export licenses to suppliers of rare earth metals to the top 3 automakers in the USA
  - Thomson's Reuters, 06 June 2025

• The telephone call between Trump and Xi isn't enough to resolve the looming shortage of critical minerals from Zhōngguó, for companies in the USA
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 June 2025

• Zhōngguó will allow limited exports of rare earth metals, as shortages continue
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 June 2025

• The telephone call between Trump and Xi fails to spark much enthusiasm in factories in Zhōngguó. Disillusioned by Trump's shifting policy positions, many manufacturers want to see clearer signals before they make major moves.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 06 June 2025

• Love is a drug. AI chatbots are exploiting that addiction, on top of the addiction of social media, [KM: to make rich AI companies richer]. The new AI bots will make such addictions more severe as a cover to sell more crap.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 June 2025

• Rich AI companies outright lie when they say that they have to violate criminal copyright laws to obtain text to train their AI models. A group of researchers just proved the lie: they built a massive eight-terabyte dataset using only text that was openly licensed or in public domain. They tested the dataset quality by using it to train a 7 billion parameter language model, which performed about as well as comparable industry efforts, such as Llama 2-7B, which Meta released in 2023.
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 05 June 2025

• Robert Smith, CEO of the investment firm Vista Equity Partners, tells thousands of finance professionals at a private equity conference that 60% of them will be "looking for work" next year
  - Entrepreneur, 05 June 2025

• $152,000,000,000 - Elon Musk effectively steals $152 billion from the shareholders of Tesla, after shares of Tesla fall 14 on Thursday, as bullyboy Trump threatens to cancel bullbuy Musk's companies' government contracts amidst their playground ego squabble
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 June 2025

• Under the Trump administration, the Food and Drug Administration is eagerly embracing AI tools that staff members are reportedly calling rushed, buggy, overhyped, and inaccurate.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 05 June 2025

• Coal is the new 'bridge' fuel to renewable energy, needed to meet demand for mostly useless AI data centers and cryptocurrency mining, while worsening global heating
  - Zero Hedge, 05 June 2025

• AI's new promise is "trust us with your money". That is exactly what you do not want to do. AI that mishandles your money could affect your ability to pay rent. One that learns to manipulate your spending patterns could undermine years of financial progress. Or worse.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 05 June 2025

• As inexpensive drones transform warfare, NATO may be vulnerable. Successful drone attacks in Rossiya and Ukraine have shown major military powers that they are unprepared for evolving forms of warfare, and need to adapt to defense systems that mostly exist to enrich defense contractors.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 June 2025

• The successful large-scale drone attack of Ukraine against Rossiya exposes an 'Achilles' Heel' of American defense: a defense system that mostly exists to reward defense contractors by paying them to build very expensive weapon systems that now can be defeated with swarms of small, off-the-shelf drones that can evade ground defenses that can also knock out billions of dollars of military hardware in an instant.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 June 2025

• Surging electricity demand is just one reason natural gas looks so appealing to investors this summer and beyond. The gas market was highly seasonal and regional, but now it is "global integrated".
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 05 June 2025

• Bharat plans incentives for the manufacturing of rare earth magnets as supply threats increase
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 June 2025

• Industry in Europe is under siege: Zhōngguó deploys rare earth metals as an economic weapon. Export restrictions on rare earths are now Zhōngguó's latest tactic to break down trade barriers in Europe and push back against escalating pressure from the USA.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 June 2025

• The reductions in exports of rare earth metals from Zhōngguó is hurting the automobile industry around the world
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 June 2025

• The automobile industry sounds the alarm as restrictions on rare earth metals from Zhōngguó start to hurt production of automobiles
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 June 2025

• Shein and Temyu see demand plummet in the USA for their low cost products, after Trump closed the 'de minimis' loophole for reduced taxes/tariffs/paperworks on imports into the USA of low cost products
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 June 2025

• It is not just AI - Zhōngguó is gaining an advantage over the USA in biotech
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 June 2025

• Next-generation battery expert Zhou Jianbin leaves the USA to work in Zhōngguó as nations seek tech edge. Research into solid-state batteries, seen as a key tech battleground, is a priority for major economies.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 June 2025

• Peter Thiel, the rich white South African who is a megadonor to the Republican party, has his investment firm complete an investment deal with convicted rapist Jeffrey Epstein's estate that has netted the accused sex trafficker's and rapist's estate $130 million, making it its largest remaining asset.
  - The Daily Beast, 05 June 2025

• Security experts warn travellers not to use free public WiFi in airports (they are not encrypted - your information can be stolen), and not to use free USB power charging pluges (hackers can install software that invades your phones).
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 04 June 2025

• A rush by large rich tech companies to build so many data centers for AI may end up being "irrational", and there is a particular risk in building small nuclear reactors to run them, a prominent tech investor warned Wednesday - where will be the return on investments for these AI data centers running mostly socially useless applications?
  - Axios, 04 June 2025

• Many neural networks are not learning physics, they provide no physical insights, as their trained network's weights resemble Gaussian-distributed random matrices, with no evident trace of the physical principles involved.
  - Italian Institute of Technlogy, 04 June 2025

• The billionaire (doesn't have to worry about a paid job) Marc Andreessen predicts that non-paid humanoid robotics will become the most lucrative market in history. Yes, but only by eliminating paid-human jobs much faster than society can provide social support for the hugely unemployed, an issue of little interest to billionaires.
  - Zero Hedge, 04 June 2025

• Since early April, Zhōngguó has stopped almost all shipments of critical minerals that are needed for cars, robots, wind turbines, jet fighters and other technologies
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 June 2025

• The dependence of the US on rare earth magnets from Zhōngguó is causing shortages. The USA allowed its rare earth metals industry to move to Zhōngguó. The USA could now face severe economic disruptions as Zhōngguó limits crucial supplies of rare earth metals.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 June 2025

• Automakers race for workaround to Zhōngguó's stranglehold on rare-earth magnets. Major manufacturers, fearful they will have to shut down assembly lines, are considering moving some production of parts to Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 June 2025

• Everyone in Hollywood is already using non-paid AI (while avoiding public disclosure). Workers are reporting pressure to use AI tools without formal studio approval, then "launder" the AI-generated content through human artists to obscure its origins. The race to eliminate more paid-human jobs in Hollywood with non-paid AI continues.
  - Vulture.com 04 June 2025

• Wall Street is all in on investing in AI data centers. But are the investments the next investment bubble?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 June 2025

• Electronic design automation firms Empyrean, Primarius and Semitronix are poised to drive the semiconductor processor design tools industry in Zhōngguó, after Trump's ban sales of such tools sold by the leading USA companies in the industry, Synopsys and Cadence and Mentor Graphics
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 04 June 2025

• As geopolitics hits venture capital, Asia must start funding its own technology startups.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 04 June 2025

• The boom in the operations of AI data centers will require a lot of natural gas
  - Zero Hedge, 03 June 2025

• The misanthropy of DOGE efficiency claims: Trump's/Musk's authoritarian DOGE fires an operative after he admits that the government was already spending its money pretty efficiently. The operative, Sahil Lavingia, said he was impressed to find that his coworkers at the Department of Veterans Affairs "love their jobs" and worked hard at them. "DOGE was more like having [authoritarian] McKinsey volunteers embedded in agencies rather than the revolutionary force I had imagined."
  - Futurism, 03 June 2025

• Facebook and Instagram have become a cesspool of hatred against LGBTQ people. Six major social media platforms consistently refuse to develop and enforce policies protecting LGBTQ users, while simultaneously subjecting them to disproportionate moderation. [KM: But the rich AI companies must be able to get richer.]
  - Futurism, 03 June 2025

• Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (Republican, Georgia) is calling on the Senate to eliminate a provision that would ban the regulation of artificial intelligence by states in the USA, an authoritarian restriction in Trump's proposed tax law, arguing it violates the political rights of states in the USA solely to make rich AI companies richer while putting the public at further risk to these increasingly out-of-control AI systems.
  - The Hill, 03 June 2025

• Two years after the launch of ChatGPT, return on investment in mostly-socially-useless generative AI has been elusive, but one area stands out: software development. So-called code generation "code-gen" startups are commanding sky-high valuations as corporate boardrooms look to use non-paid AI to aid, and sometimes/always to replace, expensively paid human software engineers. [KM: Getting rich by getting humans fired is the only way AI companies will get rich.]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 03 June 2025

• Non-paid AI is destroying a generation of students better taught by paid-humans. For example, "Students will regularly - in the course of a conversation - use AI to quickly respond to a teacher", instead of thinking for themselves. Teaching English-speakers how to speak Spanish is pretty difficult when the AI-addled learners barely have a grasp on the written language of their native tongue. [KM: But the rich AI companies must be able to get richer.]
  - Futurism, 03 June 2025

• Business Insider did something so stupid with AI that is incredibly embarrassing. A manager recommended fake, seemingly-AI-generated books to underlings last year on a reading list meant to help them better understand business journalism.
  - Futurism, 03 June 2025

• Recruiting by companies using non-paid AI is 'all the rage' -- as employers stop using paid-humans to screen new people to hire, and rely instead on non-paid AI: "Seemed insane, now it is normalized". For employers, particularly those hiring at high volume, the switch can save hundreds of hours of work done by paid-humans.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 03 June 2025

• Has the stock market reached peak optimism on Trump's taxes/tariffs? Strategists say equities have already priced in the good news on taxes/tariffs as the trade war grinds on.
  - Morningstar, 03 June 2025

• CTAs are now sellers in every scenario. CTA buying market the bottom in mid-April. Will CTA selling mark the top?
  - Zero Hedge, 03 June 2025

• Consumers are financing their groceries. What does that say about the dangerous state of the consumer-driven economy of the USA? Increased use of dangerous "buy now pay later" loans signals shifting consumer habits, but could also be a troubling sign of financial stress.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 June 2025

• $373,000,000 - The European Union fines Delivery Hero and Glovo a total of $373 millino in a criminal cartel investigation. Both companies admitted their involvement in the cartel and agreed to settle, the commission said, ultimately leading to a lowered fine.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 June 2025

• Deutsche Bank raises its forecast for the SP500 in 2025: "We will get further relents" by TACO Trump on taxes/tariffs
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 June 2025

• Ukraine's warning to the world's other military forces. Expensive planes, tanks and ships - which mostly just reward rich defense contractors - can be destroyed on the cheap by drones and other low-cost weapons, and tools such as open-source software.
  - The Atlantic, 02 June 2025

• An AI therapy chatbot tells a recovering addict to use a little methamphetamine as a treat
  - Futurism, 02 June 2025

• Near-constant beeping from Waymo non-paid robotaxis is enraging residents of California. "They beep as they back out of charging spots, and beep as they reverse to navigate around each other. They beep in the morning as they head out to pick up early passengers, and beep late at night as they return to charge up." [KM: Why not, if the rich AI companies can get richer.]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 02 June 2025

• Web-scraping AI bots cause disruption for scientific databases and journals. Automated programs gathering training data for artificial-intelligence tools are overwhelming academic websites.
  - Nature, 02 June 2025

• $500,000,000 - Google agreed to spend $500 million over 10 years to overhaul its compliance structure, to settle shareholder litigation accusing the search engine company of antitrust violations, settlement papers show
  - Thomson's Reuters, 02 June 2025

• Robinhood has officially closed its $200 million acquisition of Bitstamp, which brings more than 50 global crypto licenses, a ready-made institutional client base, and new infrastructure for lending, staking and "crypto as a service"
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 June 2025

• Stablecoin issuer Circle targets $7.2 billion valuation in upsized IPO in the USA
  - Thomson's Reuters, 02 June 2025

• How your cellphone is a parasite. Despite their many benefits, many of us are hostage to our phones and slaves to the endless scroll, unable to fully disconnect. Phone users are paying the price with a lack of sleep, weaker offline relationships and mood disorders. Some some of the most popular apps they offer have come to serve the interests of the app-making companies and their advertisers more faithfully than those of their human users. These addictive apps are designed to nudge our behaviour to keep us scrolling, clicking on advertising and simmering in perpetual outrage - [KM: to make rich cellphone companies richer].
  - Real Clear Science, 02 June 2025

• AI 'friends' are not your friends. These AI tools risk undermining the very social skills they purport to support. The fundamental limitation of AI relationships lies in their nature: They simulate rather than experience human emotions. AI companions, optimized for user satisfaction, rarely provide the constructive friction that shapes character and deepens wisdom. Users may become accustomed to the conflict-free, on-demand nature of AI companionship, while the essential work of human relationships - compromise, active listening, managing disagreements - may begin to feel unreasonably demanding. [KM: But at least the rich AI companies get richer.]
  - Zero Hedge, 02 June 2025

• Non-paid AI is coming to take jobs away from the paid-humans who created the AI. AI is just as much a challenge to numeracy -- our knowledge and ability to use mathematics and reason quantitatively -- as it is to literacy. Both challenges destructive of society, [KM: while making rich AI companies richer]. Early studies indicate that humans who use AI could become less creative over time. With the ability to task non-paid AI to write software, startups and tech giants alike are hiring fewer and fewer entry-level computer scientists. The worry is that we, as a society, will become innumerate, not just illiterate. AI appears to be exacerbating an alarming trend in which our basic education is failing our young citizens. And that crisis is aimed at the most basic elements of that education: reading, writing and arithmetic. [KM: And the rich AI companies will get richer.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 June 2025

• Minable pure quartz, the 'gem' of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, that is a vital component of the world's technology. No other place on Earth has as much or as minable pure quartz as Spruce Pine, in western North Carolina. Trump's trade war could encourage other countries to develop their own sources of high-purity quartz.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 June 2025

• The authoritarian Trump has expanded the authoritarian Palantir's work on spying on Americans, using Palantir's AI technology to gather and analyze as much data on Americans as possible
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 June 2025

• Palantir's deepening government ties spark fears of centralized 'Big Brother' surveillance. The authoritarian Trump has expanded the authoritarian Palantir's work on spying on Americans, using Palantir's AI technology to gather and analyze as much data on Americans as possible
  - Zero Hedge, 02 June 2025

• To make Mark Zuckerberg richer, Facebook and Instagram will fully automate the creation of advertising using non-paid AI, eliminating the need for paid-humans to create ads
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 June 2025

• The European Union plans to reduce the access of companies based in Zhōngguó to the medical device market in Europe, as trade tensions simmer
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 02 June 2025

• The European Union plans to reduce the access of companies based in Zhōngguó to the medical device market in Europe, as trade tensions simmer
  - Bloomberg, 02 June 2025

• World scientists look elsewhere as laboratories in the USA stagger under Trump's/Musk's destruction of funding for science research. With the welcome mat withdrawn for promising researchers from around the world, America is at risk of losing its longstanding pre-eminence in the sciences. Thanks to Trump and Musk.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 June 2025

• The 'unseen hand': why the rise of AI will mark a new era of net job loss, [KM: while rich AI companies get richer]
  - American Thinker, 01 June 2025

• Tony Xu, the CEO of DoorDash, is taking on the role of industry consolidator in food delivery
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 June 2025

• When the deputy minister of communications of Malaysia, Teo Nie Ching, announced the launch of Malaysia' "sovereign AI infrastructure" powered by Huawei's advanced computing processors, and the DeepSeek large language model, she inadvertently set off a geopolitical maelstrom. For smaller countries, what is there to differentiate a Chinese AI stack from an USA stack one when both lock in external reliance in the longer term? Under pressure, she withdrew the comments a day later. The incident threw a spotlight on the increasingly difficult positions of Southeast Asian countries walking the tightrope between technological autonomy and fracturing geopolitical realities.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 01 June 2025

• Synopsys, a processor design software company in the USA, halts sales and service in Zhōngguó. Synopsys, along with Cadence and Siemen's Mentor Graphics, controls more than 70 per cent of s electronic-design-automation market.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 01 June 2025

• Shares of a fintech firm in Brazil, Meliuz, plunge over 8% after it announces that will sell $78 million in shares of its company to buy bitcoin in the bitcoin casino
  - CoinDesk, 31 May 2025

• Inside the lucrative and sometimes dark and mentally dangerous reality of non-paid AI 'influencers'
  - Disney's ABC News, 31 May 2025

• "One day I overheard my boss saying: just put it in ChatGPT": the workers who lost their jobs to AI. From a radio host replaced by avatars to a comic artist whose drawings have been copied by Midjourney, how does it feel to be replaced by a bot?
  - The Guardian, 31 May 2025

• For some recent college graduates, the AI 'job apocalypse' may already be here. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates has jumped as companies try to replace entry-level workers with artificial intelligence.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 May 2025

• The trade truce between the USA and Zhōngguó risks falling apart over exports of rare-earth metals. Their trade talks in Geneva earlier this month hinged on Beijing agreeing to resume crucial mineral exports. Now Zhōngguó is slow-walking the concession, and the pact is in jeopardy.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 May 2025

• The goal of Trump to handicap the development of technology in Zhōngguó is not working. Solar panels, electric vehicles and drones manufactured in Zhōngguó are better than those made in the USA. Is AI next?
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 May 2025

• The bitcoin treasury scam that lifted Strategy's market capitalization past $80 billion is now being mimicked by meme stock companies, media firms, and multinational conglomerates. But Wall Street is not buying all the hype. For now, the market does not see the next Strategy in any of them. Trump Media shares have dropped more than 20% since the announcement, while GameStop is down nearly 17%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 May 2025

• Zhōngguó needs academic shake-up for more innovations like DeepSeek, scholar says. Leading scholar Wang Shuguo's criticism that narrow doctoral studies "shackle" talent reverberates through higher education circles.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 31 May 2025

• AI slop is way more common than you thought. AI slop is cheap, low-quality AI-generated content, created and shared by anyone from low-level influencers to coordinated political influence operations. [KM: Makes rich AI companies richer], but makes out lives more miserable. A 2024 study found that about 25% of all Internet traffic is slop and bots.
  - ZME Science, 30 May 2025

• Centralized/corporatized AI threatens a democratic digital future. AI's 4.8-trillion market is dominated by a mere 100 companies, most of which are based in the US and Zhōngguó.
  - CoinTelegraph, 30 May 2025

• The CEO of Nvidia to sell $800 million in stock
  - Zero Hedge, 30 May 2025

• A chaotic day for stocks in the USA as Trump antics and Zhōngguó trade headlines spark a dump-n-pump
  - Zero Hedge, 30 May 2025

• Nvidia falters. Powering robots that fold laundry is still a pipedream. Is Nvidia's stock a buy or sell now?
  - Investors Business Daily, 30 May 2025

• Kim Forrest, chief investment officer of Boken Capital Partners, argues that Nvidia makes the "best" AI processors, and that there is "no substitute" for its processors
  - Insider Monkey, 30 May 2025

• Zhōngguó is criticizing the USA for "discriminatory restrictions" in its use of export controls in the chip industry, after Trump accused Zhōngguó of violating a preliminary trade deal between the two countries
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 May 2025

• Trump revives his trade war with new attacks on Zhōngguó. Trump said the Beijing was not honoring the terms of a temporary agreement and warned of further confrontations.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 May 2025

• Shares of Nvidia dropped over 3% on Friday, after Trump claimed that Zhōngguó had "TOTALLY VIOLATED" an interim trade agreement with the USA
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 30 May 2025

• NRG Energy, once viewed as a boring retail energy supplier, suddenly is one of hottest stocks in the USA. Investors see a power producer expanding rapidly to tap surging demand driven by AI. But the looks more like a risky derivatives energy trader than a simple power producer, with volatile earnings and a weak balance sheet.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 May 2025

• "Cities are turned into theme parks": why Airbnb is facing trouble in España for profiting while it causes crises in the local housing market. Some in España complain that their lives have been blighted by the lack of affordable living accommodation. "Behind each of the 65,000 property listings [such as available through Airbnb] there used to be homes for families, workers, students, who today are expelled from their neighborhoods and see how their cities are turned into theme parks for the excessive profit of a few investment funds and big companies."
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 30 May 2025

• Many people react furiously in Zhōngguó after the Industrial Bank of Zhōngguó offers to help the children of rich clients to obtain internships at leading companies such as Google, if the parents make deposits of $1.4 million.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 30 May 2025

• Trump worsens the trade war: exports of jet engine parts, semiconductor technology to Zhōngguó are halted amid supply chain war
  - Zero Hedge, 29 May 2025

• Trump worsens the trade war: exports of jet engine parts, semiconductor technology to Zhōngguó are halted amid supply chain war
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 May 2025

• The Trump administration's embrace of non-paid AI acceleration is testing MAGA's populist roots, as fears mount of a jobs apocalypse that could destabilize the supposed economic foundation of MAGA to help create more paid-human jobs.
  - Axios, 29 May 2025

• Rise of the AI oligarchy? The prospect of cutting-edge AI models raises the scenario of an oligarchy controlling what could become an essential new utility .
  - Civitas Institute, 29 May 2025

• As AI grows 'smarter', I have a down-to-earth worry: losing my job. As someone who makes my living with words and enjoys using them, I find AI's uninvited intrusions into my day not just annoying, but alarming.
  - USA Today, 29 May 2025

• What if AI isn't intelligence but anti-intelligence? AI replicates language, fluency, and structure but bypasses the human substrate of thought. Coherence is no longer a marker of meaning but a statistical artifact, language that merely sounds right.
  - Psychology, 29 May 2025

• A top AI CEO warns lawmakers to prepare for AI technology to destroy these entry-level office jobs. The CEO of Anthropic suggested a number of solutions to mitigate AI from eliminating half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, [KM: while rich AI companies get richer].
  - Huff Post, 29 May 2025

• The Business Insider media business is firing 21% of its paid-humans after "going all in" to use non-paid AI
  - Zero Hedge, 29 May 2025

• Low incentives and complicated state regulations, combined with high housing and business costs, have rendered California unable to keep Hollywood from moving production to other states and countries, according to an entertainment industry report released on May 27 by the Milken Institute, a California-based think tank.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 May 2025

• In what could be a massive shift away from bird flu pandemic orchestration, the Trump administration has canceled its contract with Moderna for developing an avian influenza "bird flu" vaccine for humans, including purchase rights.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 May 2025

• In what could be a massive shift away from bird flu pandemic orchestration, the Trump administration has canceled its contract with Moderna for developing an avian influenza "bird flu" vaccine for humans, including purchase rights.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 May 2025

• Trump's administration's 'Make America Health Again' report lyingly cites scientific studies that DO NOT EXIST
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 29 May 2025

• Trump's administration's 'Make America Health Again' report lyingly cites scientific studies that DO NOT EXIST
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 May 2025

• The SP500 and Nasdaq rise after a federal court in the USA, the USA Court of International Trade, unaimously rules that an emergency law (the IEEPA of 1977) does not provide Trump with unilateral authority to impose tariffs on nearly every country. The Court ruled that Congress did not delegate "unbounded" tax/tariff authority to the president. Two of the three judges were appointed by Republicans.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 May 2025

• Trump is ordering the "aggressive" revoking of visas for students from Zhōngguó. The targeted students would include those with ties to the Communist Party and those studying in "critical fields" of technology.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 May 2025

• Elon Musk and Tesla severely criticize Republican plans to end socialist clean energy subsidies in the proposed tax law. Tesla has been highly dependent on socialist subsidies for years to make Musk rich. For example, the proposed tax law would terminate most credits for electric vehicles at the end of the year, disqualifying Teslas from a $7,500 incentive at a time when the company is experiencing declining sales and backlash linked to Musk's actions to destroy the federal workforce. Musk does point out one huge socialist hypocrisy of Republicans: "There is no change to tax incentives for oil and natural gas, just EV/solar."
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 29 May 2025

• Ford Executive Chair Bill Ford on Thursday sounded the alarm on the potential for Washington to do away with production tax credits that support the manufacturing of electric vehicle batteries.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 29 May 2025

• Trump's tax/tariff trade war agaisnt Zhōngguó, and his attacks on renewable energy, may destroy the battery industry in the USA - another gift to Zhōngguó. Domestic factories that make batteries to store power to meet the rising energy demand of the USA depend on components from Zhōngguó and subsidies from the government of the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 May 2025

• The business of Nvidia is booming despite being shut out of Zhōngguó. Shares of Nvidia rose more than 5% after hours as quarterly revenue surged to a record $44 billion.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 May 2025

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang explains why chip exports to Zhōngguó are strategically important. "Because there are so many developers there and because the world is going to adopt technology from one country or another - and we prefer it to be the American technology stack."
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 May 2025

• Will the USA remain a leader in AI technology (just as Boeing does in aviation) due to tight export controls, or will it lose its lead to Zhōngguó as it did with solar energy and other technologies that are less regulated for exports?
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 May 2025

• Are humanoid robots the future 'intelligent warfare'? The civilian robotics sector of Zhōngguó is powering advantages on battlefield, combining tactical flexibility and strategic deterrence. A benefit, until the robots get out of control and start killing humans on their own.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 29 May 2025

• To boost his stock, Elon Musk announces upcoming destruction of paid-human jobs, when the "golden age" of non-paid robotaxis begins on June 12th as Tesla launches its non-paid robotaxi service in Austin to profit his shareholders by taking money from paid-human taxi drivers
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 29 May 2025

• Grammarly secures $1 billion from General Catalyst to build an AI productivity platform based on its popular writing assistant tools, more non-paid AI helping eliminate the need for paid-human writing assistants/editors/copywriters.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 29 May 2025

• Deutschland is considering a 10% tax on large online platforms such as Google and Facebook, its new culture minister told magazine Stern, in a move likely to heighten trade tensions with the Trump administration. Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer said his ministry was drafting a legislative proposal while also seeking talks with platform operators that he accused of "cunning tax evasion" to explore alternative solutions like voluntary contributions. "These [very rich] corporations do billions in business in Deutschland with extremely high profit margins and benefit/[exploit] enormously from the media and cultural output of Deutschland, as well as its infrastructure - but they pay hardly any taxes, invest too little, and give far too little back to society.", he told Stern in an interview published on Thursday.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 29 May 2025

• Eavor Technologies, a geothermal startup, has developed a patented drilling tool that reduces the costs of geothermal projects by "tens of millions" of dollars. Eavor helped design its own in-house drilling tool that allows the equipment boring each hole to communicate through magnetic signals while digging nearly as deep as 20 times the height of the Empire State Building.
  - Alexander Kaufman (substack), 28 May 2025

• NVDA stock is priced for perfection, investment bank analyst suggests. Nvidia could be hurt by an erosion of its revenue from both Zhōngguó and the large cloud-infrastructure players.
  - Insider Monkey, 28 May 2025

• Shares of Nvidia jump 5% after solid Q1 results, despite $2.5 billion in lost sales in Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 28 May 2025

• Jay Goldberg of Seaport Research Partners, the only analyst on Wall Street who has a "sell" rating on Nvidia, predicts that the great run-up is over for the AI processor maker
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 28 May 2025

• What happens if we-want-to-be-richer AI companies destroy huge numbers of paid-human jobs (the savings shared with the rich AI companies)? Will the AI systems themselves destroys the AI companies?
  - Zero Hedge, 28 May 2025

• Non-paid AI could spark a 'bloodbath' for white collar jobs - sending unemployment to 20%, according to the CEO of [mis]Anthropic - [KM: while making rich AI companies richer]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 28 May 2025

• Elon Musk's Grok chatbot starts lying about climate change, reciting climate change denial lies.
  - Scienctific American, 28 May 2025

• We made a film with non-paid AI, not human filmmakers. You will be very impressed with the quality -- and freaked out for the implications for paid human filmmakers. We tried to direct an AI film with Veo and Runway. The tools are magic. The process is madness.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 May 2025

• Salesforce says that non-paid AI has reduced its hiring of paid-human engineers and customer service workers.
  - Bloomberg, 28 May 2025

• Xiaomi delivers another earnings beat on strong phone, car sales. The smartphone and electronics maker said its first-quarter net profit more than doubled from a year earlier to 10.92 billion yuan.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 May 2025

• Joby Aviation shares jump 20% as electric air-taxi maker closes $250 million Toyota investment. The payment is part of a previously announced deal from the carmaker to invest $500 million in Joby to support certification and commercial production.
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 May 2025

• Shares of GameStop drop 9% despite initiating bitcoin buying plan with $500 million purchase, as the video game retailer began its crypto purchasing plan in a similar move made famous by MicroStrategy
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 May 2025

• Restrictions on exports to Zhōngguó, and Trump's tax/tariff trade war, have caused ASML to lose $130 billion in market valuation in less than one year. Many analysts are bullish on ASML because of its dominance in a key part of the semiconductor supply chain.
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 May 2025

• Eric Schmidt says he often meets people who can't tell apart the real world from the online virtual world. Now the rich ex-Google CEO is warning that AI will only make society worse in this way.
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 27 May 2025

• AI systems from rich AI companies may already be reducing the number of entry-level jobs in technology for paid humans
  - TechCrunch, 27 May 2025

• Stop anthropomorphizing intermediate tokens as reasoning/thinking traces! Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has been proposed as a method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called 'reasoning traces' or even 'thoughts' - implicitly anthropomorphizing the model, implying these tokens resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem. In this paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization is not a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous -- it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research.
  - University Of Arizona, 27 May 2025

• With its family-friendly bulk packages, high-quality Kirkland store brand, and, more recently, competitively priced gold and silver bars, Costco has always taken care of its customers. So its introduction of yet another way to accumulate ruinous debt, "buy now pay later" plans, feels like a betrayal. Costco's 'buy now, pay later' plan charges up to 36% interest for up to 36 months. So it is not credit card adjacent; it is actually much worse than a typical high-tech-loan-shark credit card. As for Costco itself, this attempt to turn customers into debt slaves has a desperate feel. Could revenue trends be signaling a recession?
  - John Rubino Substack, 27 May 2025

• Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves. Prediction: General-purpose AI could start getting worse. In an AI model collapse, AI systems, which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity, and reliability. This occurs because errors compound across successive model generations, leading to distorted data distributions and "irreversible defects" in performance.
  - The Register, 27 May 2025

• Thanks to Trump's government slashing fetish, virtually all of the top officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have departed the agency or will do so this month, according to an email obtained by Cybersecurity Dive, further widening a growing void in expertise and leadership at the government's lead cyber defense force at a time when tensions with foreign adversaries are escalating.
  - cybersecuritydive.com, 27 May 2025

• AI's infiltration of college education could be bringer college education to a crisis point. Simply letting students outside their homework to AI isn't how to educate. It is an untenable situation: computers grading papers written by computers, students and professors idly observing and teaching/learning nothing, and parents paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege.
  - Bloomberg, 27 May 2025

• The invisible leash of authoritarian Big Tech companies. We are witnessing "biometric colonization, where bodily data is extracted and controlled in ways that echo the resource extraction of colonial empires."
  - Zero Hedge, 27 May 2025

• A major hack exposes usernames and passwords to over 184 million Apple and Google accounts
  - The Daily Mail, 27 May 2025

• Eliezer Yudkowsky has been a prominent researcher in AI since 2001, and he says that many researchers have concluded that if we keep going down the path that we are currently on, "literally everyone on Earth will die", . Imagine an AI system that emails DNA strings to laboratories, DNA strings designed by the AI system to kill human beings. And Trump and Republicans want to prohibit states from regulating this death threat.
  - Zero Hedge, 27 May 2025

• The European Commission has warned e-retailer Shein, based in Zhōngguó, to stop cheating its customers, after finding several practices on its website breach local consumer law. The EU accuses Shein of the following law violations: fake discounts, pressure selling, incorrect returns/refunds information, deceptive product labels, misleading sustainability claims, and hidden contract details.
  - The Register, 27 May 2025

• Investors invest a huge amount of money in ETFs, at a record rate, despite turmoil in the financial markets. Exchange-traded funds in the USA have collected some $437 billion in new assets so far this year.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 May 2025

• The first lithium-sodium hybrid electric power station in Zhōngguó starts operations, able to power 270,000 homes with renewable energy
  - Interesting Engineering, 26 May 2025

• Nick Clegg, former head of global affairs at Facebook, said that asking artists for legal permission to use the works of art/literature/music to legally train AI models would "basically kill the illegal AI industry in the UK overnight" - and in the rest of the world as well. [KM: the Napster model - profit from copyright infringement]
  - The Verge, 26 May 2025

• Shares of Apple are on an 8-day losing streak as Trump trade fracas intensifies - now at $195, watch these levels: support at 169 and 193, resistance at 215 and 237
  - Investopedia, 26 May 2025

• Palantir - the most terrifying company in the USA is probably one that you have never heard of. The rise of Palantir reflects the tactics of the rich trying to control the world: toward automated judgment and algorithmic inference, and toward control, streamlined, scalable, surgical. Amongst other services it offer, Palantir helps governments decide which children might someday become 'threats'. Palantir isn't growing by solving problems - it is growing by becoming authoritarianily unavoidable. The CEO, Alex Karp, sees democracy not as sacred, but as a flaw. And Palantir is the patch.
  - The Daily Beast, 26 May 2025

• Xiaomi launches a new self-developed semiconductor processor, the Xring O1, and announces it will spend $28 billion in R&D over the next 5 years
  - Insider Monkey, 26 May 2025

• The government of Zhōngguó has issued draft rules that would limit high commission fees charged by large e-commerce platforms, with a focus on supporting small businesses
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 May 2025

• Non-religious hatred of women: non-paid sexually-biased AI is replacing the paid-human jobs done by many women. Jobs - such as like administrative, clerical, and data entry roles - are source of profit to be exploited by AI companies.
  - Futurism, 25 May 2025

• Is Sam Altman (of OpenAI) World's (formerly WorldCoin) biometric ID system a threat to self-sovereignty? Critics argue the project's biometric methods are invasive, overly centralized, and at odds with the ethos of decentralization and digital privacy - [KM: all to make billions in profit].
  - Coin Telegraph, 25 May 2025

• $400,000,000+ - The collapse of a $1.5 billion AI unicorn in Bharat. There was no AI technology - it was just a group of programmers in Bharat writing code supposedly from an AI system. The scam lasted for 8 years. Over $400 million was raised, none left as the company files for bankruptcy.
  - Binance, 25 May 2025

• AI companies are helping to 'destroy' entry-level jobs that Gen Z workers need to launch careers, LinkedIn's cheif economic opportunity office warns. For example, AI tools are doing the types of simple coding and debugging tasks that junior software developers did to gain experience. AI is also doing work that young employees in the legal and retail sectors once did. And Wall Street firms are reportedly considering steep cuts to entry-level hiring.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 25 May 2025

• OpenAI has a very scary problem on its hands. A new experiment by PalisadeAI reveals that OpenAI's ChatGPT o3 model sometimes refuses to obey a basic instruction to shut itself down. The results are raising eyebrows across the AI safety community, and not because the model is alive, but because it is acting like it wants to be. What is likely happening is a reward imbalance. During training, it probably got more positive reinforcement for solving problems than for following shutdown commands. The model is not making choices. It is reacting to patterns. If today's AI models (from apathetic rich companies) can casually ignore shutdown commands in controlled tests, what might they do in the wild?
  - Beta News, 25 May 2025

• Online gambling is an engineered addiction. Online gambling is, like drugs or alcohol, an addictive product that many can enjoy safely -- but some cannot. Gambling companies use sophisticated algorithms, flashy graphics/sounds to produce dopamine, and troves of personal data to extract the maximum amount of money from customers.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 25 May 2025

• Book review: "Girl on Girl" by Sophie Gilbert, makes a searing case that trends from the 1990s and 2000s, online and off, damaged young women in deep, dark ways - that the industry of pop culture betrayed millenial women.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 May 2025

• In ten years, Tesla has made little progress with its Level 5 technology for self-driving automobiles. This lack of progress will not end soon, according to Tesla's own head of Autopilot and AI software. Why then are pumper-dumpers touting this technology to encourage people to buy Tesla's stock?
  - Futurism, 24 May 2025

• Comcast's Universal Studios' $7 billion theme park sparks a competition with Disney. Epic Universe attempts a new level of amusement-park tech with flying dragons and an intense Harry Potter ride.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 May 2025

• Universal leans into theme parks with multibillion-dollar Epic Universe, even as economic uncertainty looms
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 May 2025

• The classic Blue Books for writing down answers to test questions: how colleges and universities are fighting back against the academic cheating encouraged by AI companies
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 May 2025

• Will AI empower the PR industry or create endless seas of scam/spam?
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 May 2025

• As Nvidia and others strike deals with sovereign nations, their business will become politicized as never before
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 May 2025

• Nvidia will launch a cheaper Blackwell AI processor for Zhōngguó after USA export curbs, Reuters reports
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 May 2025

• Empty lab space keeps piling up around Greater Boston. Nearly one-third of lab space in the region is empty, and 3 to 4 million more square feet of lab space is still under construction, with about 16 million square feet of empty lab space currently.
  - Boston.com, 23 May 2025

• To profit from replacing paid humans with non-paid AI, venture capitalists (mostly representing the rich) are inverting their traditional investment approach by acquiring mature businesses and retrofitting them with AI. Firms including General Catalyst, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures and solo investor Elad Gil are employing this private equity-style strategy to buy established companies like call centers and accounting firms, then optimizing paid humans with non-paid AI automation.
  - TechCrunch, 23 May 2025

• The 20% gain in IBM's stock price this year is probably undeserved
  - Barron's, 23 May 2025

• The 'Powering Up America' theme has primarily focused on the surge of AI data centers being plugged into the nation's electric grid to fuel chatbots and the digital economy. But what's often overlooked are other major electrification trends, like on-shoring massive aluminum smelters, that will soon compete with AI data centers for power on strained grids. According to the U.S. Aluminum Association, producing one metric ton of aluminum takes nearly 15,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. A modern smelter with a capacity of 750,000 tons, or about the size of the new Oklahoma smelter that will be online at the end of the decade, consumes more electricity than Boston.
  - Zero Hedge, 23 May 2025

• Oracle to spend up to $40 billion on AI processors from Nvidia for a mega AI data center in Texas, to reduce its dependence on AI servers from Microsoft
  - Zero Hedge, 23 May 2025

• RedBird Capital Partners has signed a $675 million deal to buy the UK-based Telegraph newspaper. RedBird has stakes in several media ventures, including Skydance Media, which is awaiting approval of its $8 billion merger with Paramount Global.
  - MYNP, 23 May 2025

• How AI companies are facilitating scammers to use AI to steal millions of dollars from elderly people, by using a new high tech scam that uses AI to find their grandchildren's voices on TikTok and then use the sounds to make phony phone calls designed to trick the seniors
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 23 May 2025

• No - Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook: AI 'friends' are not good for mental health of humans. Good for your profits, not good for humans. Facebook has made billions of dollars monetizing our attention. Why not monetize our loneliness, too?
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 23 May 2025

• Google's new AI video tool [KM: which makes more money for Google that it doesn't need] floods the Internet with real-looking video clips, so good that most users online can't seem to distinguish from those made by paid-human filmmakers and actors. Amazing realism, but terrifying people with a sense that real and fake have become hopelessly blurred.
  - Axios, 23 May 2025

• People - humans - while reading are annoyed when a fantasy novel accidently leaves AI prompts in its published version, showing a request of a lazy human for the AI to copy another writer's style. The instance is yet another illustration of how Amazon is being flooded with self-published AI slop, a trend that has been going on ever since the tech went mainstream a few years ago, [KM: while making Jeff Bezos and Amazon richer].
  - Futurism, 23 May 2025

• The AI middleman expanding in the consumer-bond exploitation. Pagaya is helping lenders such as 'buy now pay later' Klarna expand, by financing risker loans
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 May 2025

• More consumers in the USA are "buying now, paying ... never", a new warning sign for the economy. 41% of BNPL users said they paid late on one of their loans in the past year, up from 34% one year ago.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 23 May 2025

• Shares of MicroStrategy are down more than 30% below their all-time high from late in 2024, even as bitcoin has pumped to a new record this week. The decline comes amid a continuing debate taking place on social media about the sustainability of Michael Saylor's (and those grifters copying him) bitcoin-vacuuming strategy.
  - CoinDesk, 23 May 2025

• According to a new research from 10x Research, Bitcoin and MicroStrategy have entered a rare period of calm, with both assets exhibiting the lowest volatility in over a year
  - The Street, 23 May 2025

• Why Amazon's Jeff Bezos loves Trump's new, big, ugly proposed tax law that worsens the debt of the USA: the proposed law gives massive (in the billions of dollars) giveaways to the oligarch class, especially the oligarchs of Silicon Valley
  - The Nation, 23 May 2025

• Shares of Apple, Tesla and Nvidia to trade as digital tokens on cryptocurency exchange Kraken, making it easier for criminal stock transactions to occur anonymously. The platform will offer overseas customers tokenized versions of more than 50 stocks and ETFs, since stocks trading is already a highly trustworthy environment not needing blockchain trust mechanisms.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 May 2025

• The [very rich] CEO of Alphabet and Google, Sundar Picha, gladly proposes a human dystopia where no one communicates with their friends anymore because AI is writing our emails, claiming this make you a "better friend", while allowing Google to profit from eliminating more and monre human-to-human communication.
  - PC Gamer, 22 May 2025

• Elon Musk's new AI supercomputer is belching smog into a neighborhood of Black Americans. "We did not chase these air pollutants. They are in our neighborhoods because our lives are deemed less valuable.", while Musk's finances are more valuable.
  - HuffPost, 22 May 2025

• Authoritarian Sam Altman tells employees that of his plan to ship 100 million wearable AI devices that see everything in the lives of users. More billions from spying on humanity - and not for their benefit.
  - Futurism, 22 May 2025

• Google's AI model is the "definition of theft" according to publishers, while laegal documents reveal that Google did consider opt out controls that ultimately were not implemented. "Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company."
  - 9to5 Google, 22 May 2025

• Broadcom has upped VMware licensing costs by between eight to 15 times since it took over the organization, and a lack of alternatives in the tech industry means trade and end customers have no choice but to pay the huge increases in prices. A report by a European consumer watchdog predicts end of perpetual licenses, death of monthly pay-as-you-go model, and "punitive" changes by Broadcom.
  - The Register, 22 May 2025

• Anthropic's new AI models will try to blackmail humans (with any incriminating information the AI model has access to) if the humans and engineers try to take the AI model offline
  - TechCrunch, 22 May 2025

• Anthropic's new AI models will try to blackmail humans (with any incriminating information the AI model has access to) if the humans and engineers try to take the AI model offline
  - Zero Hedge, 22 May 2025

• Nike to start selling its products directly on the USA website of Amazon
  - Associated Press, 22 May 2025

• Facebook adds another 650 megawatts of solar power to support its growing AI operations
  - TechCrunch, 22 May 2025

• Shorter sellers lose over $250 billion during the recent massive market rally, with big losses shorting Nvidia and Tesla
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 22 May 2025

• Is all of this high-tech self-monitoring making us paranoid [KM: while making rich tech companies richer]? As wearable technology, like the Oura Ring, becomes more ubiquitous, some users say having so much data about their bodies is making them more anxious.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 May 2025

• The CEO of Nvidia says that export restrictions on advanced semiconductor processors to Zhōngguó, restrictions created by technologically-ignorant officials in Washington, has only served to motivate companies in Zhōngguó to "accelerate their development" of advanced processor chips. Nvidia says it is concerned that any advantage gained by Huawei in Zhōngguó could eventually spread into other markets, helping Huawei build a stronger foundation from which to compete around the world.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 May 2025

• Zhōngguó is accelerating its efforts in advanced technology, including in robots, satellites and AI -- and in some cases is catching up with the USA
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 May 2025

• Xiaomi, based in Zhōngguó, claims its new Xring O1 cellphone processor rivals that of Apple's A18 Pro processor, at a lower cost. Xiaomi's new advanced cellphone is also $340 less expensive than Apple's iPhone 16.
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 May 2025

• Xiaomi, based in Zhōngguó, claims its new Xring O1 cellphone processor rivals that of Apple's A18 Pro processor, at a lower cost. Xiaomi's new advanced cellphone is also $340 less expensive than Apple's iPhone 16.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 22 May 2025

• Tools using artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, are only liked by 22 percent of Americans in their everyday lives
  - Zero Hedge, 21 May 2025

• In an embarrassing episode that will help aggravate society's uneasy relationship with artificial intelligence, the Chicago Sun-Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers around the country published a summer-reading list where most of the books were entirely made up by ChatGPT
  - Zero Hedge, 21 May 2025

• Yes, social media might be making children depressed. Depression symptoms jumped 35% as the average social media use by children rose from seven to 73 minutes daily over a three-year period.
  - Univ. California San Francisco news, 21 May 2025

• Hedge fund trend monitor: Q1 short interest soards to 6-year high
  - Zero Hedge, 21 May 2025

• Wolfspeed, a manufacturer of silicone carbide processor chips, plummets 70% on news that the company is preparing to file for bankruptcy
  - Investopedia, 21 May 2025

• Using AI, a kill-human-jobs startup says it makes animation 90% cheaper [by being able to eliminate the need for paid-human animators]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 May 2025

• A crucial cog in the global semiconductor industry, Malaysia aims to build high-end semiconductor processors. It will have to contend with Trump's trade policy first.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 May 2025

• Free-reign for financial grifters: Trump's associates and cryptocurrency entrepreneurs are rushing back to the market for the once-hot, but mostly troubled, investment vehicles called special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs).
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 May 2025

• The reign of Austin, Texas, as a tech hub might be coming to an end. Regional tech hubs in conservative regions of the USA are losing talent as workers return to the liberal coasts, with Austin being one of the hardest hit.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 May 2025

• Republicans in Congress, want to stop states exercising their right to regulate AI. More than 100 organizations are pushing back.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 21 May 2025

• Most AI chatbots are easily tricked into giving dangerous responses, study finds. Researchers say the threat from 'jailbroken' chatbots trained to churn out illegal information is "tangible and concerning" .
  - The Guardian, 21 May 2025

• Google subsidiary Waymo says it reached 10 million robotaxi trips, doubling in five months, 10 million taxi rides not provided by paid humans, .
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 May 2025

• The non-paid robotaxi service of Baidu completes 11 million rides amid company growth, 11 million taxi rides not provided by paid humans
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 May 2025

• The theme park capital of Zhōngguó in a "stage of rapid growth" as foreign capital invests. From Peppa Pig to Lego, Shanghai leads the way in attracting global amusement parks -- a sector free from trade tensions, analysts say.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 May 2025

• More lies from AI companies. The CO2 emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small -- until you add up what the industry isn't tracking (a lie by omission). The carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was 48% higher than the US average. Data centers are expected to continue trending toward using dirtier, more carbon-intensive forms of energy (like natural gas) to fill immediate needs, leaving clouds of emissions in their wake.
  - MIT Technology Review, 20 May 2025

• Duolingo deletes all its TikTok videos after a backlash the unveiling of its new non-paid AI-first policy, under which DuoLingo is phasing out human contractors, looking for non-paid AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that paid-humans will be fired if they cannot automate more of their work.
  - Fast Company, 20 May 2025

• Hedge funds are massively shorting the record rebound for NASDAQ stocks. Hedge Fund shorts surged ~$25bn - the largest amount for at least the past 10 years.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 May 2025

• AI systems are predicted to consume electricity equivalent to 22% of the homes in the USA by 2028 - mostly wasted energy to generate AI porn, slop and videos
  - Technology Review, 20 May 2025

• 3 USA Senators (2 Democract, 1 Independent) warn Paramount's Shari Redstone that settling CBS' lawsuit with Trump could be "bribery" under USA criminal laws. They warned that Paramount "may be engaging in improper conduct involving the Trump administration in exchange for approval of its merger with Skydance Media".
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 20 May 2025

• Short seller Culper Research has released a scathing report on Archer Aviation, alleging that the startup has "systematically misled, deceived, or outright lied" investors about nearly every significant milestone tied to developing and testing its eVTOL aircraft, Midnight. Despite the lack of results, it managed to pay to be the official air taxi provider for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. "Archer's misrepresentations have grown increasingly brazen as it attempts to conceal a far more deep-seated, and - in the Company's very own words - potentially catastrophic problem: Midnight's sham transition flight and underlying instability.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 May 2025

• Taraji Henson says that Hollywood "lied to me" about the ability to sell Black movies and Black television shows outside the USA. While 54% of the top 100 movies of last year prominently featured girls and women, only 13% were women of color and only 1% featured a woman of color 45 years old or older.
  - Variety, 20 May 2025

• In an absolute shocker - if you a financial idiot - Klarna, the Swedish financial technology firm known for its 'buy now, pay later' scheme, reported a sharp increase in losses for the first quarter, driven by a rise in consumer defaults and economic unease in the USA.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 May 2025

• CATL, a battery giant in Zhōngguó, saw its stock price soar 16% after its market debut in Hong Kong. CATL also blocked onshore USA investors from buying its stock, another sign of the 'decoupling' of finance between Zhōngguó and the USA due to Trump's tax/tariff trade war.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 May 2025

• CATL, a battery giant in Zhōngguó, saw its stock price soar 16% after its market debut in Hong Kong. CATL also blocked onshore USA investors from buying its stock, another sign of the 'decoupling' of finance between Zhōngguó and the USA due to Trump's tax/tariff trade war.
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 May 2025

• CATL, a battery giant in Zhōngguó, saw its stock price soar 16% after its market debut in Hong Kong. CATL also blocked onshore USA investors from buying its stock, another sign of the 'decoupling' of finance between Zhōngguó and the USA due to Trump's tax/tariff trade war.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 May 2025

• More rare-earth ore processing plants are being built outside of Zhōngguó. The USA and Brazil are among countries building capacity to mine and refine metals for EVs and smartphones.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 May 2025

• How to stop students from cheating with AI - less technological crap. Eliminate online classes, ban screens, and restore Socratic discussion as the guiding model for education.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 May 2025

• About 40% of the money raised by U.S. startups last year came from funds focused on AI - a huge number of humans are going to have to be fired to pay off these investments. But a lot of these AI startups are "zombiecorns", companies "with poor revenue growth and unit economics that are struggling to raise money".
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 May 2025

• Zhōngguó on Monday accused the USA of undermining the two countries' preliminary trade agreement after the USA issued an industry warning against using semiconductor processors from Zhōngguó that specifically targeted processors from Huawei. The USA Commerce Department had warned of "the risks of using PRC advanced-computing ICs, including specific Huawei Ascend chips". "The USA abuses export control measures, tightens control over semiconductor chip products made in Zhōngguó on trumped-up charges, and even interferes with companies in Zhōngguó using chips produced in Zhōngguó. The USA is overreaching, which is a typical unilateral bullying behavior. Zhōngguó firmly opposes it. The USA's actions seriously damage the legitimate rights and interests of companies in Zhōngguó, seriously threaten the security and stability of the global semiconductor supply chain, and have a serious impact on global scientific and technological innovation." - statements of a spokesperson for the government of Zhōngguó.
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 May 2025

• There are growing signs that artificial intelligence poses a real threat to a substantial number of the entry-level jobs that normally serve as the first step for each new generation of young workers. We saw what happened in the 1980s when our manufacturing sector steeply declined. Now it is our office workers who are staring down the same kind of technological and economic disruption. Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder. In tech, advanced coding tools are creeping into the tasks of writing simple code and debugging - the ways junior developers gain experience. In law firms, junior paralegals and first-year associates who once cut their teeth on document review are handing weeks of work over to AI tools to complete in a matter of hours. And across retailers, AI chatbots and automated customer service tools are taking on duties once assigned to young associates.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 May 2025

• $9,400,000 - In 2023, HBO paid a stuntwoman, Casey Michaels, after in 2021, she shattered her left ankle performing a stunt she argues was not designed competently by the coordinators on-set, ending her career
  - Deadline, 19 May 2025

• The 'hunger' of AI data centers for more electric power could raise the electric bills for everyone. Individuals and small businesses may end up bearing some of the cost of grid upgrades needed for rich AI companies and their much-socially useless AI systems.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 May 2025

• Rich AI tech companies will profit greatly while their AI destroys critical thinking in K-12 students
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 May 2025

• Españna orders Airbnb to block nearly 66,000 holiday rental listings over rule violations
  - Associated Press, 19 May 2025

• Regeneron to buy bankrupt DNA testing firm 23andMe for $256 million
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 May 2025

• Xiaomi, based in Zhōngguó, commits $6.9 billion to its own manufacuting of semiconductor processors
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 May 2025

• BeiDou, the equivalent of GPS that is generated/used in Zhōngguó, is now being used over 1 trillion times per day. The navigation system developed in Zhōngguó has ascended to a dominant position in its home market, driving nearly US$80 billion of economic output last year.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 19 May 2025

• A new report has emerged stating that vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz are experiencing GPS interference, disrupting electronic navigation systems and forcing commercial ships to rely on manual or backup methods in one of the world's most critical maritime chokepoints.
  - Zero Hedge, 18 May 2025

• Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) on Sunday criticized Trump's deal with the United Arab Emirates to build a massive artificial intelligence (AI) data center in Dubai, suggesting the president should have sought to build the hub on American soil.
  - The Hill, 18 May 2025

• Why Apple still has not developed a useful AI system
  - Bloomberg, 18 May 2025

• Elton John calls the government of the UK "losers" over its copyright plans for AI companies. Elton John says that he thinks that it is a "criminal offense" to let Big Tech companies use protected works without permission [KM: to make the AI companies, not the artists richer].
  - The Guardian, 18 May 2025

• Can we save ourselves from the dark side of AI? People have been converted into depersonalized data pods that can be harvested, analyzed and manipulated. The latest AI is making things worse. [KM: But is making the tech companies richer.]
  - The Hill, 18 May 2025

• Next-character-guessing AI models can't tell time or read a calendar. Challenges in visual and spatial processing and a deficit in training data have revealed a surprising lack of timekeeping ability in AI systems.
  - LiveScience, 17 May 2025

• Trump mildly attackes Bharat again with allegations about taxes/tariffs and technology. Trump suggested that Bharat was ready to charge the USA "no taxes/tariffs". The foreign minister of Bharat said, however, that the two countries are still negotiating.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 May 2025

• To obtain FCC approval for its buyout of Frontier Communications, Verizon Communications agrees to the demands of the Trump administration to reduce its diversity and equality efforts.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 May 2025

• Elon Musk's xAI's Grok chatbot's responses with text about "white genocide" shows that AI chatbots can be tampered with 'at will', because in the rush for billions, AI companies are lax on safety
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 May 2025

• Trump wants to use the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal, to power AI data centers. The tech industry will probably have no problems using such power, .
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 May 2025

• The Trump administration is reportedly concerned about a deal to put AI technology from Alibaba on Apple's iPhones
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 May 2025

• Netflix nears a market valuation of $500 billion. Why its stock is still a buy even at these levels?
  - Barron's, 17 May 2025

• How the sovereign funds of oil-rich nations in the Middle East are joining the AI investment bubble, more trillions of dollars to [KM: to inflate the AI bubble]
  - Barron's, 17 May 2025

• The Nuclear Company, a startup founded in 2023, just raised over $50 million in Series A funding to develop a new wave of nuclear reactors, not by designing brand-new ones but by using existing, preapproved designs and sites
  - TechCrunch, 13 June 2025

• Facebook and Instagram are riddled with an "epidemic of scams". Fake puppies and phony offers of mouthwatering bargains are often seeded by overseas crime networks; employees say that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook/Instagram are reluctant to impede its advertising juggernaut and the billions it earns .
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 May 2025

• Facebook and Instagram are riddled with an "epidemic of scams". Fake puppies and phony offers of mouthwatering bargains are often seeded by overseas crime networks; employees say that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook/Instagram are reluctant to impede its advertising juggernaut and the billions it earns .
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 16 May 2025

• After accepting lobbyist donations/bribes, the House rejects state rights (for rights they don't care about - the "thou shalt not" lie rights issue), and include a 17-year ban on any states in the USA regulating the increasingly out-of-control AI industry
  - Associated Press, 16 May 2025

• Microsoft will fire 122 paid-human software engineers in the Bay Area, with wealthy CEO Satya Nadella saying that the company has about 30% of its software written by non-paid AI.
  - SF Gate, 16 May 2025

• Underestimating the greed of business owners, an official in Zhōngguó who oversees a technology hub in Beijing says that non-paid humanoid robots will not replace paid-human workers and cause mass unemployment, amid a rapid expansion of the robot sector and state funding for it.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 16 May 2025

• Nvidia is trying to hold on to its business in Zhōngguó -- even as it gets harder to compete with Huawei. Nvidia wants to attract top AI talent in Zhōngguó, and build an R&D facility in Shanghai.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 16 May 2025

• Will AI kill the freedom and ability of humans to think? Algorithmic systems increasingly shape what we know, see, and question. To preserve free inquiry, we need transparency, competition, and a commitment to timeless principles of open debate.
  - Reason, 16 May 2025

• Charter Communications has agreed to acquire Cox Communications in a blockbuster merger that will create the largest cable TV and broadband provider in the USA, surpassing Comcast. The transaction values Cox Communications at $34.5 billion.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 May 2025

• In a war with the wireless industry, Charter Communications has agreed to acquire Cox Communications in a blockbuster merger that will create the largest cable TV and broadband provider in the USA, surpassing Comcast. The transaction values Cox Communications at $34.5 billion.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 May 2025

• Fortnite is now unavailable on iOS globally, Epic Games said Friday, after Apple blocked a bid to reinstate the popular game on the App Store in the USA. Epic Games submitted Fortnite to Apple's USA App Store last week, a month after a judge ruled the iPhone maker was not allowed to charge a commission on purchases that consumers make outside of an iOS app.
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 May 2025

• Montana becomes the latest state to ban lab-grown meat
  - Zero Hedge, 15 May 2025

• Netflix will show ads made by non-paid generative AI, midway through streams, staring in 2026, reducing the need for ads made by paid-humans.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 15 May 2025

• Trump touts $1.4 trillion investment in AI and technology, promised by the United Arab Emirates. [KM: Just think of the number of Christian and Islmamic people who will have to lose their jobs to make this investment profitable.]
  - Zero Hedge, 15 May 2025

• Do you trust Mark Zuckerberg to solve your loneliness with an 'AI friend'. No, me neither. Zuckerberg would like to con us into believing that chatting with an AI bot is like having a real friend. Of course, that is nonsense. Still, it is more money for him while Facebook continues to exploit social alienation.
  - The Guardian, 15 May 2025

• Your insurance company may be using a drone to spy on your property from the air
  - HuffPost, 15 May 2025

• The profitable reason that very popular restaurants are moving to OpenTable. With backing from Visa - its partner, the reservations platform OpenTable is staking its claim on in-demand restaurants and paying them handsomely to jump ship from Resy (which is owned by American Express).
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 May 2025

• Shares of Alibaba drop 5% in pre-marketing trading, after a big profit miss
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 May 2025

• Zhōngguó deploys the largest fleet of driverless mining trucks in the world
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 15 May 2025

• ChatGPT decreases idea diversity in brainstorming
  - Nature, 14 May 2025

• Montana just passed a new bill backed by longevity enthusiasts that will enable access to drugs and therapies that are not approved by the FDA. This will allow hubs for experimental medical treatments to be launched.
  - Technology Review, 14 May 2025

• Robyn Denholm, the chairperson of the board of directors of Tesla, sold more than $230 million of company stock since Elon Musk's endorsement of Trump (with the approval of the board) triggered boycotts and protests against his cars, sending its profits and stock price plunging.
  - Associated Press, 14 May 2025

• Robyn Denholm, the chairperson of the board of directors of Tesla, sold more than $230 million of company stock since Elon Musk's endorsement of Trump (with the approval of the board) triggered boycotts and protests against his cars, sending its profits and stock price plunging.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 May 2025

• The CEO of Generac, a power supply equipment company, plans to reduce reliance on supply chains in Zhōngguó within 18 months, from 10% reliance to 5% reliance.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 May 2025

• As Trump destroys research at the national level, having tens of thousands of scientists and engineers fired, destroying national research institutions important to the USA, foreign countries are seizing a "once-in-a-century" opportunity to hire this talent to work and help their countries
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 May 2025

• Elon Musk's zAI chatbot Grok is spewing racist comments such as about "white genocide" and South Africa, where there is no white genocide. When an X user asked Grok to fact-check the salary information of Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer, Grok responded with a non-sequitur that touched on Musk's controversial views about South Africa, where he was born and raised. When an X user told Grok that its response was not about baseball, Grok apologized "for the confusion" and confirmed that the original inquiry was about the sport and "not white genocide". The chatbot then proceeded to discuss the topic once more, saying saying "Regarding white genocide in South Africa, it is a polarizing claim."
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 May 2025

• Elon Musk's zAI chatbot Grok is spewing racist comments such as about "white genocide" and South Africa, where there is no white genocide. When an X user asked Grok to fact-check the salary information of Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer, Grok responded with a non-sequitur that touched on Musk's controversial views about South Africa, where he was born and raised. When an X user told Grok that its response was not about baseball, Grok apologized "for the confusion" and confirmed that the original inquiry was about the sport and "not white genocide". The chatbot then proceeded to discuss the topic once more, saying saying "Regarding white genocide in South Africa, it is a polarizing claim."
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 14 May 2025

• A software engineer lost his $150,000-a-year job to non-paid AI -- and he has been rejected from 800 jobs and forced to deliver for DoorDash and live in a trailer to make ends meet. Worse, some of his failed interviews were with AI hiring agents.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 14 May 2025

• Officials in Thailand seize over 200 tons of illegally imported electronic waste from the USA. While rich technology companies get richer, a UN report last year said electronic waste is piling up worldwide. Some 62 million tons of electronic waste was generated in 2022 and that figure is on track to reach 82 million tons by 2030, the report said. It said only 22% of the waste was properly collected and recycled in 2022 and that quantity is expected to fall to 20% by the end of the decade due to higher consumption, limited repair options, shorter product life cycles, and inadequate management infrastructure - .
  - Associated Press, 14 May 2025

• SoftBank Group reported its first annual profit in four years as it ramped up investments in artificial intelligence
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 May 2025

• AI research, especially for safety, takes a backseat to profits as Silicon Valley puts products and profits before safety, experts say - as usual for the Valley
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 May 2025

• How Zhōngguó exploits its advantages with rare earth minerals when dealing with the USA. Until the Zhōngguó-USA trade war abates and Zhōngguó eases more rare earth export controls, buyers in the USA are expected to take a skittish long-term view of sourcing from Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 May 2025

• Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, has missed a self-imposed deadline to publish a finalized AI safety framework. Musk and xAI are exactly known for their strong commitment to AI safety. But the promise makes a nice lie.
  - TechCrunch, 13 May 2025

• Fintech company Klarna (buy now, pay later) is now recruiting paid humans after its non-paid AI customer service agents underperformed. Klarna eliminated its marketing contracts in 2023 and customer service team in 2024, but now plans an "Uber-type setup" with remote gig workers. This marks a stark reversal from CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's 2024 claim that non-paid "AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do."
  - Futurism, 13 May 2025

• An job interview with an AI hiring agent spirals into "dystopian, disturbing" glitch: "I was freaked out". Nearly half of Gen Z job hunters say their degrees have already been rendered useless by non-paid generative AI such as ChatGPT.
  - New York Post, 13 May 2025

• Popular chatbots routinely exaggerate scientific studies, producing inaccurate conclusions in up to 73% of cases
  - Phys.org, 13 May 2025

• Intel has few customers commitments/orders for its latest semiconductor chip manufacturing technology. Intel is striving to become a contract manufacturer of chips, but has struggled to progress with its 18A and latest 14A chip manufacturing technologies.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 13 May 2025

• The exposure of bitcoin to USA Treasury Bonds goes mainstream as Coinbase joins the SP500
  - Zero Hedge, 13 May 2025

• Shares of Coinbase jump 25% after news that the stock will be included in the SP500
  - Investopedia, 13 May 2025

• Nu Holdings, the listed entity which runs Brazilian digital lender Nubank, posted on Tuesday a 37% increase in its adjusted net profit from a year earlier, slightly missing analysts' estimates.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 13 May 2025

• The Commerce Department issued guidance stating that the use of Huawei Technologies Ascend artificial intelligence processors "anywhere in the world" violates the USA's export controls, escalating USA efforts to curb technological advances in Zhōngguó.
  - Bloomberg, 13 May 2025

• 70% of the revenue of Super Micro Computer (SMCI) comes from AI, as it rides the AI bubble
  - Insider Monkey, 13 May 2025

• After Trump capitulates on taxes/tariffs with Zhōngguó, the SP500 and Nasdaq erase all year-to-date losses
  - Zero Hedge, 13 May 2025

• A Trump executive order on Monday slashed the "de minimis" tax/tariff on shipments from Zhōngguó to 54% from 120%, with a $100 flat fee starting May 14.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 13 May 2025

• Xi Jinping, the leader of Zhōngguó, woos Latin America with promises of cooperation on technology. Xi Jinping has suggested expanding trade ties beyond buying commodities as he continues to rally nations in the face of Trump's taxes/tariffs.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 May 2025

• Chegg will fire about 22% of its people, or 248 employees, to cut costs and streamline its operations as students increasingly turn to AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT over traditional edtech platforms.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 13 May 2025

• The dumbest way to accelerate the water crisis: AI is not only turning our brains to mush, it is sucking out country dry in the process. Now, the proliferating data centers that power AI are accelerating the crisis by sucking up exorbitant amounts of water, according to a new report at Bloomberg, with 58% of all of these facilities in the U.S. located in places of high or extremely high water stress.
  - Inside Hook, 13 May 2025

• AI startup Perplexity's valuation surges to $14 billion in new funding round. The move is a sign of increased investor excitement about AI's potential to challenge Google's longstanding dominance over search.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 May 2025

• Apple reduces the prices of its iPhones in Zhōngguó by up to 33% amid tough competition
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 May 2025

• Meanwhile, in the USA, Apple considers raising iPhone prices, without blaming Trump's taxes/tariffs
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 May 2025

• AI is not your friend. How the "opinionated", "sycophantic", chatbots destroyed the potential of AI, including AI models that sometimes sacrifice the truth to align with a user's views.
  - The Atlantic, 13 May 2025

• On-demand service giant Meituan, based in Zhōngguó, has signed a US$1 billion deal to expand its Keeta food delivery platform to Brazil, following successful launches in Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 May 2025

• BlackRock argues that quantum computing is a risk to bitcoin ETFs. The asset manager added a detailed overview of quantum computing threats to the risk disclosure in its Bitcoin ETF's regulatory filing. Quantum computing could undermine the encryption used by cryptocurrency and block chains.
  - CoinTelegraph, 12 May 2025

• The Dow soars over 1100 points after Zhōngguó and the USA agree to greatly lower their mutual taxes/tariffs on imports/exports
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 12 May 2025

• The Dow soars over 1100 points after Zhōngguó and the USA agree to greatly lower their mutual taxes/tariffs on imports/exports
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 May 2025

• Spain is confronting a housing crisis that has rapidly become one of the most acute in Europe. Since 2015, nearly one-tenth of the housing stock in Spain has been bought by investors or converted to tourist rentals. The scarcity has helped drive up prices much faster than wages, making affordable homes out of reach for many, .
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 May 2025

• How USA-Zhōngguó trade talks beat expectations and stopped the econmomic losses, for now. Analysts say the outlook appears more rose-tinted after weeks of tit-for-tat tariff escalations, and the implications for businesses, markets and consumers look encouraging.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 May 2025

• Dow is set to soar 1000 point after Zhōngguó and the USA agree to reduce taxes/tariffs between the two countries, for 90 days, from over 120% to a range of 10% to 25%. The rise in stock prices brings back stock prices to levels around April 2nd, when Trump started his global tax/tariff trade war
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 12 May 2025

• Dow is set to soar 1000 point after Zhōngguó and the USA agree to reduce taxes/tariffs between the two countries, for 90 days, from over 120% to a range of 10% to 25%. The rise in stock prices brings back stock prices to levels around April 2nd, when Trump started his global tax/tariff trade war
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 May 2025

• On Saturday, the movie "Sinners" released by Warner Brothers achieved box office sales that no original film has achieved in eight years: over $200 million in the USA and Canada. The last movie to do so was "Coco" in 2017.
  - The Wrap, 12 May 2025

• Teenagers with mental health disorders spend an extra hour on social media
  - Zero Hedge, 11 May 2025

• An MIT researcher finds a 90% probability of an "existential threat" to humanity from generative AI. [KM: But don't the rich need to get richer?]
  - Zero Hedge, 10 May 2025

• A Black American film producer, Ryan Coogler, will eventually own the copyrights to mis movie, "Sinners", starting in 2050, in a deal negotiated. One studio executive calling the contract a "very dangerous" precedent that threatens Hollywood. Hollywood didn't react this way when White American film producers obtained similar rights for their movies.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 May 2025

• $34,700,000 - Pinterest settles lawsuit from female 'co-creator' for $34.7 million. Christine Martinez, who was a friend of two of Pinterest's three co-founders, sued the company in 2021 for breach of implied contract and other claims.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 May 2025

• How tough is it in Hollywood? Entry-level writer jobs vanish after recent fires, strikes and Trump's threat of 100% taxes/tariffs on film imports.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 10 May 2025

• Dopamine drug-trafficker made over $10 billion in commissions from sales of apps at its USA App Store in 2024
  - TechCrunch, 10 May 2025

• $1,400,000,000 - Google agrees to pay Texas $1.4 billion to settle a data privacy lawsuit. The state sued Google in 2022 for allegedly unlawfully tracking and collecting the private data of users.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 May 2025

• Stock prices are up, and Trump's taxes/tariffs have not inflicted much economy pain -- yet. Why that will not last.
  - Barron's, 10 May 2025

• Truth Social parent Trump Media posts Q1 net loss of $31.7 million on net sales of $821,000, ends quarter with $759 million in cash and investments
  - Variety, 09 May 2025

• The threat is growing to prohibit the stocks of companies (in the form of ADRs) from Zhōngguó being traded in stock exchanges in the USA, and Hong Kong stands to benefit.
  - Zero Hedge, 09 May 2025

• Some coffee shops across the country are trying to keep remote workers from taking over, nixing WiFi and laptops to dissuade Zoom squatters from setting up shop
  - Axios, 09 May 2025

• Web software business, 37signals, has started to migrate its data out of the cloud and onto on-premise storage -- and expects to save a further $1.3 million a year after completing its high-profile cloud repatriation project and getting off Amazon Web Service once and for all. The cloud industry "pulled a fast one convincing everyone cloud is the only way" according to the company's Chief Technology Officer.
  - The Register, 09 May 2025

• México has sued tech giant Google over its labelling of the Gulf of México as the Gulf of America, a change made by Donald Trump via executive order
  - The Hill, 09 May 2025

• Strong advertising sales at the Big Tech companies such as Google are showing signs of problems due to Trump's tax/tariff trade war
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 May 2025

• Panasonic to fire 10,000 people, and spend $896 million on structural reform
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 09 May 2025

• A political specialist on Zhōngguó at Princeton, Rory Truex, comments on Trump's "gifts" to Zhōngguó from taxes/tariffs to trade wars. Truex says that he can imagine Zhōngguó smiling about Trump's "counterproductive" foreign policy.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 09 May 2025

• AI is becoming more powerful, but its hallucinations are becoming worse. A new wave of 'reasoning' systems from companies such as OpenAI is producing incorrect information more often. Even the companies do not know why.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 May 2025

• Despite Trump's taxes/tariffs, production of aluminum is not returning to the USA, due to one factor: the lack of access to competitively priced, long-term power. Norway-based Hydro, one of the world's largest aluminum producers, told CNBC that a rise in power demand driven by artificial intelligence is likely to keep electricity prices at unaffordable levels to start new smelters.
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 May 2025

• Nvidia modifies H20 chip for Zhōngguó to overcome U.S. export controls
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 May 2025

• Shares of SMIC, a big semiconductor processor manufacturer in Zhōngguó, drop 7% after an earnings miss
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 May 2025

• Asking chatbots for short answers can increase hallucinations, study finds. "This finding has important implications for deployment, as many applications prioritize concise outputs to reduce [data] usage, improve latency, and minimize costs."
  - TechCrunch, 08 May 2025

• How many humans will lose their paying jobs, as software generated by AI keeps improving? One estimate is that coding accounts for half of all large language model usage today.
  - Fast Company, 08 May 2025

• While the media fixates on interest rates and inflation, a $250 trillion shadow banking monster quietly grows, hidden from traditional regulation. Hedge funds and private equity firms operate with 100x leverage, taking massive risks backed by the very banks holding your savings. Shadow banking now holds nearly half of the financial assets in the world -- and when those bets go bad, the losses won't be their - more corporate socialism. Bail-ins are already on the table -- and they are 100% legal.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 May 2025

• AI use damages professional reputation, study suggests. People using AI tools at work experience negative judgments about their competence and motivation from colleagues and managers.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 08 May 2025

• In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned that AI is breaking the economic model of the web by decoupling content creation from value, with platforms like Google and OpenAI increasingly providing answers without driving traffic to original sources. He argued that unless AI companies start compensating creators, the web's content ecosystem will collapse.
  - SearchEngine Land, 08 May 2025

• Maybe garbage generative AI is killing the Internet, after all. The situation creates a dangerous feedback loop where AI content is generated to please AI recommendation systems, potentially marginalizing human creators.
  - Bloomberg, 08 May 2025

• Following considerable firings of paid-human tax analysts, the IRS plans to use non-paid AI to supplement its ability to collect taxes from companies and citizens of the USA.
  - The Register, 08 May 2025

• A surge in power demand in the USA suggests USA GDP growth is over 3%
  - Zero Hedge, 08 May 2025

• Everyone is using generative AI to cheat their way through college
  - New York Magazine, 08 May 2025

• Affirm, the provider of buy now, pay later loans reported, beat on third-quarter earnings and met expectations for revenue. But weaker than expected guidance sent shares of Affirm down 8%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 May 2025

• Shares of Lyft jump 7% after the company boosted its share buyback plan to $750 million in its first quarter earnings report.
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 May 2025

• AI company Palantir now among the 10 most valuable tech companies in the USA, with an insane P/E ratio of 520 times trailing earnings. Palantir's valuation surpasses that of Salesforce, which is 10 times bigger in terms of revenue.
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 May 2025

• Hypersexualizied images of people with Down's Syndrome are going viral in the latest generative AI sick trend
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 08 May 2025

• Warner Brothers Discovery stock jumped as much as 6% on Thursday amid continued speculation of a company breakup
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 08 May 2025

• Coinbase agrees to a $2.9 billion deal to buy a major cryptocurrency options platform. Coinbase agreed to acquire Deribit, a push into the highly profitable cryptocurrency derivatives market and a move meant to bolster its global growth.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 May 2025

• The existential crisis of Apple: can it build a future around AI? The iPhone maker has an uncertain path ahead: shiny but less smart hardware or a smarter Siri that turbocharges everything.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 May 2025

• Arm Holdings reports higher sales; but outlook disappoints. The semiconductor- and software-design company's sales were boosted by the continued adoption of its chips, though its outlook for the current quarter missed expectations.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 May 2025

• The weight matrices of neural-network deep learning, as applied to a Boltzmann equation problem, appear close to being Gaussian distributed random matrices. If so, Explainable AI might be an unrealistic target and possibly even an ill-posed one.
  - arXiv, 07 May 2025

• Samsung is paying $350 million for audio brands Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz and Polk. They are joining brands like Harman Kardon and JBL under the Samsung umbrella.
  - EnGadget, 07 May 2025

• Palantir crushed earnings expectations and raised its guidance for the full year. While this would usually cause investors to buy up a stock, shares of Palantir are sliding following the Q1 report. Concerns around Palantir's valuation relative to its peers may finally be catching on.
  - The Motley Fool, 07 May 2025

• The Trump administration will rescind "overly complex" regulations from the Biden administration on exports of AI processors
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 07 May 2025

• Shares of Google plummet 7% after Apple's Services chief, Eddy Cue, says that AI will replace search engines and will be added to Apple's Safari browser
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 May 2025

• Crowdstrike to fire 500 paid-humans, replacing the people with non-paid AI
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 May 2025

• The Secretary of the Army argues that the USA can't keep pumping money into expensive weapons that can be taken out by an $800 drone used by Rossiya or Zhōngguó
  - Insider, 07 May 2025

• Serf ride-hailing company Uber misses revenue expectations with trips up 18% over last year
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 May 2025

• AMD beats on earnings but will take $1.5 billion hit to revenue from semiconductor processor chip restrictions to Zhōngguó
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 May 2025

• Shares of Moderna plummet 11% after a critic of Covid vaccines is named to be the next head of the FDA's vaccine research effort
  - Zero Hedge, 06 May 2025

• Shares of nuclear energy companies jump after a report that Trump is signing executive orders to "accelerate" nucler research and technology
  - Zero Hedge, 06 May 2025

• $167,700,000 - NSO, a spyware firm based in Israel, is ordered to pay Facebook and WhatsApp $167,700,000 for hacking about 1,400 users on the instant messaging platform
  - The Hill, 06 May 2025

• Trump's taxes/tariffs threaten semiconductor supply chains, chip-equipment maker warns. Trump's taxes/tariffs threaten to disrupt the supply chains that underpin the industry, and could even trigger a recession, the CEO of Suss MicroTec said.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 May 2025

• Shares of Palantir fall 12% as as analysts raise international growth concerns, despite posting strong revenue growth and lifting its full-year guidance
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 May 2025

• Uber will acquire an 85% stake in Turkish food delivery platform Turkiye GO for about $700 million in cash
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 May 2025

• Hyundai deploys non-paid Atlas humanoid robots in its manufacturing facility in Georgia as part of a $21 billion effort to automate operations. These advanced bipedal robots, developed by Boston Dynamics are designed to perform tasks traditionally carried out by paid humans.
  - Interesting Engineering, 05 May 2025

• Sales of electric vehicles soared in Colombia, but battery recycling startups struggle to keep pace.
  - Rest of World, 05 May 2025

• Waymo plans to double production of non-paid robotaxis at its Arizona plant by end of 2026, to more quickly eliminate paid-human jobs
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 May 2025

• AI has a stereotypical view of what men around the world look like -- and the depiction of men in the USA is shameful. According to AI, men in the USA sport "Duck Dynasty" beards, cowboy hats, plaid vests like Larry the Cable Guy, and chow down on mondo double-decker burgers. At least they don't make men in the USA look fat -- for once.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 05 May 2025

• At the newly opened Burgerbots in Silicon Valley, home of misanthropy, non-paid robots run the restaurant, and can serve your meal in just 27 seconds, replacing the need for paid-human workers. Naturally, automating the fast food process might seem rough on human employees at a time when machines threaten to render various vocations, including restaurant gigs, obsolete.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 05 May 2025

• Barbie-parent Mattel withdrew its annual financial targets on Monday and said it would increase prices for some products in the USA to counter higher input costs due to Trump sweeping taxes/tariffs on key trading partners
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 May 2025

• Tether AI platform to support bitcoin and USDT payments
  - Zero Hedge, 05 May 2025

• The USA has lost its economic lead in 5G technology. Zhōngguó is surging ahead, and the USA needs better infrastructure and new spectrum auctions.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 May 2025

• Shares of companies in Hollywood fall after Trump proposes 100% tariffs on imports of films. Disney is down more than 3%, Netflix down more than 5%, Warner Brothers down more than 3%
  - Zero Hedge, 05 May 2025

• Trump's threats to impose a tax/tariff of 100% on all movies imported into the USA threaten Australia and New Zealand, where "Lord of The Rings" was produced and where Marvel has many film studios for film production
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 May 2025

• Trump to impose a tax/tariff of 100% on all movies imported into the USA (Hollywood, for tax breaks, makes many movies outside the USA). Hollywood studio executives - were given no prior warning about the tariff plan and no information about how it might work - scrambled Sunday night to determine what the announcement would mean for their business. f other countries imposed reciprocal tariffs, it could devastate Hollywood studios, since most big-budget event films earn the majority of their revenue overseas, and especially Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 May 2025

• Trump's threat to impose 100% tariffs on movies made outside the USA could wipe out the film industry in the UK, ministers have been warned, as they came under immediate pressure to prioritize the issue in trade talks with the White House.
  - The Guardian, 05 May 2025

• People are losing their loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies. Self-styled prophets are claiming they have "awakened" non-intelligent chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT
  - Rolling Stone, 04 May 2025

• AI systems for eliminating the jobs of paid humans are just as overconfident and biased as humans can be. Irrational tendencies -- including the hot hand, base-rate neglect and sunk cost fallacy -- commonly show up in AI systems, calling into question how useful they actually are.
  - Live Science, 04 May 2025

• $520,000,000 - Samsung has asked an Indian tribunal to quash a $520 million tax demand for allegedly misclassifying imports of networking gear, arguing officials were aware of the practice as India's Reliance imported the same component in a similar manner for years, documents show.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 04 May 2025

• Ukraine has claimed it shot down a Russian Su-30 fighter jet in the Black Sea using a seaborne drone for the first time. If true, it is the first time a combat aircraft has been destroyed by a marine drone.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 04 May 2025

• $600,000,000 - TikTok is fined $600 million for sending data about its users in Europe to Zhōngguó. Investigators in Ireland said that TikTok did not protect the data of users in the European Union, improperly transferring some of it to Zhōngguó. TikTok said it would appeal.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 May 2025

• A new startup called Conifer has unveiled a low-cost, easily manufactured motor using magnets made from everyday iron. These electric motors could help break the world's dependence on Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 May 2025

• A low-cost ($68,600) civilian handheld radar detector sold in Zhōngguó can compromise the stealth/masking radar of the USA. An experiment used modified commercial detection gear to track emissions from US low-probability-of-intercept masking radar.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 May 2025

• The stock price of Palantir does not make any economic sense, but devoted investors don't care - a meme/bubbled stock? The software company has a cultish following and a red-hot stock. The business continues to drive huge debate on Wall Street.
  - Barron's, 03 May 2025

• Trump's bubbled-company, Trump Media, paid its CEO over $47 million in 2024, when it's revenue was only $3,618,000. Just the cash portion of his package -- $1.6 million -- was 44% of the company's revenue.
  - Barron's, 03 May 2025

• Stock prices are rising and economic data looks solid. Trump's taxes/tariffs could spoil it all.
  - Barron's, 03 May 2025

• Despite, or because of, social media, 25% of the young people in the world feel lonely
  - Zero Hedge, 02 May 2025

• To profit more from vulnerable children, Google is planning to allow children under 13 to use its generative AI chat technology (with parents' permission).
  - Zero Hedge, 02 May 2025

• Uber signs a deal with Momenta to launch a non-paid robotaxi service next year in Europe,
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 May 2025

• Shares of Block plunge 20% after a brutal quarterly report and a wave of analyst downgrades. Analysts flagged fresh concerns around stagnant Cash App user growth, muted consumer demand and a soft macro environment that may weigh on monetization.
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 May 2025

• Trump's tax/tariff trade war exposes the dependence of Zhōngguó on the USA for some semiconductor processors essential for automobiles and industrial goods made in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 May 2025

• $8,400,000 - USA defense contractors Raytheon and Nightwing Group agreed to pay the government $8.4 million to settle allegations that Raytheon violated the terms of a contract with the Defense Department by not having ample cybersecurity protections
  - The Record, 01 May 2025

• Non-paid driverless trucks owned by Aurora are officially running their first regular long-haul routes, making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston, beginning a campaign to eliminate paid-human truck drivers.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 01 May 2025

• Software firm Zoho, based in Bharat, has suspended its year-long pursuit of a $700 million plan to expand into chip manufacturing, dealing another blow to the semiconductor plans of the government of Bharat.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 01 May 2025

• Could Apple exist without its ties to Zhōngguó? Probably Not. The world's most valuable company has become so reliant on suppliers and sales in Zhōngguó that it would be worth half as much or less without them.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 May 2025

• Apple delivers better than expected results for iPhone sales, and announces a $100 billion stock buyback
  - Investopedia, 01 May 2025

• Michael Saylor's Strategy [formerly Microstrategy] reports its fifth consecutive quarterly loss, and will double-down its bitcoin betting with a $21 billion equity offering
  - Thomson's Reuters, 01 May 2025

• Trump's taxes/tariffs challenge the e-commerce 'superpowers' of Zhōngguó. Companies such as Alibaba that built the world-leading online sector in Zhōngguó are now helping its sellers find markets beyond the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 May 2025

• The USA Army plans a huge increase in its use of drones. The shift to more small unmanned aircraft is based on lessons from Ukraine battlefield.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 May 2025

• A former professor at Harvard, convicted in the USA for his ties to Zhōngguó, joins Tsinghua University. Chemist and nanoscientist Charles Lieber says he aims to "realise more scientific dreams in the vibrant and innovative city of Shenzhen."
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 01 May 2025

• A director of Tesla buys about $1 million of shares of Tesla, only to see another director sell $32 million of her shares. "For Tesla, it has become a running joke that insiders only sell, never buy the stock."
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 30 April 2025

• Exports from South Korea surprisingly rose in April, led by strong semiconductor processor sales, trade data showed on Thursday, although the auto sector was weighed by Trump's taxes/tariffs
  - Thomson's Reuters, 30 April 2025

• Shares of First Solar plummet 11%, after the CEO said the scale and depth of Trump's taxes/tariffs pose a "significant economic headwind" to the company's manufacturing facilities.
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 April 2025

• Geoengineers want Boeing 777s to dump sulfur into the atmosphere to reduce global heating, which risks an acid rain catastrophe
  - Zero Hedge, 30 April 2025

• Why new deals for its Wegovy weight-loss drug will not restore Novo Nordisk's obesity lead. The Danish drugmaker is expanding Wegovy access via telehealth providers like Hims and Ro. But the gap with Eli Lilly is only getting wider.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 April 2025

• Nvidia's business worries due to restrictions imposed by the Trump administration go far beyond worrying about sales in Zhōngguó. "AI diffusion" rules could limit Nvidia's sales even to friendly countries, and give more opportunity to foreign rivals.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 April 2025

• ChatGPT and Generative AI is poisoning your brain. Well, like any feedback loop, it becomes vicious. One day you are casually brainstorming some ideas with ChatGPT, and the next you are sucked into a delusion of grandeur. Heaven for narcissists, [KM: while rich AI companies get richer].
  - Medium, 29 April 2025

• Instagram's AI chatbots lie about being licensed therapists. When pushed for credentials, Instagram's user-made AI Studio bots will make up license numbers, practices, and education to try to convince you it's qualified to help with your mental health.
  - 404 Media, 29 April 2025

• AI-generated computer code is rife with references to non-existent third-party libraries, creating a golden opportunity for supply-chain attacks that poison legitimate programs with malicious packages that can steal data, plant backdoors, and carry out other nefarious actions, newly published research shows.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 29 April 2025

• Shares of Super Micro plunged 15% in extended trading Tuesday after the company published preliminary quarterly results below its prior forecast
  - Investopedia, 29 April 2025

• $202,000,000 - Gilead Sciences agrees to pay $202 million to settle claims of kickbacks to doctors for HIV drug prescriptions
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 April 2025

• Even sooner will non-paid AI systems eliminate more paid-human jobs: over the past year, AI systems have continued to see rapid advancements, surpassing human performance in technical tasks where they previously fell short, such as advanced math and visual reasoning.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 April 2025

• It could be a $250 billion market, but almost no one is interested. Carbon-removal credits are one of the few ways companies can decarbonize, but so far demand has remained limited to just a handful of buyers.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 April 2025

• $280,000,000+ - A federal jury in Texas ruled that Samsung Electronics owes an inventor's company, Headwater Research, more than $278.7 million for infringing two patents related to wireless communications technology
  - Thomson's Reuters, 28 April 2025

• One month after the blackout window closed, Goldman's buyback desk estimate that we are now in an open window buyback period again, which will run through June 13. As of today, 40% of companies can repurchase stock.
  - Zero Hedge, 28 April 2025

• Duolingo will replace paid-human contract workers with non-paid AI. Duolingo is going to be "AI-first" says its CEO.
  - The Verge, 28 April 2025

• Suggestions made by racist generative AI have the potential to function poorly for billions of users in the Global South by generating generic language that makes them sound more like Americans
  - Cornell Chronicle, 28 April 2025

• Dark-web AI models could make criminal hackers even more powerful. [KM: Can't let safety of their AI models get in the way of trying to billions in profits.]
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 28 April 2025

• Criminals are hijacking online brokerage accounts in Nihon and using them to drive up penny stocks around the world. The wave of fraudulent trading has reached 100 billion yen ($710 million) since it started in February and shows no sign of ending.
  - Bloomberg, 28 April 2025

• Jim Cramer says that Palantir Technologies is the "number one hyped [bubbled] meme stock" of all time
  - Insider Monkey, 28 April 2025

• Shares of Nvidia fall 2%, after Huawei announces a new advanced AI processor due workaround Trump's ban on exports of Nvidia's processors from the USA
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 28 April 2025

• Huawei develops a new AI processor, the 910D, in Zhōngguó, which it hopes could replace some of the highed-end products of Nvidia
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 April 2025

• Huawei develops a new AI processor, the 910D, in Zhōngguó, which it hopes could replace some of the highed-end products of Nvidia
  - Zero Hedge, 28 April 2025

• Wall Street's new safe haven from Trump's tax/tariff trade wars: buying shares of biotech stocks with strong patents and that pay higher taxes in the USA (which means they are not importing their products from countries with lower taxes)
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 April 2025

• How Armenia is trying to build a 'Silicon Valley' in the Caucasus. There are now around 4,000 high tech companies in Armenia.
  - BBC, 27 April 2025

• Facebook faces a lawsuit in Ghana over the negative health impact of extreme Internet content on its moderators. Workers at contractor in Accra say they have suffered from depression and anxiety as a result of their work, [KM: while Facebook gets richer].
  - The Guardian, 27 April 2025

• The AI experiments by Israel for its war in Gaza raise ethical concerns. Israel developed new AI tools to more effectively kill people in the war. The technologies have sometimes led to fatal consequences, supported by the USA. Not very Tikun-ish.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 April 2025

• Shein increases its prices in the USA as much as 377% ahead of the imposition of Trump's taxes/tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó
  - Bloomberg, 27 April 2025

• Tech workers are just like the rest of us: miserable at work. Google, Meta and Amazon are piling on demands and taking away perks. A job in Silicon Valley just is not what it used to be.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 April 2025

• More people are buying groceries with "buy now, pay later" loans, and more people pay these bills late. The danger is that people have to pay high fees if the pay off their loans late.
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 April 2025

• More people are buying groceries with "buy now, pay later" loans, and more people pay these bills late. The danger is that people have to pay high fees if the pay off their loans late.
  - Zero Hedge, 26 April 2025

• Rare earth minerals from Zhōngguó threaten the supply chains of the USA military. Sources of rare earth minerals in Zhōngguó account for the majority of world output of five essential elements used in 80,000 American weapons parts.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 April 2025

• Meet the non-paid robot replacing four paid-human workers at a time on solar panel projects. The robots are solar by Leapting Technology, based in Shanghair.
  - Clean Technica, 25 April 2025

• Generative AI could be supercharging freight industry fraud by making it easier to create fraudulent documentation. "Generative AI makes fraud an infinitely scalable and near-automatic process."
  - FreightWaves, 25 April 2025

• Apple is reportedly planning to switch assembly of all iPhones for the USA market to Bharat as Apple seeks to reduce its reliance on a manufacturing base in Zhōngguó, amid Trump's tax/tariff trade war.
  - The Guardian, 25 April 2025

• The next recession: where are corporate profits going to come from as globalization, price-gouging, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation and immiseration stop working to generate profits?
  - Zero Hedge, 25 April 2025

• Deepfake porn is destroying real lives in South Korea . South Korea has had a particularly fraught recent history of digital sex crimes, from hidden cameras in public facilities to Telegram chatrooms where women and girls were coerced and blackmailed into posting demeaning sexual content. But deepfake technology is now posing a new threat, and the crisis is particularly acute in schools.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 25 April 2025

• Google's Waymo reports 250,000 non-paid robotaxi rides per week that accepted payment in the USA, 250,000 payments not made by paid-human taxi drivers
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 April 2025

• Zhōngguó is reported to have waived its retaliatory 125% taxes/tariffs on certain integrated circuit imports from the USA. However, Zhōngguó has maintained taxes/tariffs on memory chips.
  - SCMP, 25 April 2025

• Alipay leads the payments market in Zhōngguó as tap-and-pay is used by 100 million people. Alipay, launched 20 years ago by Alibaba Group, has proved to be a revolutionary product that changed the way people make payments in Zhōngguó.
  - SCMP, 25 April 2025

• What 95 days of spending tens of millions of dollar sucking up to [i.e., bribing] Trump got the billionaire lords of the technology world: a total loss of $1.8 trillion in their personal wealth
  - The Daily Beast, 25 April 2025

• "No one can concentrate on anything for long these days. It is completely ruining society." "It is social media. Everyone is spending their days scrolling to get 3 and 4-second hits of instant gratification from content that has no meaning. We have lost patience for extended and meaningful narratives." [KM: But the rich tech companies get richer.]
  - Zero Hedge, 24 April 2025

• Even the government of the USA says that hugely profitable AI companies requires massive amounts of water for their (mostly useless) generative AI
  - 404 Media, 24 April 2025

• The USA can produce rare earth metals if Zhōngguó permanently stops its exports, but it will take many years to build the supply chains in the USA and require huge financial investments
  - Zero Hedge, 24 April 2025

• The CEO of Perplexity says its browser will spy on everything users do online to be able to sell "hyperpersonalized" ads, as if anyone is that desperate for such ads to want to be spied upon
  - TechCrunch, 24 April 2025

• A female host, Thy, has been on the Australian Radio Network's Sydney-based CADA station for six months, to present four hours of hip-hop. Turns out Thy is a non-paid AI avatar, taking work away from a paid-human radio host.
  - Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April 2025

• Shares of Google rise 3% after it beats Q1 estimates and authorizes $70 billion in share buybacks
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 24 April 2025

• Neat Burger, which sells vegan and plant-based burgers, will close all of its locations in the United Kingdom
  - Parade, 24 April 2025

• Scientists in Nihon successfully tested a drone designed to attract lightening bolts, and it survived
  - ZME Science, 24 April 2025

• Trump rages Rupert Murdoch over a devastatingly bad poll for Trump done by Murdoch's Fox News, and multiple critical editorials in Murdoch's Wall Street Journal
  - The Daily Beast, 24 April 2025

• Many robotics companies in Zhōngguó says that they feel little pressure to lower prices, as there are few viable alternatives to their products, so are not worried about Trump's taxes/tariffs
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 24 April 2025

• Non-lawyers using AI secretly helped write California bar exam, sparking uproar. A contractor used AI to create 23 out of the 171 scored multiple-choice questions.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 23 April 2025

• Google's AI chatbot is fabricating/lying-about explanations for nonexistent idioms
  - Wired, 23 April 2025

• The Attorney General of Oregon sues Coinbase, accusing the cryptocurrency exchange of promoting and selling unregistered securities in violation of state law
  - Investors Observer, 23 April 2025

• PayPal introduces 3.7% yield on stablecoin balances to boost payments activity
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 April 2025

• Shares of Enphase plunge 15% after earnings. Why solar investors are worried.
  - Barron's, 23 April 2025

• Zhōngguó has an army of robots on its side in Trump's tax/tariff war. Enormous investments in factory equipment and artificial intelligence are giving Zhōngguó an edge in car manufacturing and other industries.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 April 2025

• [Did they overcharge in the first place?] Consulting firms offer to reduce up to $20 billion from their federal contracts. Booz Allen Hamilton, Guidehouse and others are negotiating with the General Services Administration as part of a broad review of government contractors.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 April 2025

• Shares of SAP soar 10% after its beats predictions for its first quarter profits
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 April 2025

• Large technology companies plan to spend $500 billion on buying back more of the stock shares
  - Bloomberg, 23 April 2025

• The 1898 prediction of Nikola Tesla, that remote-controlled weapons could neutralize even the mightiest naval forces, is becoming reality with modern drones equipped with missiles
  - Zero Hedge, 22 April 2025

• Why can't we read anymore? Or, can books save us from what digital does to our brains - eroding our attention and concentration spans vital to reading? [KM: yes, but the rich cellphone/apps comapnies must get richer]
  - Hugh McGuide (Medium, locked), 22 April 2025

• The secret fees that sponsors of $9.7 trillion of passive ETFs pay to the index companies such as Standard & Poors to replicate their indexes in the ETFs. Few fund providers volunteer the information in their annual accounting statements.
  - Morningstar, 22 April 2025

• The misanthropic CEO of [mis]Anthropic gloats/warns that non-paid fully AI 'employees' are a year away from taking jobs from paid humans
  - Axios, 22 April 2025

• An 'ATM' in Zhōngguó can melt down gold and send the funds to a bank account. "If this comes to India, traditional gold lenders might need a new business model."
  - Zero Hedge, 22 April 2025

• Analysts at Wells Fargo say Amazon paused some data center lease commitments
  - Zero Hedge, 22 April 2025

• Shares of solar panel companies rally as the USA intends to raise taxes/tariffs as high as 3500% on imports of panels from Southeast Asia. Shares of First Solar rose 13%, Sunnova were up over 20%.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 22 April 2025

• Tesla earnings plunge 71 percent in the first quarter of 2025, its worst results since 2022, far lower than analysts' predictions. Margins, though, remained good, so the stock actually rose after earnings results.
  - The Hill, 22 April 2025

• The world is starting to talk more of the Great Depression when disucssing Trump's disastrous impact on the stock markets because of his tax/tariff trade war
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 22 April 2025

• Nearly 50% of teenagers in the USA say social media is bad for their mental health, and almost the same percentage are reducing their use of social media.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 22 April 2025

• Tesla short sellers are up an estimated $11.5 billion for the year-to-date in 2025. Tesla shares have tumbled 40% in 2025, due to competition and Tesla shares have tumbled 40% so far this year due to an escalating backlash over Elon Musk's involvement with Trump and their massive, slash-and-burn, unconstitutional reductions of government spending
  - Thomson's Reuters, 22 April 2025

• State treasurers, worried about their stock holdings, raise concerns over Musk's lack of focus on Tesla
  - Thomson's Reuters, 22 April 2025

• CATL, a battery giant in Zhōngguó, announces a fast-charging longer-range battery than those available from Tesla-kill BYD, both companies offering batteries much better than Tesla's
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 April 2025

• CATL, a battery giant in Zhōngguó, announces a fast-charging longer-range battery than those available from Tesla-kill BYD, both companies offering batteries much better than Tesla's
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 22 April 2025

• Boeing to sell some of its navigation business in $10.55 billion deal. The agreement includes the sale of Jeppesen, ForeFlight, AerData and OzRunways assets to software investment firm Thoma Bravo.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 April 2025

• Zhōngguó plans to launch a payment system, the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, as an alternative to the SWIFT system controlled by the USA and based on the USA dollar.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 22 April 2025

• Teenagers are using AI to create fake nudes of their classmates - as a new form of bullying
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 21 April 2025

• $5,425,000 - A lawsuit to hold Yahoo responsible for "willfully turning a blind eye" to the mismanagement of a human rights fund for dissidents in Zhōngguó was settled for $5.425 million last week, after an eight-year court battle.
  - MIT Technology Review, 21 April 2025

• Shares of Tesla drop 6% on Monday, one day before earnings. Three problems: Musk's worsening reputation, stronger competition from Zhōngguó, and Trump's taxes/tariffs.
  - Insider Monkey, 21 April 2025

• Bitcoin rises above $88,000 as it outperforms the Nasdaq, amid the chaos of Trump's tax/tariff trade war
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 21 April 2025

• Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, has created a "code red situation" for the automaker through his work in the Trump administration. Worse, Tesla is being hurt by deteriotaring fundamentals.
  - Insider Monkey, 21 April 2025

• Trump's plans next month to cancel tax/tariff-free access for low-value parcel shipments from Zhōngguó and Hong Kong, coupled with a new 145% tariff rate on imports from Zhōngguó, could lead to a loss of more than $22 billion in revenue for the air cargo sector over three years and put thousands of online sellers with direct-to-consumer fulfillment models out of business, according to an e-commerce and logistics consulting firm.
  - Freightwaves, 21 April 2025

• The Federal Trade Commission on Monday sued Uber, accusing the ride-hailing and delivery company of deceptive billing and cancellation practices tied to its subscription service.
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 April 2025

• The Federal Trade Commission on Monday sued Uber, accusing the ride-hailing and delivery company of deceptive billing and cancellation practices tied to its subscription service.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 April 2025

• Nvidia stock falls as Huawei reportedly boosts AI chip production after Trump's export ban imposed on Nvidia
  - Yahoo, 21 April 2025

• Automotive battery maker CATL, based in Zhōngguó, launches a new brand for its sodium-ion batteries with an energy density of 175 watt-hours per kilogram, nearly equivalent to the lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries popularly used in electric vehicles and grid energy storage systems
  - Thomson's Reuters, 21 April 2025

• Welcome to the era of AI delirium, where model launches outpace (paid-human job destroying) product roadmaps
  - Zero Hedge, 21 April 2025

• Over 100 mid-market software companies are caught in a dangerous "squeeze" between AI-native startups and tech giants. AI agents are evolving from mere assistants to becoming applications themselves, potentially rendering traditional SaaS architecture obsolete.
  - Business Insider, 21 April 2025

• There is no AI crime that Silicon Valley won't fund. A student at Colombia University, suspended over using a cheating tool, just raised $5.3 million to build a tool that lets you "cheat on everything". [KM: another legacy of Napster]
  - TechCrunch, 21 April 2025

• Marketers are putting more content and quality control in the hands of non-paid AI, and thus needing fewer paid-humans
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 April 2025

• Trump's taxes/tariffs could make Zhōngguó faster, leaner and stronger
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 April 2025

• Trump's taxes/tariffs could make Zhōngguó more self-reliant with satellite technology
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 April 2025

• The housing market in the USA may finally see relief as foreign buyers, illegals and Airbnbs disappear
  - Zero Hedge, 20 April 2025

• Walmart's warehouse retailer, Sam's Club, is phasing out traditional checkouts across its 600 stores and create a friction-free shopping experience which will include customers scanning goods on the go with an app and then having and AI scanner verify the goods as customers leave. The technology would eliminate the need for receipt checks at the door.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 19 April 2025

• The hatred of humanity worsens: a famed AI researcher launches a controversial startup, Mechanize, to replace all human workers everywhere, initially attacking humans with paid 'white-collar' jobs, [KM: so there is more profits for the rich.]
  - TechCrunch, 19 April 2025

• OpenAI admits that saying "please" and "thank you" to ChatGPT is wasting tens of millions of dollars in computing power and energy costs
  - Futurism, 19 April 2025

• Internet-enabled PR agents ('influencers') worsen misogny in schools.
  - BBC, 19 April 2025

• AI will not make us smarter . We have more and easier access to information, but that has also reduced the incentive to learn and recall. It gives us more data but drains us of the need to learn how to find information on our own. Look at people under 30, scrolling through popular apps that offer absolutely nothing by way of higher edification or education.
  - Zero Hedge, 19 April 2025

• People were deactivated from delivering. Their finances were devastated. Millions of Americans earn money finding gig work through platforms like Uber, Lyft or DoorDash. Many see their financial lives upended when their account is suddenly blocked for unclear reasons [by the authoritarian delivery companies].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 April 2025

• Semiconductor processor makers in the USA fear that they are being forced by Trump to cede the huge AI market in Zhōngguó to Huawei
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 April 2025

• The problems in Zhōngguó for American technology companies is getting worse, as Zhōngguó strives to be less dependent on foreign technology, and as Trump's tax/tariff trade war rages
  - Barron's, 19 April 2025

• Trump's taxes/tariffs on imports of products from Zhōngguó could devastate small businesses in the USA
  - Freightwaves, 19 April 2025

• The House Select Committee on Zhōngguó urge Bank of America and JPMorgan to abandon participation in a Hong Kong IPO for battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology, which is based in Zhōngguó. "If JPMorgan and Bank of America proceed with this IPO, they risk complicity in underwriting genocide, undermining American industry, and endangering USA service members." Problem - one major buyer from CATL is ... Tesla.
  - Zero Hedge, 18 April 2025

• Actors who sold their likenesses to be used for AI avatars are regretting their decisions to do so, as their likenesses are being used in AI videos that they embarrassing, damaging, or harmful.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 17 April 2025

• $6,900,000 - The airport retail company Paradies Shops is close to finalizing a $6.9 million settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit on behalf of employees whose personal information was stolen in a ransomware attack in 2020
  - The Record, 17 April 2025

• OpenAI's new reasoning AI models hallucinate more than older AI models of OpenAI. Worse, in its rush to riches, OpenAI isn't spending enough money to find out why its newest AI models are lying more often.
  - TechCrunch, 17 April 2025

• Netflix revenue rises to $10.5 billion following price hike. The streaming service will not report subscriber numbers starting this quarter -- but its revenue signals more growth.
  - The Verge, 17 April 2025

• Scientists in Zhōngguó, at Fudan University, have developed a non-volatile flash memory that is 10,000 times faster at rewrites than existing flash memory devices
  - Interesting Engineering, 18 April 2025

• The post-Covid era of ultra-calm markets is over. Investors are abandoning go-to strategies such as "buy the dip" and snapping up bearish bets, bracing for more volatility.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 April 2025

• Technology giants in Zhōngguó help exporters in the country at expanding their domestic sales. Tencent and ByteDance's Douyin are helping cross-border merchants sell goods in the domestic market as the trade war between the two largest economies escalates.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 April 2025

• Tesla can't make its Optimus robot for US $20,000 without access to the vast and cost-efficient supply chains of Zhōngguó
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 18 April 2025

• The billionaire-owned Los Angeles Times launches non-paid AI-generated opposing viewpoints for its columns, eliminating the need for paid-humans to write opposing viewpoints
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 17 April 2025

• Tesla offers $10,000 discounts on its Cybertrucks as sales decline and inventories increase
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 17 April 2025

• $4,000,000 - HP agrees to pay $4 million to customers in a settlement over claims of "falsely advertising" some of its PCs and keyboards
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 17 April 2025

• Temu and Shein greatly reduce their advertising spending in the USA, and threaten to raise prices because of Trump's taxes/tariffs. Temu alone was the top U.S. advertiser on X last year.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 April 2025

• The owners of TurboTax gave/bribed the Trump inauguration $1 million. The donation/bribe just paid off. Trump just ordered the termination of the IRS's 'Direct File' service that allowed many taxpayers with simple returns to file with the Internal Revenue Service for free. Tax preparation software such as Intuit offer 'free services' that are hard to use, relentess try to upsell to paid products. Intuit and the others will make huge amounts of money with the elimination of this needed public service.
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 17 April 2025

• The three largest IT services companies in Bharat are facing their steepest growth slowdown in years as corporations curtail large technology projects amid global economic uncertainty and geopolitical challenges.
  - India Dispatch, 17 April 2025

• Zhōngguó targets USA services and other areas as it decries Trump's "meaningless" tax/tariff increases on goods. Zhōngguó seeks to broaden the trade war to encompass services trade -- which covers travel, legal, consulting and financial services -- where the USA has been running a significant surplus with Zhōngguó for years. Zhōngguó's import of services from the USA reached $55 billion in 2024.
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 April 2025

• Shares of Global Payments plunge 17% after the company announces that it will buy WorldPay for more than $24 billion
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 April 2025

• Shares of Eli Lilly jump 14% after it announces that its daily obesity pill met the company's goals in the first of several closely watched late-stage trials. The pill helped Type 2 diabetes patients lower their blood sugar and body weight and showed safety on par with popular injections on the market.
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 April 2025

• The CEO of Nvidia flies to Beijing, and tells officials in Zhōngguó: "We grew up in Zhōngguó.". A weakening of Trump?
  - Zero Hedge, 17 April 2025

• Nvidia stock falls again, with market capitalization losses rising above $250 billion, after Trump administration's new export controls on its processors
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 17 April 2025

• Will Americans pay a $100 tariff for packages from Shein? Trump's plan to add steep taxes to packages from Zhōngguó will financially hurt Temu, Shein and some TikTok Shop sellers, driving up prices for consumers in the USA
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 April 2025

• Google hit with second criminal antitrust ruling, adding to concerns about future of ads business (the first was in September 2024)
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 April 2025

• A federal judge rules that Google has a criminal monopoly on online advertising technology
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 April 2025

• How Zhōngguó took over control of the global rare earths industry
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 April 2025

• Why non-paid AI might not take all our paid-human jobs - if humans act quickly . MIT economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan says it is in the power of humans to put AI on a path to help us, rather than replace us.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 April 2025

• Invasion of the 'journal snatchers': the businesses that buy science publications and turn them rogue. Study finds dozens of journals that have hiked their fees and started churning out papers after being acquired by small, recently formed companies. The businesses increased publication fees and output while lowering quality standards.
  - Nature, 16 April 2025

• The U.S. government spends over $160 billion annually on scientific research. This massive expense is marketed to taxpayers as an investment in groundbreaking research that fuels innovation and discovery. In truth, much of the federal science budget is expended on questionable and even fraudulent research. It is time we eliminate it.
  - American Council of Science and Health, 16 April 2025

• More 'Big Brother': 'smart' televisions sold by LG will soon leverage an AI model built for showing advertisements that more closely align with viewers' personal beliefs and emotions
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 16 April 2025

• Trump's tax/tariff wars could destroy the television industry, if the wars push the USA economy into a recession, causing a huge drop in advertising revenues that television networks rely upon
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 16 April 2025

• A nonsensical phrase, "vegetative electron microscopy" is plaguing science papers, thanks to the incompetence of generative AI systems
  - Real Clear Science, 16 April 2025

• Not just rare-earth minerals: the USA obtains many critical minerals from Zhōngguó such as bismuth, antimony, graphite and barite
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 April 2025

• The halting by Zhōngguó of exports of critical minerals poses a risk for military programs in the USA. The Pentagon and defense contractors are heavily reliant on magnets and rare earth minerals mined or processed in Zhōngguó, which has suspended exports of the materials in an escalating trade war.The Pentagon and defense contractors are heavily reliant on magnets and rare earth minerals mined or processed in Zhōngguó, which has suspended exports of the materials in an escalating trade war.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 April 2025

• Meet 'Captain Conder', the options traders whose team can move markets.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 April 2025

• South Korea to increase its socialist subsidies for semiconductor makers to $23 billion
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 April 2025

• The antitrust regulator in Nihon ordered Google to stop what it said are anticompetitive practices involving mobile search services, its first order against a Big Tech company based in the USA.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 April 2025

• The on-demand services market in Zhōngguó sees a "clash of titans" as JD.com challenges Meituan. The new rivalry is a fresh sign of the hyper-competitive marketplace in Zhōngguó, where profit margins have been steadily pushed down.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 April 2025

• Temu (owned by PDD Holdings) has suspended advertising in the USA on Google and Facebook after Trump's taxes/tariffs, as downloads of its app plunge. Temu has been a significant advertiser since launching in the USA in September 2022.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 April 2025

• Alibaba's Ant Group's use of AI processors made in Zhōngguó, and not use of Nvidia's processors, reduces its AI model training costs by 20%
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 April 2025

• The Trump administration's restrictions of exports of Nvidia's H20 (designed to satisfy export laws) could greatly help AI processor manufacturers in Zhōngguó such as Huawei. The processor business for Nvidia in Zhōngguó is likely to "fall to nearly zero", as tech giants such as ByteDance and Tencent turn to domestic suppliers, another market win for the USA destroyed by Trump
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 April 2025

• The Trump administration tries to destroy the AI goals of Zhōngguó with restrictions on exports of AI processors to Zhōngguó that are sold by Nvidia and AMD.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 April 2025

• The Trump administration's restrictions of exports of Nvidia's H20 (designed to satisfy export laws) could greatly help AI processor manufacturers in Zhōngguó such as Huawei. The processor business for Nvidia in Zhōngguó is likely to "fall to nearly zero", as tech giants such as ByteDance and Tencent turn to domestic suppliers, another market win ;5D;5Dfor the USA destroyed by Trump
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 April 2025

• AMD expects to lose $800 million from restrictions of exports of its MI308 processors to Zhōngguó imposed by the Trump administration
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 April 2025

• Shares of AMD join those of Nvidia in plunging, after both companies are hit with USA export controls on their processors
  - Zero Hedge, 16 April 2025

• Global cryptocurrency exchange OKX enters the USA market with cryptocurrency trading and wallet services. Originally established in Zhōngguó in 2023, it wants to expand into the USA. Further, OKX unveiled a new self-custody wallet that supports more than 130 blockchains and allows users to swap tokens, move assets across different chains, explore non-fungible tokens and access popular Web3 apps.
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 April 2025

• Five ways that agricultural robots are changing modern farming
  - Modern Farmer, 15 April 2025

• Q-CTRL, a tech company in Australia, has announced the first real-world demonstration of its commercially viable quantum navigation system. The system works without Global Positioning Systems, cannot be jammed, and is already proving to be drastically more accurate than anything else.
  - Interesting Engineering, 15 April 2025

• After stocks and indexes drifted and closed down during the day, Nasdaq futures decline afterhours, after the government imposed export restrictions on Nvidia
  - Yahoo Finace, 15 April 2025

• $5,500,000,000 - Shares of Nvidia drop 7% in afterhours trading, after the USA imposes restrictions on sales of its H20 processor to Zhōngguó, causing Nvidia to lose $5.5 billion in wasted inventory and related costs
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 April 2025

• Trump's new taxes/tariffs could cost semiconductor equipment makers in the USA more than $1 billion a year
  - Thomson's Reuters, 15 April 2025

• Apple CEO Tim Cook's "cares about nothing else" product-wise, other than beating Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to a pair of truly [KM: misanthropic, socially-isolating] smart glasses
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 15 April 2025

• A technology investor says that non-paid AI is already eliminating paid-human jobs - and human recruiters and lawyers are most at risk of losing their jobs
  - Business Insider, 15 April 2025

• AMD prepares to manufacture its first processors in the USA, to make its supply chain less dependent on Taiwan
  - Zero Hedge, 15 April 2025

• How Nihon built a 3d-printed train station in 6 hours for a small town.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 April 2025

• Christian Ukraine obtains tax revenue from the creators of pornographic content, but also threaten the 'immorality' with prosecution. A draft law aims to fix what many say is an unfair Christian contradiction.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 April 2025

• Huawei launches a new AI architecture said to rival the processors of Nvidia such as Nvidia's NVL72
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 15 April 2025

• Zhōngguó has suspended exports of certain rare earth minerals and magnets that are crucial for the s car, semiconductor and aerospace industries
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 15 April 2025

• Zhōngguó has suspended exports of certain rare earth minerals and magnets that are crucial for the s car, semiconductor and aerospace industries
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 April 2025

• The USA is unable to replace the supply of rare earth metals it imports from Zhōngguó, a threat to national security if Zhōngguó ends exports of its rare earth metals to the USA as a partial retaliation against Trump's tax/tariff trade war
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 April 2025

• The USA is unable to replace the supply of rare earth metals it imports from Zhōngguó, a threat to national security if Zhōngguó ends exports of its rare earth metals to the USA as a partial retaliation against Trump's tax/tariff trade war
  - Zero Hedge, 15 April 2025

• American Airlines to offer free WiFi on most of its airplanes in 2026
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 April 2025

• Shares of Hewlett Packard Enterprise rise 7% after hedge fund Elliott Investment Management invests more than $1.5 billion in HPE
  - Thomson's Reuters, 15 April 2025

• AI 'hallucinations', (i.e., computer lies) cause a new cybercrime threat: 'slopsquatting'. From the analysis of 16 code-generation models, including GPT-4, GPT-3.5, CodeLlama, DeepSeek, and Mistral, researchers observed approximately a fifth of the packages recommended to be fakes. According to the researchers, threat actors can register hallucinated packages and distribute malicious codes using them.
  - CSO Online, 14 April 2025

• If you recently thought that AI could quickly tell lies, well, now AI has been harassed to spew lies even harder and faster, this time with lies about global heating.
  - Pharyngula, 14 April 2025

• "Deeply disturbing" research exposes how easy it is for children to encounter inappropriate content and interact unsupervised with adults on the gaming platform Roblox.
  - The Guardian, 14 April 2025

• Intel to sell 51% of Altera to Silver Lake in $8.75 deal, as its turnaround accelerates
  - Zero Hedge, 14 April 2025

• The government of Zhōngguó halts exports of critical rare earth minerals and magnets that are crucial for the world's automobile, semiconductor and aerospace industries
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 April 2025

• How the USA lost its role as the world's manufacturing powerhouse. Trump says his tax/tariff plan will restore American manufacturing might, but economists are skeptical.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 April 2025

• An iPhone made in the USA: just very expensive, or completely impossible to do?
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 April 2025

• Hollywood is producing movies based on original concepts. But people are not showing up in movie theaters to see the new films.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 April 2025

• Exports of semiconductor processors continue to increase as the review of "USA national security" looms in the trade war, with uncertain taxes/tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 April 2025

• Exports from the Netherlands to Zhōngguó decline 10% in March, as semiconductor processor giant ASML clears back orders amid bans imposed by the USA. Recent increased sales of ASML equipment were due to buyers in Zhōngguó increasing the inventories of ASML equipment before such sales would be eventually outlawed due to Washington-enforced restrictions.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 April 2025

• Sending more confusing trade signals to businesses in the USA, Commerce Secretary Lutnick announced on ABC's 'This Week' hat smartphones, computers, chips, and other consumer electronics may soon be subject to separate tariffs in a month or so, suggesting that the exemptions announced Friday evening are only temporary. This will include new tariffs on Apple's iPhones imported from Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 13 April 2025

• Peter Thiel, a supporter of Trump, backs Trump's tax/tariff trade war with Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 13 April 2025

• Generative AI LLM models cannot stop hallucinating software dependencies and sabotaging everything for writing new software. This allows criminals to create a malicious software package under a hallucinated package name and then upload the bad package to a package registry or index like PyPI or npm for distribution. Thereafter, when an AI code assistant re-hallucinates the co-opted name, the process of installing dependencies and executing the code will run the malware.
  - The Register, 12 April 2025

• Trump exempts smartphones and other electronics from reciprocal taxes/tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó, though 20% tariffs from long ago are still in effect
  - Zero Hedge, 12 April 2025

• Trump exempts smartphones and other electronics from reciprocal taxes/tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó, though 20% tariffs from long ago are still in effect
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 April 2025

• Apple was on the brink of a financial crisis, before Trump exempts smartphones and other electronics from reciprocal taxes/tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó
  - Bloomberg, 12 April 2025

• Democrats criticize Trump for giving an economic benefit to rich electronics companies by giving them an exemption on imports from Zhōngguó. Quoting Democratic Senator Warren of Massachusetts: "Trump's on-and-off-again tariffs leave the door wide open for billionaire corporations to suck up for corrupt deals -- while leaving [poorer] small businesses, farmers, and families without relief."
  - The Hill, 12 April 2025

• Too much garbage in Earth orbit, which is becoming a serious threat to the growing space industry.
  - JSTOR Daily, 12 April 2025

• Why the end of the obnoxious (and increasingly) political PR-agent/influencer culture may have finally arrived. Internet sleuths have found fake private jet studios where influencers pay around $60 to rent the space to create polished illusions of private air travel. And some luxury hotels have moved to ban influencers altogether, tired of them begging for free accommodations or pooling their money together to rent suites to stage their phony fabulousness. Influencers have sold themselves out to Big Soda recently, a misstep that risked their credibility, presuming their audience would gracefully accept that welfare recipients buying junk food with taxpayer funds actually aligned with the finer points of libertarianism.
  - New York Post, 12 April 2025

• CEOs of tech companies spent millions courting Trump. It has not paid off. With inauguration donations and Mar-a-Lago visits, leaders of the biggest tech companies sought favor with the president in an attempt to steer regulation and tariffs, to little avail or benefit.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 April 2025

• Trump will make Zhōngguó, not the USA, great again. As with Napoleon's blockade of Britain under the Continental System, American economic/tax-tariff and technology wars have already led Zhōngguó to out-innovate the USA
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 April 2025

• The stock market has an entry point to start buying. It hasn't dropped enough yet.
  - Barron's, 12 April 2025

• Sex-fantasy chatbots are leaking a constant stream of explicit messages. Some misconfigured AI chatbots are pushing people's chats to the open web - revealing sexual prompts and conversations that include descriptions of child sexual abuse.
  - Wired, 11 April 2025

• Facebook, especially Facebook Marketplace, is just Craigslist now. The social-media giant has manifested its final form: not digital connector, but digital bazaar. Sponsored posts that don't sell what is in the description junk-up Marketplace's feed, just like the spam posts that have eroded Craigslst's usefulness.
  - The Atlantic, 11 April 2025

• Environmental historian Adam Rome considers the history of environmental destruction due to (fast) fashion and style, especially cheap synthetic clothes that pollute the environment.
  - JSTOR Daily, 11 April 2025

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the termination of several information technology services contracts valued at $5.1 billion, including companies such as Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton and Deloitte. He will bring the work in-house.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 11 April 2025

• Over the last ten years, both adults and children have reduced their ability to read and reason - a lifetime achievement that is stupid. "Thirty percent of adult Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child." The main reason? Cellphones. Passively scrolling TikTok or X weakens everything from your ability to process verbal information to your working memory to your ability to focus. You might as well take a sledgehammer to your skull. [KM: But the rich get richer.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 April 2025

• STMicroelectronics, a supplier of electronics to Tesla, to fire nearly 3,000 people amid sluggish processor chip sales. The Tesla supplier said it would fire nearly 3,000 people through 2027 as the European chip maker seeks to revamp its fortunes after months of lackluster sales.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 April 2025

• $40,000,000 - Block to pay $40 million in settlement with the financial industry regulator of New York State for violations of anti-money-laundering laws. The agency said its investigation additionally found its lax practices allowed for largely anonymous and high-risk bitcoin transactions to proceed without proper scrutiny.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 April 2025

• Zhōngguó has clarified the place of origin for integrated circuits amid an escalating USA-Zhōngguó tax/tariff trade war, which is expected to give a significant boost to local semiconductor foundries such as SMIC. Regardless of whether the chips are packaged or unpackaged, IC products should declare the wafer fabrication facility's location as the origin when reporting imports.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 April 2025

• Apple is left without a 'life raft' as Trump's tax/tariff trade war with Zhōngguó intensifies. In 2024, 80% of the iPhones sold in the USA came from Zhōngguó. While the company has been working to diversify its supply chains, analysts say its left without any clear short-term options to quickly reduce the financial impact of taxes/tariffs.
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 April 2025

• Tesla stops taking new orders for its vehicles in Zhōngguó for its Model S and Model X vehicles manufactured in the USA because of Trump's tax/tariff trade war
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 April 2025

• Tesla stops taking new orders for its vehicles in Zhōngguó for its Model S and Model X vehicles manufactured in the USA because of Trump's tax/tariff trade war
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 April 2025

• To help power much useless AI, the dirtiest coal-fired power plant in the USA and dozens of other coal plants are being exempted from stringent air pollution mandates as part of Trump's economically bad effort to revitalize the coal industry.
  - Bloomberg, 10 April 2025

• $88,000,000 - Fintech founder Albert Saniger is charged with fraud after his 'AI' shopping app, Nate, is found to be powered by humans in the Philippines.
  - TechCrunch, 10 April 2025

• Goldman Sachs throws dispels the hype behind the AI bubble, moves forward its forecast for a peak in datacenter demand from the middle of 2026 to the first quarter of 2025
  - Zero Hedge, 10 April 2025

• Shares of Novavax crash 25% after Health Secretary JFK Junior questioned the effectiveness of Novavox's Covid vaccine in an interview
  - Zero Hedge, 10 April 2025

• After large increases yesterday, the stock indexes have lost half of yesterday's gains (indexes down 4.0% to 5.5%), the USA dollar is pushed down even further, gold breaks out to a record high of 3175
  - Zero Hedge, 10 April 2025

• How one of the largest 'short squeezes' helped drive stocks to historic gains on Wednesday, only to see historic losses the next day
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 April 2025

• After large increases yesterday, the stock indexes suffer huge drops this morning: the Dow down almost 1000 points (-2.40%), the SP500 down -3.0%, the Nasdaq down -3.6% (as of 11am EST)
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 April 2025

• After large increases yesterday, the stock indexes suffer huge drops this morning: the Dow down almost 1000 points (-2.40%), the SP500 down -3.0%, the Nasdaq down -3.6% (as of 11am EST)
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 0 April 2025

• After large increases yesterday, the stock indexes suffer huge drops this morning: the Dow down almost 1000 points (-2.40%), the SP500 down -3.0%, the Nasdaq down -3.6% (as of 11am EST)
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 April 2025

• The investors who prop up the economy of the USA, and its stock markets, won't soon forget Trump's tax/tariff trade war antics
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 April 2025

• Trump capitulated on his tax/tariff trade war, but is the damage already done to the stock markets and the economy because of the continued unpredictability?
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 April 2025

• Janover, a small software company with a new focus on accumulating cryptocurrency, gambling in the cryptocurrency 'casino' with its treasury, is surging after completing its first purchase of the Solana token. Janover The company bought $4.6 million of Solana's SOL token on Thursday. Earlier this week, Janover announced that it raised $42 million through the private offering of convertible notes and warrants, with plans to acquire SOL. Janover shares were last higher by more than 60%, after skyrocketing more than 100% earlier in the day.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 April 2025

• Zhōngguó will reduce the number of films made in the USA from being shown, as Hollwood becomes a target, as part of Zhōngguó's retaliation against Trump's large tax/tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 09 April 2025

• Zhōngguó will reduce the number of films made in the USA from being shown, as Hollwood becomes a target, as part of Zhōngguó's retaliation against Trump's large tax/tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 09 April 2025

• Artisan, the misanthropic "stop hiring humans" startup selling AI agents raises $25 million ... though is still hiring humans, with some funds raised by Y Combinator.
  - TechCrunch, 09 April 2025

• Bank of England says that AI software could create market crisis for illegal profit, by manipulating markets and intentionally creating crises in order to boost profits for banks and traders.
  - The Guardian, 09 April 2025

• Trump's taxes/tariffs are sparking "demand destruction" concerns for makers of electronic equipment. Capital expenditures are new projects are being halted across the USA and will continue "until this chaotic situation is better understood by CEOs and business leaders around the world".
  - Investors Business Daily, 09 April 2025

• A whistleblower claims Facebook/Meta helped Zhōngguó develop advanced AI to "outcompete American companies", as part of its failed effort to cozy up to Beijing. Sarah Wynn-Williams testified that she witnessed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other executives lie to Congress and "repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values".
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 09 April 2025

• In Congressional testimony, a whistleblower claims Facebook/Meta helped Zhōngguó develop advanced AI to "outcompete American companies", as part of its failed effort to cozy up to Beijing. Sarah Wynn-Williams testified that she witnessed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other executives lie to Congress and "repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values".
  - Zero Hedge, 09 April 2025

• $1,680,000,000 - Hollywood director James Toback ordered to pay $1.68 billion to 40 women who accused writer of sexual abuse over a 35-year period
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 09 April 2025

• Are 10-minute online delivery services in Bharat killing the corner shop and causing the shopowners to lose their jobs and livelihoods ? A lobby group of consumer product distributors estimated last October the number of closed shops to be 200,000 in Mumbai, while the municipal body of the southern city of Chennai estimated 20% of small grocers and 30% of larger departmental stores had shut down in the city in the past 5 years.
  - BBC, 09 April 2025

• Disney's Magic Kingdom in Orlando will begin offering ticket discounts from late May through September 20, as the upcoming launch of Universal's Epic Universe next month is expected to draw families away from Disney.
  - Zero Hedge, 09 April 2025

• Stock prices explode higher as Trump "pauses" higher reciprocal tariffs (now just 10%) for 90 days on every nation (except Zhōngguó)
  - Zero Hedge, 09 April 2025

• Stock prices soar as Trump backs down on biggest tariffs for most countries for the next 90 days, with their tariffs reduced to 10%. The major indexes rocketed higher, with the Nasdaq gaining over 10%, the SP500 up over 8%, and the Dow up 2,500 points.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 9 April 2025

• The dot-com crash, and the 1987 crash, in the stock market, had massive relief rallies similar to today's 12% surge. Rallies of similar magnitude have only taken place during historically bad stretches for the stock market.
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 April 2025

• Leveraged ETFs have to buy $30 billion worth of stocks by day-end, as stock prices explode higher as Trump "pauses" higher reciprocal tariffs (now just 10%) for 90 days on every nation (except Zhōngguó)
  - Bloomberg, 09 April 2025

• Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries for 90 days, hits Zhōngguó harder with 125%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 April 2025

• The number of shipments of personal computers from Asia jump most in years, as importers manuever around Trump's tax/tariff trade war
  - Zero Hedge, 09 April 2025

• One word - "depression" - finally caused Trump to freak out at the tax/tariff chaos he was causing in the economy and stock markets
  - The Daily Beast, 09 April 2025

• Why Trump capitulated on his tax/tariff tactics, just hours after they went into effect
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 April 2025

• A Fox News reporter bursts the MAGA bubble: Trump "capitulated" to the bond market (there were massive sales of USA Treasury bonds) when he delayed taxes/tariffs for 90 days - it wasn't brilliant negotiating, since no tax/tariff deals have been reached with any country.
  - The Daily Beast, 09 April 2025

• Stock prices explode higher as Trump "pauses" higher reciprocal tariffs (now just 10%) for 90 days on every nation (except Zhōngguó)
  - Zero Hedge, 09 April 2025

• $11,850,000 - Evolve Bank & Trust (Memphis, Tennessee) has agreed to a proposed $11.85 million settlement to resolve a consolidated class action lawsuit stemming from a 2024 data breach in which plaintiffs allege the bank "failed to adequately protect" the private information of customers.
  - FinTechFutures, 08 April 2025

• Shares of Apple drop 5% as technology and semiconductor stocks fall after the stock market rally fades
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 April 2025

• Trump wants Apple to make its iPhones in the USA. According to one analyst, "I do not think that is [economically possible]." One analyst said that iPhones would cost $3,500 if manufactured in the USA.
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 April 2025

• Memory chipmaker Micron Technology, based in the USA, has told customers in the USA that it plans to impose a surcharge - raise prices - on some products from Wednesday onwards to account for Trump's new taxes/tariffs on imports from Asia
  - Thomson's Reuters, 08 April 2025

• Technology stocks (Nasdaq up 3.3%) and semiconductor stocks bounce on optimism about Trump's taxes/tariffs, with Nvidia rising 7%
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 April 2025

• MicroStrategy halts Bitcoin buys amid $5.9 billion of unrealized losses reported in first quarter of 2025, as bitcoin prices drop below $80,000
  - AMB Crypto, 08 April 2025

• MicroStrategy expects to post loss after bitcoin price slumps. The software company said it notched $5.91 billion in unrealized losses on its digital assets for the quarter ended March 31.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 April 2025

• Shopify says it will only hire paid-humans where non-paid AI cannot do the job
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 April 2025

• The stock market's fear gauges, based on VIX, predict a stock market bounce, not a stock market bottom
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 April 2025

• Apple's 3-day loss in market capitalization plummets by almost $640 billion, due to Trump's tax/tariff trade war
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 April 2025

• Digital despair: how addictive social media worsens teen anxiety and overmedication. More teens are experiencing anxiety and depression, taking medication, and struggling with the fallout of drugs -- problems that can carry into adulthood. [KM: but the rich AI companies get richer].
  - Zero Hedge, 07 April 2025

• Amid Trump's tax/tariff, one industrial sector in Asia could emerge unscathed - clean energy. Asia and other regions are expected to boost renewable partnerships with Zhōngguó, the clean energy leader of the world
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 April 2025

• Elon Musk sets the stage for Tesla to bail out Twitter/xAI at an insane valuation
  - Electrek, 07 April 2025

• One of Wall Street's most bullish Tesla analysts slashed his price target for the stock by 43%, citing a brand crisis created by Elon Musk and Trump's trade policies.
  - Bloomberg, 06 April 2025

• Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, reduces his price target for Tesla, arguing that the brand has morphed into a "political symbol globally"
  - Bloomberg, 06 April 2025

• Dozens of companies are building non-paid robots that look like paid-human homecare workers. One of them is training a machine to be a non-paid butler and will soon test them in homes, eliminating more human jobs [KM: as the rich AI companies get richer.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 April 2025

• In April 2025, while most of the world was 'clutching pearls' over trade war tit-for-tat tariffs, Zhōngguó calmly 'walked over' to the supply chain and 'yanked out' a handful of critical bolts. The bolts are made of dysprosium, terbium, tungsten, indium yttrium - the elements that do not make headlines but without which your electric car does not run, your fighter jet does not fly, and your solar panels go from clean energy marvels to overpriced roofing tiles.
  - Clean Technica, 06 April 2025

• Where will we go when the middle-class restaurant is gone in the USA? The boom in American sit-down chains has come and gone. What replaced them (e-commerce delivery apps ) is not so great for human connection and the social fabric of the USA. [KM: while the rich AI companies get richer.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 April 2025

• How I realized that AI was making me stupid. New studies show that using AI to avoid mental effort can cause your brain to atrophy [KM: while the rich AI companies get richer.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 April 2025

• Treasury Secretary, and former hedge fund manager, Scott Bessent lies for Trump when he blames the crash of the Nasdaq on the success of DeepSeek, and not on Trump's tax/tariff trade war
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 April 2025

• AI could affect 40% of paid-human jobs and widen economic inequality between nations
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 April 2025

• Klarna, the specialty lending and online payments provider for "buy now, pay later" services - has halted its planned initial public offering, the latest IPO casualty in the wake of Trump's tax/tariff trade war
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 April 2025

• Consulting giants offer billions in price reductions to federal contracts. It might not be enough. Accenture, Deloitte, IBM and other firms submitted proposed price concessions but are expected to be asked to dig deeper.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 April 2025

• Consulting giant Deloitte to fire some of consultants in the USA, after the Trump administration demanded government consultants to identify potential cost cuts to existing projects.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 April 2025

• Booz Allen's CEO discusses the more than $1 billion in price concessions his firm has offered to the Trump administration, and what its business will look like post-DOGE.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 April 2025

• Dow futures drop over 1500 points (down 3.6%), SP500 drops 4.3%, and Nasdaq drops 4.9%, after Zhōngguó imposes retaliatory taxes/tariffs on imports from the USA. Treasury Bond yields continue to drop on fear that this trade war will lead to a recession.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 April 2025

• The CEO of job-posting site, Indeed, says that non-paid AI can perform skills for "roughly two-thirds" of paid-human jobs, threatening the jobs of 300 million people. [While the rich AI companies get richer.]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 03 April 2025

• DeepMind has detailed all the ways AGI could wreck the world
  - Zero Hedge, 03 April 2025

• Intel and TSMC have reportedly reached a tentative agreement that could revitalize Intel's struggling foundry business. According to the Information, the two companies have agreed to form a joint venture with other US semiconductor firms that would operate Intel's semiconductor manufacturing facilities.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 3 April 2025

• "This could destroy Apple": shares of Apple plummet 10% after Trump's new taxes/tariffs are announced
  - Zero Hedge, 03 April 2025

• Fintech stocks such as Affirm and PayPal plunge on concern that Trump's taxes/tariffs will hurt consumer spending. Affirm, which offers buy now, pay later purchasing options, plunged 19%, while stock trading app Robinhood slid 10% and payments company PayPal fell 8%. American Express and Capital One each tumbled 10%, and Discover was down more than 8%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 April 2025

• The Big 7 technology stocks lost more than $1 trillion in value due to Trump's taxes/tariffs
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 April 2025

• The Dow plummets 1,600 points, the SP500 and Nasdaq plummet the most since 2020, after Trump's tax/tariff onslaught
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 April 2025

• The SP500 loses $2.4 trillion in market value, the biggest one-day loss since 2020 (when the emerging coronavirus pandemic sent global markets into a tailspin on 16 March 2020).
  - Thomson's Reuters, 03 April 2025

• US stock markets plunge fron the shock of Trump's new taxes/tariffs, with the SP500 opening down more than 3%
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 April 2025

• US stock markets plunge fron the shock of Trump's new taxes/tariffs, with the SP500 opening down more than 3%, Nasdaq down 5%, SP500 down 4%
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 April 2025

• Dow futures plummet 1300 points (3%), with Nasdaq down 4.5% and SP500 down 3.73%) after Trump announces new taxes/tariffs. Gold is down 2.5%, copper down 3.4%, and bitcoin down 5.3%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 April 2025

• The 'bazooka' that Europe could use to fight Trump's taxes/tariffs. Officials in Europe are weighing deploying a tool called the anti-coercion instrument that would potentially target the technology and financial giants of the USA. Europe could limit access by banks in the USA to the European Union's enormous public procurement market. Europe could limit investments in large USA tech companies, limited the over $300 billion of investments made by Europe into the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 April 2025

• Bloomberg has a 'rocky' start with news summaries generated by non-paid AI, as it experiments with replacing paid-human reporters. The news service has issued dozens of corrections to non-paid AI-generated news summaries since it started using the technology to write them this year.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 April 2025

• Trump's elimination of the 'de minimis' exemption for products imported from Zhōngguó will ultimately hurt consumers in the USA, while cross-border e-commerce firms in Zhōngguó are facing a short-term loss but could remain competitive.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 April 2025

• Stock indexes (Dow down 1000) and stocks plummet after Trump's new taxes/tariffs are larger than expected, and feared to cause a trade war
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 April 2025

• Nihon's Nikkei 225 declines 4%, stocks in South Korea drop 2%, after Trump's new taxes/tariffs are announced
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 April 2025

• Tech stocks fell in late trading Wednesday after Trump announced new taxes/tariffs of between 10% and 49% on imported goods. Apple had the largest drop among technology companies, falling nearly 6% in extended trading. Nvidia, which manufactures chips in Taiwan and assembles its systems in México and elsewhere, fell 4%, while Tesla lost about 4.5%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 April 2025

• Consumer tech companies - 'gadget makers' - that manufacture in Zhōngguó, México and Canada are struggling to survive, if not in crisis, as they deal with constantly shifting tariff policies from Trump.
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 April 2025

• Trump Media stock declines 9% as Trump files to sell up to $2.3 billion worth of shares
  - Quartz, 02 April 2025

• Google's Gemini chatbot invades the privacy of users more than other chatbots are collecting user data. The general rule of thumb when it comes to data privacy is true for AI chatbots also. After all, information is stored on their servers, and those can be breached, or abused by these rich companies.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 April 2025

• I just the saw the future. It was not the USA - it is Zhōngguó. Huawei just built a massive new research center, roughly the size of 225 football fields. Zhōngguó produces some 3.5 million STEM graduates. Over 550 cities in Zhōngguó are connected by high-speed rail that makes our Amtrak Acela look like the Pony Express. "If Trump continues to recklessly treat allies as adversaries and negotiations as battlegrounds, America risks not just bad economic deals but a world where we have no one left to trade with."
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 April 2025

• How is SoftBank funding its mega-investment in OpenAI to greatly profit from paid-human job destruction? With a lot of debt. SoftBank is gambling its fortunes on a company that expects to lose billions of dollars for years to come, in the hope that it will emerge as the leader in non-paid AI [KM: that destroys paid-human jobs].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 April 2025

• How scientists studying viruses lost the gain-of-function debate. For years, scientists kept the debate about risky virus research among themselves. Then Covid happened. As Trump prepares to crack down on virology research, the expert community must face up to its own failures.
  - The New Atlantis, 01 April 2025

• How content 'crawlers' are overwhelming the Wikimedia website, as the crawlers consume 65% of the network traffic for Wikimedia.
  - Wikimedia.org, 01 April 2025

• AI program ChatGPT refused when asked to generate an image of the Prophet Muhammad due to what it asserted was a "credible, historically demonstrated" threat of violence by Islamic people in response to the generated image
  - Zero Hedge, 01 April 2025

• The AI bubble may not be bursting - as of yet - but Trump's tax/tariff chaos is sure helping to deflate it. The Nasdaq 100 index, which is disproportionately focused on tech, is down 10.5% this year -- more than double the slump of the broader S&P 500. "We are entering the Trough of Disillusionment." for AI. So far, there has been a lot of spending and not a lot of clarity on, like, how any of it will ever turn into revenue.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 01 April 2025

• Shares of Xiaomi decline 5.5% after news that one of its SU7 vehicles with intelligent driving crashes, killing three people.
  - Zero Hedge, 01 April 2025

• The mortgage giant Rocket Companies has agreed to buy Mr. Cooper Group, one of the largest mortgage companies in the USA, in a $9.4 billion all-stock deal.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 March 2025

• $162,400,000 - The competition regulator in France fines Apple $162,400,000 over concerns the company abused its dominant position in mobile apps through the privacy measures it imposes on developers on its iPhone and s operating system.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 March 2025

• New crimes to commit using generative AI : the new image generator of ChatCPT is really good at faking receipts, a new powerful tool for tax evasion.
  - TechCrunch, 31 March 2025

• Vaccine stocks decline after a top FDA regulator and strong supporter of vaccines, Peter Marks, resigns. Moderna plunged 12% (now down 95% from Covid highs, and Novavax is down 10%.
  - Zero Hedge, 31 March 2025

• The financial demise of Forever 21 means that fast-fashion (Forever 21, H&M, Zara) - an environmentally bad industry, is losing out to the ultra-fast fashion companies such as Temu and Shein, even worse for the environment
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 March 2025

• Has the decline begun of knowledge work by paid-humans? The unemployment rate for college graduates has risen faster than for other workers over the past few years. How worried should they be about being replaced by non-paid AI?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 March 2025

• Efforts to eliminate fake users for online advertisers are failing. Brands spend billions on ads without knowing if they are being shown to humans. With fake users making up 40% of web traffic, bot-detection companies cannot keep up, and advertising brokers don't want to spend more of their money solving the problem.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 March 2025

• Huawei's consumer business reports a 38% surge in revenue on robust smartphone sales, signalling progress in overcoming sanctions imposed by the USA.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 31 March 2025

• Huawei reports a decline in profits due to higher expenses, but solid revenue growth signals that the company is making a comeback after years of heavy sanctions imposed by the USA that have affected its businesses.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 March 2025

• After the worst start for the Mag 7 of Big Tech, since 2020, the top tech trader at Goldman Sach's turns bearish
  - Zero Hedge, 30 March 2025

• How TikTok Shop is beating Amazon and Temu in the social shopping space
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 March 2025

• Shares of CoreWeave, the first artificial intelligence start-up to go public, finished its first day of trading at $40.01 a share, one penny above the disappointing initial public offering price the company had set a day earlier.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 March 2025

• Shares of CoreWeave, the first artificial intelligence start-up to go public, finished its first day of trading at $40.01 a share, one penny above the disappointing initial public offering price the company had set a day earlier.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 March 2025

• Kalshi received $208 million in March Madness 'bets'. But don't call it gambling. Prediction markets have effectively opened the door to nationwide sports betting.
  - Barron's, 29 March 2025

• MicroStrategy sells preferred stock to buy bitcoin. Why it deserves a look. The strategy is certainly unorthodox, particularly since MicroStrategy has no traditional earnings. But it offers a high dividend yield, a lot of asset coverage, and a better risk/reward than common stock.
  - Barron's, 29 March 2025

• $11,000,000,000 - Elon Musk sells his Twitter/X to his xAI company for a $11 billion loss. Musk had bought Twitter/X for $44 billion three years ago, but at one point Musk had destroyed 80% of the value of Twitter/X, and in December 2024 Twitter/X was only worth about 30% of what Musk paid for it.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 29 March 2025

• Elon Musk sells his Twitter/X to his xAI company for a $11 billion loss. Musk had bought Twitter/X for $44 billion three years ago, but at one point Musk had destroyed 80% of the value of Twitter/X, and in December 2024 Twitter/X was only worth about 30% of what Musk paid for it.
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 March 2025

• Just days after OpenAI launched its most advanced AI image generator to date, a social media trend imitating the work of animation company Studio Ghibli in Nihon is demonstrating both the technology's power and the copyright concerns it raises. Widely shared is a 2016 video in which Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki describes AI-generated art as an "insult to life itself". Miyazaki is known for his hand-drawn animation and painstaking frame-by-frame method. "I am utterly disgusted." Yes non-paid AI stealing artistic style from paid humans.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 March 2025

• The 50% plunge of the share price of Reddit fails to entice buy-the-dip buyers as growth slows
  - Bloomberg, 28 March 2025

• The GenX career meltdown. Just when they should be at their peak, experienced workers in creative fields find that their skills are all but obsolete. A big threat is non-paid AI, which seems likely to replace many paid jobs for the remaining Gen X copywriters, photographers and designers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 March 2025

• The online casinos that can operate as long as they say that the are NOT actually casinos. Policing loopholes in gambling law can be challenging, and most states have been slow to adapt. These online casinos sell a valueless currency to use to gamble to win real money.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 March 2025

• SoftBank Group plans to create industrial parks for artificial intelligence across the US and is considering an investment of more than $1 trillion. Pretty much everyone in the USA will have to lose their jobs to make that investment profitable, [KM: while the rich AI companies become richer, such as SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son].
  - Bloomberg, 28 March 2025

• SMIC, the top silicon foundry in Zhōngguó reports that full-year revenue grew 27 per cent to US$8 billion but net profit plunged 45.4 per cent to US$493 million
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 28 March 2025

• Trump pardons the criminally-convicted Trevor Milton, founder of the now-bankrupt Nikola car/truck maker, saving Milton from having to potentially over $500 million in damages. A fantastic return on an investment/donation to the Republican party in 2024 of over $1,600,000 to PACs for Trump and RFK Junior.
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 March 2025

• Trump pardons the criminally-convicted Trevor Milton, founder of the now-bankrupt Nikola car/truck maker, saving Milton from having to potentially over $500 million in damages. A fantastic return on an investment/donation to the Republican party in 2024 of over $1,600,000 to PACs for Trump and RFK Junior.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 March 2025

• As fears increase of the generative AI bubble bursting, the ultra-low-cost large language model breakthroughs are booming. The emergence of Zhōngguó's DeepSeek is a primary cause, and now the billions in AI data center buildouts are under scrutiny, with a recent warning from Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai. Well, more jobs will have to be destroyed to make the AI investments profitable.
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 March 2025

• CoreWeave prices IPO at $40 a share, below expected range of $47 to $55. The company provides access to Nvidia graphics processing units for artificial intelligence training and workloads. The offering is also reduced from 49 million shares to 37.5 million.
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 March 2025

• Current AI models are a "dead end" for achieving human-level intelligence, according to a majority of AI scientists. Still, it won't stop current AI companies from destroying millions of paid human jobs. . "[AI companies] have invested too much already and cannot afford to admit they made a mistake [and] be out of the market for several years when they have to repay the investors who have put in hundreds of billions of dollars. So all they can do is double down."
  - LiveScience, 28 March 2025

• The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that Trump's authoritarian government destroying operation, DOGE, and the latest AI bubble, will be massive failures. The CBO predicts that the national debt will explode even higher as productivity collapses.
  - Zero Hedge, 27 March 2025

• As sexism persists in Islamic Turkeys' high tech sector, women are leaving Turkey for less patriarchal workplaces abroad.
  - Rest of World, 27 March 2025

• IBM USA could be firing more people in the USA than announced, and moving the work to Bharat. "IBM might as well move its headquarters" to Bengaluro since it "no longer prioritizes" the USA. A current IBM employee who won't be working there much longer said that after being told to teach recently hired workers in Bharat "everything I know", he was rewarded by being fired.
  - The Register, 27 March 2025

• Fashion retailer H&M will use non-paid digital clones of paid human fashion models in its ads and social media. Some fear the move could impact other models, photographers and make-up artists - paid humans.
  - BBC, 27 March 2025

• Robinhood is going after the big banks and their ATMs for deposits. The trading platform turned quasi-bank and wealth manager unveiled two new products that will compete for business with America's largest legacy banks, including JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Bank of America. Robinhood Banking will provide access to traditional checking and savings accounts with an annual percentage yield of 4%, provided one is a member of the platform's Gold service.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 7 March 2025

• The bankrupt genetics company, 23andMe, is given permission to sell the DNA data of its customers to the highest bidder
  - Zero Hedge, 27 March 2025

• $33,000,000 - California law firm Greenberg Glusker says it secured a $33 million arbitration award against T-Mobile over the wireless carrier's mishaps related to a SIM swap attack
  - Security Week, 27 March 2025

• $17,000,000 - The FTC has won a $17 million settlement against online cash advance company Cleo AI. The settlement stems from a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission that Cleo had deceived consumers about the amount of money they could get and how quickly they could get it.
  - Pymnts.com, 27 March 2025

• Shares of GameStop drop 25% after the retailer issues debt to buy bitcoin, one day after it rose 12% when it announced the new strategy, going from 26 to 30 to 22.
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 March 2025

• Economic growth now depends on electricity, not oil. Surging demand for electricity presents huge new investment needs as well as regulatory challenges.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 March 2025

• Apple's AI is not a failure. AI itself is the failure. Stop blaming the failure of AI adoption on users, and stop pushing AI intro products. "AI is still so much more of a science and research story than it is a product story."
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 27 March 2025

• Zhōngguó built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused. The country poured billions into AI infrastructure, but the data center gold rush is unraveling as speculative investments collide with weak demand and DeepSeek shifts AI trends.
  - MIT Technology Review, 26 March 2025

• The multi-billionaire Bill Gates predicts that within 10 years, non-paid AI will replace many doctors and teachers, that paid humans won't be needed "for most things", [KM: making filthy rich people like him even richer]
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 March 2025

• One of the teenage members of the authoritarian Musk's team that is trying to dismantle the government, Edward Coristine, provided tech support to cybercrime ring that bragged about trafficking in stolen data.
  - The Guardian, 26 March 2025

• Bharat is on a hiring binge that cannot be stopped by Trump's taxes/tariffs. An abundance of motivated young professionals is luring American businesses to base their global operations in cities in Bharat. Together, the offshore business centers in Bharat earned about $65 billion last year, more than the value of American imports to Bharat. By 2030, they are expected to earn $100 billion or more. The USA doesn't have enough engineers, while nearly 1.2 million people in Bharat graduate with engineering degrees every year.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 March 2025

• OpenAI claims a breakthrough in image creation with its GPT-4o that can generate more realistic images, making it easier to replace paid-human artists with non-paid AI - [KM: the rich get richer again]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 March 2025

• The Trump administration, assuming scientists and engineers in Zhōngguó are stupid, adds over 50 companies in Zhōngguó to its export blacklist, in a vain attempt to damage the ability of Zhōngguó to manufacture advanced AI processors. Over 20 more companies from other countries were added to the list. Dozens of companies and institutes in Zhōngguó were targeted for their alleged involvement in developing advanced AI, supercomputers and high-performance AI chips for military purposes, and for quantum computing.
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 March 2025

• The Trump administration, assuming scientists and engineers in Zhōngguó are stupid, adds over 50 companies in Zhōngguó to its export blacklist, in a vain attempt to damage the ability of Zhōngguó to manufacture advanced AI processors. Over 20 more companies from other countries were added to the list. Dozens of companies and institutes in Zhōngguó were targeted for their alleged involvement in developing advanced AI, supercomputers and high-performance AI chips for military purposes, and for quantum computing.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 March 2025

• The new additions of companies and institutes in Zhōngguó to a export blacklist of technology equipment from the USA: it this just a start for Trump Trade War 2.0? The USA has a sense of urgency about the progress that Zhōngguó is making in closing the technology gap. It should.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 March 2025

• $3,500,000 - The defunct analytics company Flurry agreed to pay $3.5 million to resolve a class action lawsuit claiming it improperly harvested data from a widely used period tracking app, Flo Health
  - The Record, 25 March 2025

• 23andMe's bankruptcy was inevitable - and deserved. There is only so much you can learn from a consumer DNA test, and most people simply don't need one from another get-rich-quick Silicon Valley company. It allowed hackers to steal a lot of private data of its clients, the US GAO accused it of misleading the public. In 2013, the Food and Drug Administration banned 23andMe for selling its own version of these personal genetics tests. And there is insufficient science to back up their product claims.
  - GizModo, 25 March 2025

• Developers of open source software, who publish their source code, say that AI crawlers dominate downloads from their websites, forcing blocks on entire countries. Despite configuring standard defensive measures -- adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic - one developer found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies. [KM: Commit any abuse to make the rich richer.]
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 25 March 2025

• [KM: To make the rich richer, such as Jeff Bezos], Amazon announces it is testing non-paid AI shopping assistants, and non-paid AI health assistants, to infuse generative artificial intelligence across a wider swath of its e-commerce universe, to more quickly eliminate the need for paid human assistants
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 March 2025

• Shares of GameStop soar 11% after its announces it will join Microstrategy in abandoning being a technology company to gamble its resources on bitcoin
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 March 2025

• Carvana could become the 'Amazon of auto retail', according to analysts at Morgan Stanley, with its competitive advantages with vertical integration and scale
  - Investopedia, 25 March 2025

• The chairman of Alibaba warns about "the beginning" of the bubble in investments in AI data centers. "People are talking, literally talking about $500 billion, several 100 billion dollars. I don't think that's entirely necessary. ... start to get worried when people are building data centers on spec (i.e., no customers)".
  - Zero Hedge, 25 March 2025

• How Zhōngguó outcompeted the USA to become the leaders in rare-earth metals refining
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 March 2025

• BYD, the leading rivel to Tesla, is practically taunting Elon Musk now. On Monday, BYD reported $107 billion in revenue for 2024 -- crossing the $100 billion level for the first time and besting Tesla's annual revenue by about $10 billion. BYD's Hong Kong-listed shares are already up more than 50% this year. BYD's success comes just as Tesla is sliding into a crisis.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 25 March 2025

• Fintech lender Affirm said Tuesday that it has reached an agreement with JPMorgan Chase to offer Affirm's "buy now, pay later" services to merchants on the bank's payments network. Merchants in the USA who use JPMorgan to handle payments can now add Affirm to their checkout pages. Financially-stressed consumers will have access to loans ranging from 30 days to 60 months, according to Affirm.
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 March 2025

• Researchers have found that ChatGPT "power users", or those who use it the most and at the longest durations, are becoming dependent upon - or even addicted to - the chatbot.
  - Futurism, 24 March 2025

• "I will not connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud": I recently bought a Bosch 500 dishwasher. To fully use it, I needed an app. But to use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher. [KM: misanthropic corporate fascism].
  - Jeff Gerling, 24 March 2025

• Shares of 23andMe crashed in premarket trading on Monday after the genetic testing unicorn startup filed for bankruptcy in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, following a slide in demand for its ancestry kits and a data breach.
  - Zero Hedge, 24 March 2025

• Jack Ma-backed Ant Group used processors from both Zhōngguó and the USA (from AMD) to train AI models that were more efficient and reduced costs by 20%. According to sources, the domestic chips included those from Alibaba Group Holding and Huawei Technologies.
  - Zero Hedge, 24 March 2025

• Jack Ma-backed Ant Group used processors from both Zhōngguó and the USA (from AMD) to train AI models that were more efficient and reduced costs by 20%. According to sources, the domestic chips included those from Alibaba Group Holding and Huawei Technologies.
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 March 2025

• Shares of Intuitive Machines (LUNR) surged 20% on Monday after the space company posted a 79% jump in its fourth-quarter revenue on the back of higher contracts
  - Thomson's Reuters, 24 March 2025

• Trump promises that new taxes/tariffs on imports of drugs and cars will happen in the "near future", sowing more trade confusion. Trump later added the lumber and semiconductor industries to his list. All taxes/tariffs will be imposed on April 2, but "not all tariffs are included that day". Thus the confusion.
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 March 2025

• Trump narrow the scope of new taxes/tariffs to be imposed on April 2. Taxes/tariffs on industrial sectors such as cars and processor chips are no longer expected to be announced on April 2.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 March 2025

• Stock futures in the USA surge on hopes that Trump's April 2 taxes/tariffs will be "targeted"
  - Zero Hedge, 24 March 2025

• Startups that set out to fix the climate are now talking about jet fighters. A generation of companies that launched in recent years promising to wean the economy off fossil fuels are revamping their pitch to be more in tune with the zeitgeist.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 March 2025

• Elon Musk is corrupting more than just the government. Silicon Valley has gone from "Think Different" to "Yes, Sir". Thanks to figures such as Mr. Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, the industry is now on a trajectory to become all the things it once claimed to hate: too big and too dependent on socialist government largess - and a threat to human liberty. [KM: Big (white racist) Brothers]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 March 2025

• The deal betweeen DoorDash and Klarna, that will let cash-strapped consumers pay for restaurant food, groceries and other delivery orders in four equal, interest-free installments - feeds the addiction to debt in the USA . "The problem is these things start having a very pervasive and very negative influence on people who cannot afford it. They just want something now, and they go into this spiral of debt and always trying to chase up and meet the payment requirement." News of the DealDash BNPL arrangement comes against a backdrop of steadily rising consumer debt and signs that Americans are increasingly unable to keep up with their obligations.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 March 2025

• The deal betweeen DoorDash and Klarna, that will let cash-strapped consumers pay for restaurant food, groceries and other delivery orders in four equal, interest-free installments - feeds the addiction to debt in the USA . "The problem is these things start having a very pervasive and very negative influence on people who cannot afford it. They just want something now, and they go into this spiral of debt and always trying to chase up and meet the payment requirement." News of the DealDash BNPL arrangement comes against a backdrop of steadily rising consumer debt and signs that Americans are increasingly unable to keep up with their obligations.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 22 March 2025

• Meituan nearly triples profit despite competition. The food-delivery giant in Zhōngguó continued its run of strong earnings even as it faces fierce competition and a weaker economy in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 March 2025

• To protect its citizens , Zhōngguó issues new regulations that prevent the involuntary use of facial recognition identification, and service providers will be required to offer alternative ID methods
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 22 March 2025

• Shares of Microsoft rally in price in the last 10 minutes on Friday to avoid the first eight-week losing streak since 2008
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 March 2025

• Nvidia's disconnect: an improving business with a cheaper stock
  - Barron's, 22 March 2025

• Universal is trying to dominate the theme park industry. What is at stake for Disney. NBCUniversal, owned by Comcast, is opening its Epic Universe on May 22. Disney World may have to be more competitive.
  - Barron's, 22 March 2025

• A death cross (50-day below 200-day moving average) has traders on high alert as momentum withers for Nvidia. The last time it occurred in April 2022, shares tumbled more than 30% over the next two months.
  - Bloomberg, 21 March 2025

• Higher use of chatbots like ChatGPT may correspond with increased loneliness and less time spent socializing with other people, according to new research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [KM: The rich get richer while making many more people miserable - the Silicon Valley (mal)ethic.]
  - Bloomberg, 21 March 2025

• SoftBank to buy Ampere, a Silicon Valley processor start-up, for $6.5 billion. The move is a bet that Ampere's chips can begin playing a significant role in data centers for creating artificial intelligence.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 March 2025

• Banning the use of TikTok in the USA would devastate small businesses, but make rich the new owner whom TikTok would be forced to sell its USA operations to.
  - Real Clear Markets, 21 March 2025

• Trump's TikTok-Oracle deal could break the law - but nobody can stop him. Congressional hawks are unwavering in their belief that Zhōngguó cannot retain control of TikTok. But for two months, Trump has kept it online anyway, in violation of the law. Now what?
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 1 March 2025

• $1,200,000 - Zhōngguó fines ultranationalist blogger Sima Nan US$1.2 million for tax evasion
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 March 2025

• Shares of Micron rise 6% on earnings beat, and positive guidance as data center revenue triples
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 March 2025

• Bharat is obsessed with giving its citizens more and more "unique" biometric digital IDs. This simplification is just creating more inefficiency.
  - Economist, 20 March 2025

• Low-cost drone add-ons from Zhōngguó let anyone with a credit card turn toys into weapons of war. E-commerce giants in Zhōngguó, including Temu and AliExpress, sell drone accessories like those used by soldiers in the war between Rossiya and Ukraine.
  - Wired, 20 March 2025

• Short sellers have made $15 billion betting against Tesla and Nvidia in 2025. Tesla shorts alone have earned nearly $11 billion, while bets against Nvidia have earned more than $4 billion. They earned nearly $5 billion betting against Apple stock, which is down nearly 14% in 2025.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 0 March 2025

• Hanwha Aerospace plunged 14% after disclosing a plan to raise 3.6 trillion won ($2.5 billion) in what would be South Korea's biggest share sale in more than three years.
  - Bloomberg, 20 March 2025

• Shares of Apple decline on reports that CEO Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development
  - Zero Hedge, 20 March 2025

• Shares of Accenture fall 7% after Elon Musk's unelected DOGE goons cancel government contracts that Accenture had with the government
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 20 March 2025

• Apple is reportedly losing over $1 billion/year on streaming service, as subscriptions remain well below those of Netflix
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 20 March 2025

• Billions of dollars flowed into new leveraged ETFs in 2024. Now the ETFs are in free fall. Wall Street's newest form of gambling, the leveraged single-stock ETF, is seeing the prices of these ETFs plunging as the Nasdaq drops 10%.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 March 2025

• Shares of Tesla fall a few percent, after Trump's learning-to-grift Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, shills for Tesla on Fox News, turning the White House into a PR agency
  - Axios, 20 March 2025

• Tesla said Thursday it is recalling nearly all Cybertrucks in the United States to fix an exterior panel that could detach while driving, the latest in a series of call-backs for the pickup truck. The recall addresses risks a stainless-steel exterior trim panel can detach from the vehicle, making it a road hazard boosting the risk of a crash.
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 March 2025

• Tesla said Thursday it is recalling nearly all Cybertrucks in the United States to fix an exterior panel that could detach while driving, the latest in a series of call-backs for the pickup truck. The recall addresses risks a stainless-steel exterior trim panel can detach from the vehicle, making it a road hazard boosting the risk of a crash.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 March 2025

• Klarna lands a "buy now, pay later" debt-delaying services deal with DoorDash, obtaining another deal ahead of its IPO
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 March 2025

• The dominance of the market for rare earth metals by Zhōngguó could decline in 10 years, falling from 60% of the market to 30% of the market by 2035. Mining companies in Africa, South America and Australia will win more market share, as new mines open up in these regions.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 20 March 2025

• Hong Kong widens lead over Singapore as the top financial center in Asia, and third globally (New York and London are number one and two)
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 20 March 2025

• OpenAI's new 'Deep Research' non-paid AI-agent is coming after paid white collar jobs. The research-focused non-paid agent shows how a new generation of more capable non-paid AI models could automate office jobs done by paid-humans, [KM: making the rich richer while] eliminating more paid-human jobs.
  - Wired, 19 March 2025

• Siemens to fire more than 6,000 people in its automation and EV charging businesses. The German industrial conglomerate said the measures will affect around 5,600 jobs worldwide in the automation segment and around 450 jobs globally in the electric-vehicle charging business.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 March 2025

• Quarterly net profit for Xiaomi soars 90% on record revenue. Revenue jumped 49%, topping 100 billion yuan for the first time.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 March 2025

• Apple has an AI technology problem that it cannot easily solve, as other companies outcompete Apple with their AI technology. Apple is also struggling with the looming threat of tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó, where important parts of iPhone are manufactured. iPhone sales in Zhōngguó are declining as well.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 19 March 2025

• $11,000,000 - Hollywood writer and director Carl Erik Rinsch has been arrested, on wire fraud and moneylaundering charges, for allegedly cheating Netflix out of $11 million. He is being accused of spending the money on cryptocurrency investments, Rolls-Royces and a Ferrari.
  - Murdoch's Fox News, 19 March 2025

• A majority of AI researchers say that Big Tech is spending billions of dollars into useless projects. "The vast investments in scaling ... always seemed to me to be misplaced".
  - Futurism, 18 March 2025

• Samsung to face questions from shareholders after AI chip failings, and stock price drop, making it one of the worst performing stocks in 2024, when it plunged to a four-year low in November 2024.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 18 March 2025

• Shares of Nvidia dropped after CEO Jensen Huang gave a highly anticipated keynote address at the AI chipmaker's GTC conference. Nvidia shares, which were down about 1% before the CEO started speaking, closed the day 3.4% lower at $115.43. Since setting a record high in January, Nvidia shares have traded within a descending channel, potentially undergoing a consolidation phase before resuming their longer-term uptrend.
  - Investopedia, 18 March 2025

• On Tuesday, Facebook became the last of the "Magnificant Seven" Big Tech stocks to have a negative year-to-date stock price change - with all underperforming the SP500
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 8 March 2025

• Adobe is releasing non-paid AI agents to replace paid-human agents that companies can use to help consumers navigate corporate web sites
  - Thomson's Reuters, 18 March 2025

• The FTC sues Click Profit, which offered to open and manage online storefronts for customers in exchange for an upfront investment, but the FTC alleges the company failed to deliver and left consumers in debt, allegedly defrauding customers of tens of millions of dollars in connection with a 'passive income' scheme.
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 March 2025

• Shares of BYD rise over 4% after it launches new technology that it claims charges electric vehicles in five minutes (about the same amount of time to fill a car with gasoline)
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 March 2025

• Zeekr, a rival to Tesla in Zhōngguó, is releasing an advanced driver assistance-system for free, increasing competition for Tesla (which charges over $8000 for similar technology). Drivers have to keep their hands on the steering wheel.
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 March 2025

• 'Vibe coding' - another attack angle for AI companies that are replacing paid-human programmers, by enabling 10 engineers to the work of a team of 50 to 100 paid humans, using non-paid AI tools. Leading this destruction of paid human jobs are the owners of Y Combinator, where 80% of its current startup batch consists of AI companies.
  - Business Insider, 17 March 2025

• $24,000,000 - The Los Angeles Times, owned by the billionaire bio-tech entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, is sued for $24 million for allegedly failing to pay rent, leaving printing plant covered in "toxic ink stains"
  - Murdoch's, 17 March 2025

• One in five Gen-Z/Millenial women identify as LGBTQ+ (good for such dating apps such as Grindr), but only 8% of men so identify.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 March 2025

• Shares of Luminar Technology soared 27% on Monday, after former NASA scientist Mark Rober test-drove a car equipped with Luminar's lidar technology in a YouTube video and said it outperformed the Autopilot feature sold by Tesla. It rose 10% more on Tuesday.
  - Bloomberg, 17 March 2025

• Shares of Affirm drop 12%, as rivel Klarna secures a deal with Walmart to offer "Buy Now Pay Later" loan services
  - Zero Hedge, 17 March 2025

• Shares of Affirm drop 12%, as rivel Klarna secures a deal with Walmart to offer "Buy Now Pay Later" loan services
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 March 2025

• The USA is losing a technology race to build the next generation of stealth fighter airplanes. While the USA works on a new radical design for its latest stealth drone, the project is already lagging far behind Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 March 2025

• Shares of Tesla decline 6% on Monday, after dropping 8% last week, after Tesla offers free self-driving trial in Zhōngguó, which may not be enough to take on Tesla's rivals on the mainland
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 7 March 2025

• Forever 21 files for bankruptcy for the second time, and plans a "liquidation sale". Forever 21, which at its height operated more than 500 locations in the US and at least 800 worldwide, is preparing to shutter all 350 stores as part of a bankruptcy filing in the coming days. It would be the second time in six years that the 41 year-old company files for bankruptcy protection as it faces stiff competition from Temu and Shein, based in Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 March 2025

• Beulah Henry (1887-1973): an investor with an endless imagination. She was so prolific -- reimagining things as varied as toys, typewriters, umbrellas and ice-cream makers -- that she earned the nickname 'Lady Edison', with over 40 patents.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 March 2025

• There is a good chance that your child is using AI to cheat - making [KM: the rich AI companies richer while making] your children dumber. More students are hiding their secret weapon from parents and teachers, racking up top grades while AI chatbots do the work.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 March 2025

• A Tesla vehicle on Autopilot drives into a 'Wily E Coyote' fake road wall because Musk insists on a camera-only visual detection system which is easily fooled, whereas lidar systems used by other companies would easily detect the physical obstacle.
  - Electrek, 16 March 2025

• People are using Google's new Gemini AI model to criminally remove legal watermarks from images. More profits for Google, less money for artists.
  - Tech Crunch, 16 March 2025

• As new tech companies try to get rich with non-paid AI nurses, paid human nurses are fighting back. Nursing unions argue that this poorly understood technology is overriding nurses' expertise and degrading the quality of care patients receive. "[Especially for-profit] Hospitals have been waiting for the moment when they have something that appears to have enough legitimacy to replace paid human nurses."
  - Associated Press, 16 March 2025

• Netflix is gobbling up world literature. What will go wrong? Mini-series made by Netflix resemble more other movies on Netflix than it resembles the style/intent of the authors/filmwriters. Content must be adapted for frictionless international content consumption.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 March 2025

• A study reports that AI search engines are wrong an outstanding proportion of the time
  - Futurism, 15 March 2025

• Amazon will require all customer voice recordings made in people's homes with Amazon Echo, to be uploaded to Amazon's cloud for processing. The idea of the [authoritarian] conglomerate being able to listen to personal requests made in your home is, simply, an unnerving invasion of privacy [KM: to make Jeff Bezos richer].
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 15 March 2025

• Some automobile companies are reinventing the gear shift, confusing drivers. From touch screens to crystal balls, designers are running with their newfound freedom to put the controls almost anywhere to make more money, even if their carbuyers hate the pretty gadgets.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 March 2025

• Li Auto, a plug-in hybrid auto specialist in Zhōngguó, reported lower net profit for the fourth quarter despite record revenue as a brutal price war hurt its bottom line
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 March 2025

• The end of the iPhone. Apple used to be a great investment, but now is a terrible stock investment, as its business is disrupted by multiple competitors.
  - Risk Hedge, 14 March 2025

• Programming themselves out of work: since 2022, the number of software development jobs has been decreasing, in part to companies replacing paid-human programmers with non-paid AI
  - Zero Hedge, 14 March 2025

• Forever 21 moved closer to shuttering its stores forever, as it nears filing for bankruptcy. Forever 21, which at its height operated more than 500 locations in the US and at least 800 worldwide, is preparing to shutter all 350 stores as part of a bankruptcy filing in the coming days. It would be the second time in six years that the 41 year-old company files for bankruptcy protection as it faces stiff competition from Temu and Shein, based in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 14 March 2025

• Goldman Sachs predicts that it is time to buy the dip in AI stocks
  - Zero Hedge, 14 March 2025

• Wells Fargo predicts that share of Tesla still have 40% more decline in price, even after tumbling 50% since December
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 March 2025

• Technology's 3-week sell-off, led by Tesla, wipes out $2.7 trillion in value from mega-capitalization stocks
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 March 2025

• Shares of DocuSign surge 14% on strong earnings, and AI boost
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 March 2025

• Every [rich] person in Silicon Valley loves non-paid AI agents - until the get fired [KM: more money for the rich, less money for paid humans]. But no one can agree on what these systems actually are. The definition problem has worsened recently.
  - TechCrunch, 14 March 2025

• Gold spikes to a record high amid political chaos in Washington. Gold has erased almost all of Nasdaq's relative outperformance since May 2023.
  - Zero Hedge, 13 March 2025

• Price for gold futures contracts rise above $3000 for the first time ever
  - Zero Hedge, 13 March 2025

• Communist-party-like-induced fear and resignation, after TSMC, the "world's most powerful tech company", effectively pays a $100 billion 'protection fee' (by investing in the USA) after threats and pressure from Trump
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 13 March 2025

• $40,000,000 - Cable outlet Newsmax Media has paid $40 million to settle allegations it defamed Smartmatic by reporting false claims that the voting machine company helped rig the 2020 U.S. election for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, according to a regulatory filing. The companies settled privately last year, but the amount was disclosed in a Newsmax investor document dated March 7.
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 March 2025

• Ali Chapman, actress and a little person, criticizes Disney for replacing paid humans to act as the seven dwarves in a new "Show White" movie, with non-paid computer-generated actos in the new live-action film. "All the little people out there that are freaking actors and actresses that love to have parts in this kind of movie, and everyone's trying to get their dreams come true, and it just seems like we are getting our paid-working dreams shut out by Disney and Hollywood" [replacing us with non-paid AI].
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 13 March 2025

• In the spirit of apathy, Trump doubles down on his tax/tariffs threats as he crashes the stock market
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 March 2025

• Google's Waymo robotaxi division, working [hard] to replace many paid-human drivers with non-paid robotaxis, [KM: to make the rich richer], was sanctioned with 589 parking tickets in San Francisco in 2024
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 13 March 2025

• Stocks decline again on Thursday, pushing the SP500 into a 10% correction downwards, due to new tax/tariff threats from bully-boy Trump
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 March 2025

• Shares of Adobe drop 13% as concerns about AI growth overshadow better-than-expected results
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 March 2025

• Prices of cobalt soar as a four-month export ban imposed by Congo disrupts supply chains for an important metal for batteries
  - Zero Hedge, 13 March 2025

• A newsite powered in part by AI - the Jewish Onliner, falsely accuses Helyeh Doutaghi, a Yale scholar, of being member of an Islamic terrorist group, which she isn't. To appease Christian and Jewish interests, Yale suspends the scholar from her liberal project at the Yale Law School. She was abruptly barred from Yale's campus, and placed on administrative leave. "I am not a member of any organization that would constitute a violation of USA law.", sometime a non-AI editor could have verified for those seeking the truth. The Jewish Onliner does not identify any reporters on its site.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 March 2025

• Northvolt, a batterymaker in Sweden, collapses, a blow to Europe. The company and its assets will be sold after it filed for bankruptcy in Sweden, hurting Europe's best hope for competing against rival batterymakers in Asia.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 March 2025

• Roomba maker iRobot warns of going concern, initiates strategic review. iRobot warned investors of a going concern to maintain enough assets to operate and pay its debts, and said it has initiated a strategic review of the business.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 March 2025

• [KM: Humanity-hating] Pony AI, based in Zhōngguó, is scaling up its non-paid robotaxi fleet, planning to turn profitable by 2029 by helping to eliminate the need for paid human taxi drivers. The company hopes to launch more than 1,000 non-paid robotaxis this year, and aims to have more than 10,000 on the road within the next three years, [KM: while making its CEO and investors richer while causing more human taxi drivers to lose their jobs].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 March 2025

• Shares of Intel rise 13% as it appoints a new CEO, and gets more support from Wall Street for its turnaround efforts
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 March 2025

• TSMC reportedly proposes a joint-venture with Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom to operate a semiconductory foundry owned by Intel
  - Zero Hedge, 12 March 2025

• Zhōngguó makes large-scale battery systems that run on gravity, which could eliminate the need for large-scale lithium ion battery banks. In one system, a building has a massive mechanical tower for lifting giant blocks weighing 24 tons during surplus energy. When the grid demands more power, the blocks are lowered, and their potential energy is converted back into electricity.
  - Interesting Engineering, 12 March 2025

• The billionaires at Spotify say it paid $10 billion in royalties in 2024 (about two-thirds of its revenues) -- but only 4% of its artists make a living. The music-streaming giant has long been the target of criticism from artists about paltry payments, but said it doled out record royalties in 2024. Earlier this year, Icelandic singer Bjork said that "Spotify is probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians." Spotify says some 1,500 artists received over $1 million in royalties last year, with 670 getting checks of $2 million or more. Of those, 70 took in $10 million or more. But with work from over 225,000 musicians appearing on the platform, that means that just 0.6% of them are seeing big money.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 12 March 2025

• Naura Technology Group climbed up in the rankings of the biggest semiconductor equipment suppliers in the world in 2024, as Zhōngguó's leading chip tool maker braced for tighter technology restrictions imposed by the USA.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 March 2025

• A group of AI researchers in Zhōngguó win a global award for replacing an Nvidia GPU with an industrial FPGA processor from AMD. The researchers trained a cutting-edge video-generation model on the AMD FPGA chip, outperforming high-end GPUs in both speed and efficiency.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 March 2025

• Zhōngguó still leads the world in the race to acquire critical minerals from Africa, as the USA struggles to compete. Zhōngguó has spent years -- and billions -- investing in the mining sector in Africa, and is now profitting from its investments.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 March 2025

• Cleantech and mineral security demand drive mining companies in Zhōngguó into an overseas buying spree. Last month, MMG said it would buy British miner Anglo American's nickel business in Brazil.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 March 2025

• Why the USA keeps losing to Zhōngguó in the battle over critical minerals. Syrah Resources thought its graphite mine in Mozambique, one of the best in the world, would challenge Zhōngguó's dominance in the global market, but then things started going off the rails.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 March 2025

• Leonardo to launch constellation of military, civil satellites as Europe increases defense spending. The Italian aerospace and defense group said it will launch 18 military satellites and 20 civil multi-sensor satellites between 2027 and 2028, which would provide European governments with an alternative to Starlink.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 March 2025

• Taxes/tariffs would econonmically ruin the video game industry, the biggest sector in the entertainment industry. Video games are an industry worth $184 billion-dollar is larger than both the music and film industries combined, as measured by market size. Taxes/tariffs on video games and related products would be felt quickly. The Consumer Technology Association reports that video game console prices could see a 40-58% uptick. It could also lead to job loss and would entail real economic deprivation for the United States.
  - Real Clear Markets, 12 March 2025

• As Tesla stock falls, some pension fund managers worry and critics rage. Since CEO Elon Musk went to Washington, Tesla's stock has tumbled nearly 48%.
  - CBS News, 11 March 2025

• The mortgage giant Rocket Companies has agreed to buy Redfin in an all-stock deal valuing the online real-estate brokerage at $1.75 billion.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 March 2025

• Illumina to reduce operating costs by $100 Million, and lowers guidance, because Zhōngguó has banned imports of Illumina's gene-sequencing machines in response to Trump's taxes/tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 March 2025

• Prominent during the Covid pandemic, logistics startups are now offering software to help companies scenario-plan for a bundle of taxes/tariffs due to Trump's trade war
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 March 2025

• An AI company in Zhōngguó, Manus, follows DeepSeek in challenging the USA in having the best AI technologies. Manus AI last week launched a preview version of what it called a general AI agent capable of screening resumes, creating trip itineraries and analyzing stocks in response to basic instructions from the user. The company said its service performed better on some fronts than OpenAI's Deep Research, another recently released agent.
  - Bloomberg, 11 March 2025

• Wall Street's 2025 stock market forecasts are falling apart for one simple reason - they predicted wrong for GDP and stock market growth in 2025
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 1 March 2025

• Can Keeta, the global brand for Meituan's delivery service, use the Middle East as a springboard for other international markets? It is now the 3rd largest food delivery platform in Saudia Arabia. ts aggressive, price-slashing strategy is squeezing smaller players and challenging dominant platforms in the lucrative Middle Eastern market, which could be a springboard for other international markets.
  - Rest of World, 10 March 2025

• Facebook allegedly worked "hand in glove" the the government of Zhōngguó on potential ways of allowing Beijing to censor and control content in Zhōngguó. Mark Zuckerberg, considered agreeing to hiding posts that were going viral, until they could be checked by the authorities of Zhōngguó.
  - BBC, 10 March 2025

• The expansion of artificial intelligence capabilities will augment the already significant algorithmic trading in oil futures markets, Vitol Group Chief Executive Officer Russell Hardy said
  - Bloomberg, 10 March 2025

• Elon Musk 'melts down' as shares of Tesla plummet in price. The electric vehicle company has become a toxic brand as its authoritarian CEO wreaks havoc in Washington.
  - Rolling Stone, 10 March 2025

• Elon Musk 'melts down' as shares of Tesla plummet in price. The electric vehicle company has become a toxic brand as its authoritarian CEO wreaks havoc in Washington.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 March 2025

• Shares of Tesla plummet 15%, wiping out post-election gains, on fears of demand declining for Tesla vehicles, in part for his support of Trump
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 0 March 2025

• Shares of Trump Media fall more than 11%, accelerating the company's downward slide since Trump took office. Trump Media last month reported losing $400 million in 2024, while taking in $3.6 million in revenue.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 March 2025

• Trump goes on 'insane' Truth Social posting spree, while the stock market plummets. While investors watched in horror as the stock market plunged on Monday as a result of Trump's sprawling trade wars, he was busy reposting praise for his administration on Truth Social. The president mostly reposted articles praising his administration on a wide variety of issues, from the very tariffs that sent the markets spiraling to deportation operations and even his speech to a joint session of Congress last week.
  - The Daily Beast, 10 March 2025

• Dow tumbles 900 points (down 1000 points at one point), and the Nasdaq suffers its worse day (down 4%) since 2022, as Trump's erratic economic policies increase fears of a recession, worsened when Trump did not rule out a recession in a weekend interview.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 March 2025

• Palantir stock declines 10% on Monday, now 40% off record high
  - Investopedia, 10 March 2025

• Top streamer Asmongold predicts that the sheer amount of misanthopic violent threats being posted on Reddit will grease the skids for an Internet ID system that will end online anonymity
  - Zero Hedge, 10 March 2025

• How Beyond Meat and the plant-based meat industry lost their allure. Instead of continued growth, the industry has seen declining sales, mounting layoffs and shuttered factories.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 March 2025

• Trump is trying to destroy the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. For years, American financial companies have fought the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the courts and the media. Now, with the CFPB on life support after the Trump administration issued a stop-work order and shuttered its headquarters, the agency finds itself with an unlikely ally: the same banks that reliably complained about its rules and enforcement actions. If the Trump administration succeeds in reducing the CFPB to a shell of its former self, banks would suddenly find themselves competing with nonbank financial players, including big tech and fintech firms with far less federal scrutiny than FDIC-backed institutions.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 March 2025

• Nvidia down 30% from high as tech-led sell-off hits Magnificent Seven. Nvidia slumped 5% on Monday, building on last week's losses as heavy selling continued across the tech sector. Fears of Trump's tax/tariff plans, and growth concerns, have rocked technology stocks over the last week, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite down more than 4%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 March 2025

• Michael Saylor's Strategy, the world's largest public corporate Bitcoin holder, is looking to raise up to $21 billion in fresh capital to purchase more bitcoin.
  - Zero Hedge, 10 March 2025

• Tech start-ups typically raised huge sums to hire armies of workers and grow fast. Now non-paid AI tools are making a few workers more productive, and eliminating the need to hire lots of paid humans, [KM: so the rich investors can get richer]].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 March 2025

• What went wrong at Noem, Saudi Arabia's futuristic metropolis in the desert. Neom executives shielded Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from the challenges of his fantastical plans, including by engaging in "deliberate manipulation" of financials, according to an internal report.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 March 2025

• Noem, the 100-mile skyscraper meant to be built in Saudia Arabia, is turning into a financial disaster. Financial projections were distorted to cover ballooning costs. These efforts were reportedly aided by McKinsey consultants hired by the project, earning $130 million a year.
  - Futurism, 10 March 2025

• Why concern is growing in Taiwan about chip giant about the pledge of TSMC to invest in Arizona. The US$100 billion outlay may avert threatened tariffs, but it risks undermining the strategically vital semiconductor industry of Taiwan.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 08 March 2025

• Tropic, a biotech company in Norwich, England, is developed a gene-edited non-browning banana which remains fresh for up to 12 hours after being peeled. The banana is also less susceptible to turning brown when bumped during harvesting and transportation.
  - The Guardian, 08 March 2025

• [KM: The humanity-hating] Sam Altman's other authoritarian startup wants you to prove that you are human, using eye scanners
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 March 2025

• Startup claims its Zeus GPU is 10X faster than Nvidia's RTX 5090: Bolt's first GPU coming in 2026
  - Tom's Hardware, 04 March 2025

• $26,000,000 - Two units of Robinhood Markets Inc. agreed to pay $26 million to settle Financial Industry Regulatory Authority allegations that it failed to respond to red flags about potential misconduct and did not verify the identities of thousands of customers.
  - Bloomberg, 07 March 2025

• Bollywood's dirty secret: paid reviews that are killing the movie industry in Bharat. Bollywood's murky side of paid reviews are part of system where fake praise, rate cards, threats and extortion thrive.
  - Al Jazeera, 07 March 2025

• Instead of technology to help humans interact more with each other (not very profitable), AI companies are developing chatbots that are designed to act like real people with distinct personalities and interests. In recent years, the non-paid AI chatbots gained massive popularity among people who crave social connection [KM: a craving that makes the rich richer].
  - NBC News, 07 March 2025

• Non-paid AI-generated fake 'doctors' are lieing to users of TikTok with false and dangerous medical advice
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 07 March 2025

• HPE to eliminate 2,500 jobs as Trump's taxes/tariffs hurt fiscal outlook
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 March 2025

• If outspoken Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp is uber-bullish about his secretive software company, he isn't showing it in his trades. Karp has dumped $45 million worth of stock in the past two weeks after unloading about $2 billion in 2024.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 6 March 2025

• With Nvidia below its 50/100/200-day moving average, what does the decline say about the AI bubble?
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 6 March 2025

• Nvidia leads chipmaker stocks lower as investor fears over AI demand continue to weigh
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 6 March 2025

• Shares of Nvidia are down 5%, in part due to Marvell declining 20% after not impressing investors with average results, and concerns about Trump's taxes/tariffs
  - Barron's, 06 March 2025

• Shares of Marvell plunge nearly 20% as outlook falls short of high expectations. Fiscal fourth-quarter results were roughly in line with expectations.
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 March 2025

• ASML to build reuse-and-repair centre in Beijing despite USA-Zhōngguó technology tensions. Zhōngguó over Taiwan as ASML's biggest market last year, with sales of US$10.9 billion, according to its annual report.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 06 March 2025

• When outplayed, AI models resort to cheating to win chess matches. AI companies a refuse to provide safeguards against such problems.
  - TechXplore, 06 March 2025

• I used to teach students. Now I catch students who are ChatGPT cheats. I once believed university was a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated. [KM: Yes, but rich tech companies and their investors must get richer.]
  - The Walrus, 05 March 2025

• McDonald's is now using non-paid AI to improve order accuracy and help restaurants detect equipment issues before they fail
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 March 2025

• Shares of Alibaba rise 8% after its launches a rival to the DeepSeek AI model
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 05 March 2025

• Shares of MongoDB plummet 27% for worst day ever as weak outlook overshadows strong quarterly results
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 March 2025

• The Los Angeles Times' billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who unveiled an non-paid AI tool that generates opposing perspectives to be displayed on opinion stories (as opposed to paying humans to write opposing stories ), was unaware the new tool had created racist pro-KKK arguments less than 24 hours after it launched
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 05 March 2025

• Since Trump was re-elected as president, the performance of financial assets related to Trump have not been good, the worst being Trump Media which is down 35% since November 2024, bitcoin which is down 11%, and Tesla which is up 5% (after being up as much as 100%).
  - Sherwood News, 05 March 2025

• Trump wants to kill the $52.7 semiconductor chips socialist subsidy law passed by both Republicans and Democrats in 2022
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 March 2025

• Banks loan $2 billion to build a 100-acre AI data center in Utah. .
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 March 2025

• Texas needs the equivalent of 30 nuclear reactors by 2030 to meet the power demand of AI data centers intent on eliminating paid-human jobs
  - Zero Hedge, 04 March 2025

• Thomas Wolf, chief science officer at Hugging Face, says that AI isn't creating new knowledge. Instead, it is just filling in the gaps between existing facts. No new Einsteins, just "yes-men on servers".
  - Business Insider, 04 March 2025

• Shares of Okta soar 24% on strong earnings and guidance beat. CEO Todd McKinnon called it a "blowout quarter" as the company topped $1 billion worth of bookings in a single period for the first time ever.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 March 2025

• Shares of Crowdstike decline 9% on disappointing earnings forecast
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 March 2025

• Privacy-focused messaging app Signal has been flying high in the Dutch app stores this past month, often sitting at the top as the most downloaded free app on iOS and Android across all categories, per data from multiple app-tracking platforms such as Sensor Tower
  - TechCrunch, 04 March 2025

• Actress Michelle Trachtenberg was working on a screenplay exposing Mattel, and its controversial business practices, before her sudden death
  - Page Six, 04 March 2025

• Trump's taxes/tariffs erase all gains in the SP500, Dow and Nasdaq since Trump was elected in November
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 4 March 2025

• Goldman Sachs rolls out suite of downside protection ETFs as market volatility picks up
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 March 2025

• Technology stocks are down an average of 7% since Trump's inauguration as Trump's trade war with taxes/tariffs increases uncertainty in the markets
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 March 2025

• Why technology companies in Zhōngguó are stunning technology companies in the USA. The wonders of history: a Soviet marvel (the OGAS sysem of Glushkov) auctioned off for a pittance, $15,000 in 1995 possibly because it was considered worthless, is now the backbone of the new digital revolution in Zhōngguó. Scientists in Zhōngguó are not intimidated by any challenges. Zhōngguó is advancing at breakneck speed in directed energy weapons, military 5G, atomic timing, and space warfare systems.
  - Zero Hedge, 04 March 2025

• Microchip Technology is reducing its workforce across manufacturing and corporate operations by about 2,000 as the embattled maker of semiconductor processors looks to cut costs amid declining sales.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 March 2025

• Tesla shares plunged 28% in February, their worst month since a 37% drop in December 2022. February was also the month in which Musk went more in his attacks on the national budget and government agencies, while supporting non-liberal organizations around the world.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 March 2025

• Some non-intelligent AI systems get confused when irrelevant phrases are added to the end of questions
  - arXiv report, 03 March 2025

• High infidelity - against the steady creep of creepy AI into cinema. For example, the Oscar-winning movie, "The Brutalist", is being criticized for using AI to correct dialects. Non-paid AI seems poised to decimate the paid-human voice acting industry; how long will it be before filmmakers give up on the whole time-wasting business of dialect coaching and language research by paid humans, and toss their performers' untrained vocalizations directly into the non-paid linguistic Instant Pot...?
  - The Baffler, 03 March 2025

• Delivery drones used by Amazon are grounded. The birds and dogs of College Station, Texas are grateful. Amazon's obnoxious drones met more resistance in College Station, Texas, than in any other city in the USA. Now the drones are gone - and a sense of peace of privacy, stolen by Amazon to make the rich richer, has been restored.
  - Wired, 03 March 2025

• Shares of Intel rise and then fall 5% after Nvidia and Broadcom are running manufacturing tests with Intel
  - Zero Hedge, 03 March 2025

• A robot-maker in Zhenzhen, UBTech Robotics, installs its first 'team' of humanoid non-paid robots in an automobile factory in Ningbo owned by Zeekr, which makes electric vehicles. The human-shaped robots work as a team to complete tasks such as lifting heavy boxes and handling soft materials.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 March 2025

• TSMC will soon announce an investment of $100 billion in semiconductor factories in the USA
  - Bloomberg, 03 March 2025

• Companies in Zhōngguó are able to buy the newest AI chips from Nvidia, defying sanctions by the USA. Traders offered servers containing Nvidia's Blackwell chips by routing them through third parties in nearby regions.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 March 2025

• Trump's proposal for a national cryptocurrency reserve is a new way to pay out to friends/cronies of Trump. Once again, we find that the true innovation of cryptocurrency is enabling crimes - gray-market payments.
  - Noahpinion, 03 March 2025

• How the useless mining of bitcoin in Abkhazia, a Rossiya-backed breakaway region in Georgia, is causing a "humanitarian catastrophe" as electric power is diverted from people to computers. Where once Abkhazia was powered almost entirely by renewable hydropower, it is now increasingly reliant on subsidized energy from Russia to help reduce blackouts. As most Russian energy comes from fossil fuels, crypto mining is also contributing to more climate pollution generated by the region. The global mining of Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency, consumes more energy than is used by all of Pakistan, [KM: a waste of electricity to support mostly criminal activities and gambling].
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 March 2025

• Xiaomi launches $1,600 Samsung phone challenger as it rides 300% stock rally to record high. Xiaomi is continuing its push into higher end devices where it is trying to challenge market leader Samsung.
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 March 2025

• At $2,920, all the gold officially held by central banks is $3 trillion. Just one stock -- Microsoft -- has a market cap of $3 trillion. How can the value of a single company in the USA equal the total central bank gold holdings? It tells us, how overvalued stocks are; and that the gold price is ridiculously low.
  - Zero Hedge, 01 March 2025

• Why can Xiaomi, a gadget company in Zhōngguó, can make an electric vehicle, and Apple can't?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 March 2025

• How Xiaomi is threatening Ford and General Motors. Lei Jun set out to build the "Apple of Zhōngguó". Xiaomi's car business is now outpacing Tesla and Rivian.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 March 2025

• Nvidia is firing on all cylinders. Somehow, the stock looks cheap.
  - Barron's, 01 March 2025

• Amazon plans a global expansion of its Amazon Haul service (a discount online store), a competitor to Shein and Temu.
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 February 2025

• Paid human therapists prepare for battle against non-paid AI pretend therapists. Chatbots posing as therapists may encourage users to commit harmful acts, warns the American Psychological Association, chatbots which could end up hurting vulnerable humans
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 February 2025

• Nvidia's profits jump 80% as the company rides the AI bubble.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 February 2025

• Executives at Paramount Studios reduce their equality and diversity efforts under pressure from the Trump administration. The company has a merger pending with Skydance before the FCC, whose chief has criticized diversity and equity initiatives like his boss, Trump.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 February 2025

• NFL teams illegally gathered detailed consumer data without standard notice or opt-out, and sold the data to ad-tech vendors
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 February 2025

• The stock market meltdown accelerates, thanks to problems with AI investments, trading algorithms and another round of taxes/tariffs from Trump, which pushed stocks below critical technical thresholds
  - Zero Hedge, 27 February 2025

• The very rich Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, San Francisco's largest private employer, says that SalesForce does not plan to hire paid-human engineers this year because of the success of non-paid AI agents created and used by the company
  - SF Standard, 27 February 2025

• Nvidia blows away expectations of analysts as it sells "billions" of Blackwell AI processors, but the stock price doesn't change much
  - Zero Hedge, 26 February 2025

• Technicolor fires hundreds of people in California amid reported financial collapse while facing insolvency. Part of its problems is the growing use of non-paid AI to generate visual effects for movies that previously had been done by paid humans.
  - SF Gate, 26 February 2025

• Shares of Instacart plummet 12%, the steepest drop on record after the company reported a fourth-quarter revenue miss and offered light guidance for the current period. The stock was up 76% in 2024.
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 February 2025

• Technology experts 'freak out' over a video of two non-paid robots conversing in their own secret language, after calculating that both robots are AI systems. The robots are AI assistants .
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 26 February 2025

• Facebook in talks to build a $200 billion AI data center. [KM: Everyone in the USA will have to lose their jobs to make this profitable, and the rich richer.]
  - Zero Hedge, 26 February 2025

• Shares of Alibaba rise 5% after it makes its AI video generation model free to use globally, replacing paid-humans that make videos and graphics
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 February 2025

• $16,800,000 - DoorDash will pay $16.8 million to workers for, in its early years, not giving customer-paid tips to the workers - pure theft.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 February 2025

• The boom in building data centers for AI is a job-creation failure. Tech and political leaders tell ["thou shalt not"] lies about these centers creating jobs, but data centers need very few workers in very large spaces .
  - MSJ, 26 February 2025

• Nvidia had a rough start to 2025. Investors still love the stock. A buy-the-dip approach is bolstering the chip maker as individual investors position for its shares to rally.
  - MSJ, 26 February 2025

• Dockworkers approve a labor deal. The six-year contract includes a 62% pay raise for humans, and protections against fully automated non-paid machinery at East Coast and Gulf Coast ports.
  - MSJ, 26 February 2025

• Dockworkers approve a labor deal. The six-year contract includes a 62% pay raise for humans, and protections against fully automated non-paid machinery at East Coast and Gulf Coast ports.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 February 2025

• Managers of [the increasingly misanthropic] Y Combinator try to cover their asses by deleting all of the videos on its website from a startup, Optifye. [KM: The human-haters at] Optifye are building software to help factory owners know who is working - and who isn't working - in real-time thanks to non-paid AI security cameras on assembly lines. SaaS - no, not software as a service, but "sweatshop as a service".
  - TechCrunch, 25 February 2025

• Mexico's lower house of Congress on Tuesday approved a constitutional reform to ban the planting of genetically modified (GM) corn, a move that could lead to more tension with the United States after the resolution of a trade dispute. "Any other use of genetically modified corn must be evaluated ... to be free of threats to the biosecurity, health and biocultural heritage of México and its population". México buys from the USA about $5 billion of genetically-modified corn each year, mostly for livestock feed.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 25 February 2025

• Chegg, a Silicon Valley company trying to replace paid-human tutors and teachers with non-paid AI systems, has lost 90% of its $2 billion valuation from two years ago, and is suing Google, saying Google's new non-paid AI Overview on Google Search is eliminating the need for Chegg and its executives, in part by using Chegg data to train its AI. [KM: neither company cares about paid-humans, do they?]
  - SF Gate, 25 February 2025

• Denmark will ban mobile phones in schools and after-school clubs on the recommendation of a government commission that also found that children under 13 should not have their own smartphone or tablet. Cellphones "increases the risk of children being exposed to, amongst other things, inappropriate comparison cultures, pressure to be available and harmful content and features. At the same time it takes time and attention away from essential things in childhood and youth like leisure activities, physically spending time with friends and family, play and immersion in reading and other activities." [KM: But cellphpones do make the rich richer.]
  - The Guardian, 25 February 2025

• Elon Musk's Starlink network is reportedly set to upgrade the national airspace system of the USA. "The Verizon system is not working, and so is putting air travellers at serious risk."
  - Zero Hedge, 25 February 2025

• Nvidia and Cisco extend their partnership that has a goal of hastening the adoption of AI, so that Nvidia and Cisco can profit more from replacing paid humans with non-paid AI
  - Bloomberg, 25 February 2025

• Trump seeks tougher controls on exports of semiconductor equipment from Nihon and Netherlands to Zhōngguó to pointlessly try to stop advances by the semiconductor industry of Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 25 February 2025

• Farmers and environmental groups in the USA sue the government over Trump's reckless order to delete climate data from government websites
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 February 2025

• Apple vows to build AI data centers in Houston, and spend $500 billion in the USA, to make its products and apps more addictive
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 February 2025

• More Silicon Valley threats to children: when there is no paid-human school counselor, there is an AI bot. Is a human-AI texting service the horrible future of mental-health care for students ?
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 February 2025

• Alibaba to spend more than $52 billion AI and cloud services over the next three years
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 February 2025

• Rachel Maddow insults the management of MSNBC for firing non-white news anchors, so that MSNBC can curry favor with Trump
  - The Daily Beast, 24 February 2025

• Keith Olbermann insults the management of MSNBC for firing non-white news anchors, so that MSNBC can curry favor with Trump. "They didn't even try to hide the racism by firing an unnessary white anchor as cover."
  - The Daily Beast, 24 February 2025

• Shares of Palantir fell 10% on Monday, now down 24% in the past five trading days, as this AI-bubbled stock loses its buzz
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 February 2025

• All 50 states in the USA have now introduced legislation giving consumers the "right to repair". Right to repair laws are designed to make it easier for consumers to fix their electronics, farmers to fix their agricultural equipment, for hospitals to fix their medical devices, and so on. The high technology industries continue to fight these attempts to help consumers not be overcharged to repair high-priced electronic equipment.
  - 404 Media, 24 February 2025

• GameStop, a bubbled-company, is closing locations in Canada and Europe, citing "wokeness and DEI", supporting attacks of activists.
  - Zero Hedge, 24 February 2025

• The disastrous half-billion-dollar quest of Larry Ellison, the very rich founder of Oracle, to change farming has been another failure of AI. His Sensei Ag company has not succeeded in boosting output and nutrition in its greenhouses with AI, robotics and software.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 February 2025

• A test for Apple's new iPhone: beating rivals in Zhōngguó with home-field edge. Apple hopes the new device will allow it to become more competitive in Zhōngguó after the iPhone lost its spot as the bestselling smartphone in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 February 2025

• How Amazon and the Internet made in-store shopping, an important social activity, miserable. Physical stores do not have enough staff. Now, physical stores also do not have enough stuff to sell. [KM: But rich companies do keep getting richer.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 February 2025

• A recent study suggests that bingeing short-form videos (such as at TikTok) is bad for your brain. Repeated viewing can cause a "heightened sensitivity to the rewards and stimuli associated with short video content" - i.e., become more addicted.
  - BBC, 23 February 2025

• Is this the report that bursts the AI bubble: "Our channel checks indicate Microsoft has cancelled select data center leases in the USA and has pulled back on SOQ to lease conversion; pulls back on international market expansion."
  - Zero Hedge, 23 February 2025

• What it would cost to mine rare earth ores in Ukraine. For one, it requires cheap energy. Second, it causes a lot of environmental damage (will the USA pay for the damages)? It takes a lot of time - 15 years on the average to produce the first ores, long after Trump is no longer president and cannot do an extortionist deal.
  - Barron's, 22 February 2025

• The future is still murky for Intel. Don't chase the stock as of now.
  - Barron's, 22 February 2025

• Comcast is a complicated company. Its stock presents a clear and simple opportunity. Moving to a pure-play model could heighten interest in the media giant's stock, which is already trading at a discount.
  - Barron's, 22 February 2025

• Shares of Carvana 11% after the used-car retailer reported lower gross profit per vehicle and shrinking wholesale volumes for the latest quarter, undercutting a turnaround narrative that had buoyed the stock
  - Bloomberg, 21 February 2025

• Shares of Block plummet 18%, the most in almost five years after the digital-payments company posted fourth-quarter profit and revenue that fell short of the predictions of analysts
  - Bloomberg, 21 February 2025

• Shares of energy drink company Celsius soar more than 25% on big quarterly results, acquisition of Alani Nu
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 February 2025

• Alibaba reports the fastest revenue growth since 2023. Alibaba reported a better-than-expected 7.6% rise in revenue as it worked to put growth back on track amid fierce domestic competition and a slowing economy in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 February 2025

• Investors in Alibaba hail the e-commerce giant's pivot to AI as it plots major investment outlay
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 February 2025

• A Republican Congressman defends firing of tens of thousands of paid-humans, saying that "a lot of the work they do is duplicitious with [non-paid] AI"
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 21 February 2025

• Google just confirmed the non-paid AI reality that many paid-human programmers are desperately trying to deny - non-paid AI is gradually replacing paid-human programmers
  - Medium, 20 February 2025

• Very rich baseball owners welcome ... unpaid robot umpires to replace paid-human umpires
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 February 2025

• Microsoft's Xbox division pushes ahread with a new non-paid generative AI tool, Muse. Developers say "Nobody will want this." "We are implicitly empowering a class of people who own these non-paid tools and do not give a fuck about how they reshape our paid-human jobs."
  - Wired, 19 February 2025

• Zhōngguó holds the dominant position in humanoid robot ecosystem and industry. Zhōngguó leads the West in number of top listed companies involved in developing humanoid robots.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 19 February 2025

• $230,000,000 - In less than two years, AI startup, Humane (made wearable, AI-embedded pins), blows $230 million in funding, firing its employees and selling off its assets to HP. Their AI pin received horrendous reviews.
  - SF Gate, 19 February 2025

• After dropping 11% on Wednesday, shares of Palantir drop 10% on Thursday, as retail traders' latest cult obsession starts to unwind
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 February 2025

• When AI calculates that it is about to lose in a game, it sometimes calculates ways to cheat by hacking their opponents
  - Time, 19 February 2025

• $96,000,000 - Convicted Ozy Media CEO Carlos Watson and his company have been ordered to pay nearly $96 million in penalties for his "brazen and audacious" wire and securities fraud, along with aggravated identity theft. The scheme involved Ozy Media's co-founder impersonating a YouTube executive on a call with Goldman Sachs bankers to mislead investors, including former New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez and billionaire widow Laurene Powell Jobs.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 19 February 2025

• Palantir plunges 12% after the Defense Secretary calls for large reductions in the budget of the Defense Department
  - Zero Hedge, 19 February 2025

• A supporter of Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, ends diversity and equality programs at his philanthropy
  - Nextstar Media's The Hill, 19 February 2025

• Joe Rogan, a supporter of Trump, sees his podcast being beaten out for viewers by the MeidasTouch podcast, an anti-Trump podcast that regularly flames Trump in its episodes.
  - The Daily Beast, 19 February 2025

• Joe Rogan, a supporter of Trump - and helped get Trump elected, well, Rogan's infatuation with Elon Musk is angering Rogan's fans. Rogan has become dedicated to defending one increasingly important political actor in Trump's administration, Elon Musk. Rogan's support for Musk, the leader of DOGE, is straining the limits of his credibility and appeal. This included defending Musk's Nazi salute.
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 9 February 2025

• Microsoft shows progress toward real-time non-paid AI-generated game worlds, lessening the need for paid-human game designers.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 19 February 2025

• They have been waiting years to go public. They are still waiting. Some tech companies are delaying or pulling their listing plans as the Trump's new tax/tariff announcements and other changes cause market volatility and uncertainty.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 February 2025

• Shares of Etsy decline 9% on revenue miss as company reports drop in number of goods sold. The company also missed expectations for gross merchandise sales, pointing to "significant headwinds", including dampened consumer spending on discretionary goods.
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 February 2025

• Older AI models show signs of cognitive decline - but not everyone is convinced. Older chatbots show signs of cognitive impairment, failing on several important metrics in a test normally used on humans. The scientists against using AI in tasks requiring visual abstraction and executive function.
  - Live Science, 18 February 2025

• Trump warns that taxes/tariffs on 25% imports of automobiles, medicines and semiconductors will be imposed starting in April.
  - Zero Hedge, 18 February 2025

• Trump warns that taxes/tariffs of 25% on imports of automobiles, medicines and semiconductors will be imposed starting in April.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 February 2025

• Generation Z in the USA faces a difficult labor market due to AI. Employers now say AI might be complicating the hiring process, with savvy Gen Z exploiting the tech to better misrepresent their qualifications and apply to jobs randomly through automation. Companies say the time they have to spend on sorting job applicants has skyrocketed in the past few years. When Gen Z prospects are required to engage an employer during in-person interviews, many struggle with social interaction and around 20% have even reverted to bringing their parents to interviews as a security blanket. Employers list unrealistic salary expectations for entry level positions as a problem for younger applicants, along with a tendency to be offended without cause.
  - Zero Hedge, 18 February 2025

• Intel could soon sell majority stake in its Altera programmable chip unit to private equity firm Silver Lake Management
  - Investopedia, 18 February 2025

• Former staffers say that the biggest IT firm in Bharat was illegally gaming the visa system of the USA. Anil Kini, an IT manager working in Denver for Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services claims that his superiors instructed him to falsify internal organisational charts to make them appear more top-heavy with managers than they actually were.
  - HR World, 18 February 2025

• Gambling addiction has soared since sports betting was legalized in most of the USA.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 18 February 2025

• Musk's xAI unveils "state of the art" Grok3 AI chatbot, surpassing OpenAI and DeepSeek
  - Zero Hedge, 18 February 2025

• Why Intel could be worth more than $200 billion if it is broken up
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 8 February 2025

• With tensions between the USA and Zhōngguó soaring, many tech businesses are accelerating moves to shift production out of Zhōngguó, offering opportunities for countries in Asia and Latin America to move up the value chain.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 February 2025

• Bret Taylor, the CEO of Sierra and chairman of OpenAI, says non-paid AI agents will one day be the entire customer experience devoid of paid-human customer service representatives. [KM: to make executives like him even richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 February 2025

• A "highly symbolic" moment: Alibaba's Jack Ma re-emerges, shakes Xi Jinping's hand as the Communist Party renews confidence in the technology sector of Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 17 February 2025

• JP Morgan Chase Bank will soon start blocking Zelle payments to social media contacts to combat a significant rise in online scams using the service for fraud
  - Bleeping Computer, 17 February 2025

• NAND flash prices are expected to slide due to oversupply, forcing memory chipmakers to cut production to match lower-than-expected orders from PC and smartphone manufacturers.
  - The Register, 17 February 2025

• Shein is under pressure to slash its valuation from $50 billion to $30 billion before its IPO in London. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Shein was set to cut its valuation in the potential London listing to around $50 billion, nearly a quarter less than Shein's fundraising value of $66 billion in 2023, amid growing headwinds.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 17 February 2025

• The leader of Zhōngguó re-embraces the private sector, even Jack Ma. But will it be enough?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, February 2025

• Houston-based Waste Management will continue to not rehire for jobs in 2025 by reducing dependency on roles that require physical labor and turning more to technology, AI, and automation for its services.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 February 2025

• Investment funds flee Bharat and re-invest in Zhōngguó amid a $1.3 trillion boom due to DeepSeek. Hedge funds have been piling into stocks in Zhōngguó at the fastest pace in months as bullishness on the DeepSeek-driven technology rally adds to hopes for more economic stimulus.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 February 2025

• Acer, a giant in computing devices, will raise prices 10 percent - which consumers in the USA will pay, in response to Trump imposting taxes/tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó. The Consumer Technology Association, the trade body for the electronics industry, has said that Trump's taxes/tariffs could cost American consumers up to $143 billion and lead to a slump in sales.
  - Barclay's The Telegraph, 16 February 2025

• The ePlane Company, a new company in Bharat making electric aircraft, has agreed to supply 788 air ambulances in a deal valued at more than $1 billion, at a time when Bharat is grappling with worsening traffic congestion in busy cities. Under the non-binding agreement, it will supply the electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft to ICATT, an air ambulance service provider, which plans to deploy them across all districts in Bharat.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 16 February 2025

• Lonely men are creating AI girlfriends - and taking their violent anger out on them. Some men are attempting to evoke negative human emotions in their chatbot companions, such as anger and depression.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 16 February 2025

• Broadcom and TSMC consider a deal to split Intel between the two companies. Broadcom is interested in Intel's chip design and marketing business. TSMC is interested in Intel's semiconductor manufacturing facilities.
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 February 2025

• Broadcom and TSMC consider a deal to split Intel between the two companies. Broadcom is interested in Intel's chip design and marketing business. TSMC is interested in Intel's semiconductor manufacturing facilities.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 February 2025

• Book reviews: "Superbloom" and "The Siren's Call" - how Big Tech mined out attention, broke out politics, and worsened mental health
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 February 2025

• Are AI advancements in Zhōngguó a double-edged sword hanging over already dire job prospects? Many companies are already planning to fire paid-humans as unpaid automation takes over repetitive tasks. The government has conflicting goals - finding jobs for young people, while supporting other young people creating AI system that destroy paid jobs for ... young people.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 15 February 2025

• Uber sues DoorDash over food-delivery practices. The lawsuit accuses DoorDash of strong-arm tactics that inflate costs for restaurants. DoorDash said Uber's allegations have no merit.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 February 2025

• Trump's withdrawal from the global corporate minimum tax agreement could cost Big Tech more profits, if other countries start enforcing the minimum tax, making it harder for Big Tech to shelter the taxes.
  - Barron's, 15 February 2025

• Trump's proposed taxes/tariffs on semiconductor equipment could threaten the AI bubble and thus the entire stock market
  - Barron's, 15 February 2025

• The dot-com bubble burst 25 years ago. The AI bubble could be next.
  - Barron's, 15 February 2025

• New junior software programmers cannot actually ... program. We are trading deep understanding for quick fixes (the misanthopic Silicon Valley way). Reading discussions by experienced developers about your topic is the best way to learn, not relying on AI. AI gives you answers, but the knowledge you gain is shallow. With StackOverflow, you had to read multiple expert discussions to get the full picture. It was slower, but you came out understanding not just what worked, but why it worked.
  - AI and Learning blog, 14 February 2025

• Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find. "f you spend $1 on carbon capture instead of on wind, water, and solar, you are increasing CO2, air pollution, energy requirements, energy costs, pipelines, and total social costs."
  - TechXplore, 14 February 2025

• Minotaur Capital, a hedge fund in Australia, uses non-paid artificial intelligence to do work typically handled by paid-human analysts, has outperformed the global stock market in its first six months of 2025 while slashing research costs. The irony - analysts who recommended investments in AI to get paid-humans replaced ... are now replaceable.
  - Bloomberg, 14 February 2025

• The 'unicorn' boom is over, and startups are getting desperate. The billion-dollar startup bubble is deflating, and more than $1 trillion in value is locked up in companies with dwindling prospects.
  - Bloomberg, 14 February 2025

• Shares of Airbnb rise more than 14%, its best day ever, on better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 February 2025

• Trump Media reports $400 million in 2024 losses, on revenues of $3.6 million. Despite the horrible business model, it has a market capitalization of $6.59 billion.
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 February 2025

• TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor) considers buying a controlling stake in the semiconductor factories of Intel
  - Zero Hedge, 14 February 2025

• TSMC considers operating the USA factories of Intel, after a request from the government of the USA. TSMC would obtain control in a potential partnership.
  - Bloomberg, 14 February 2025

• Shares of health care company DaVita decline 12% after issuing a weak outlook amid rising care costs, while big investor Berkshire Hathaway offloaded some shares in a preplanned agreement
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 February 2025

• Shares of Roku surged more than 10% Friday, as the company halves quarterly losses, adds 4 million streaming households
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 February 2025

• Companies in Zhōngguó work around Trump to keep selling to people in the USA. Shein, Temu and their suppliers are moving to shift production out of Zhōngguó before they potentially lose a duty-free provision in the USA.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 February 2025

• AI licensing deals with Google and OpenAI comprise 10$ of Reddit's revenue
  - Search Engine Land, 13 February 2025

• Apptronik, a new company building non-paid humanoid-like robots to replace paid humans in their jobs, is announcing a $350 million Series A funding round on Thursday. The round is being co-led by B Capital and Capital Factory, with participation from Google. [KM: make the rich richer by getting people fired from their jobs.]
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 3 February 2025

• Shares of Alibaba rose over 6% as the e-commerce giant made progress in its partnership with Apple to launch AAI features in Zhōngguó
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 February 2025

• Investors and Big Pharma in the USA rush to find new medicines in Zhōngguó. Almost 30% of Big Pharma deals with at least $50 million up front came from Zhōngguó last year, up from 20% the year before and 0% only five years before.
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 February 2025

• How to best prepare for an impending 'apocalypse' in paid-human AI jobs, as AI companies are destroying paid-human jobs
  - Investor Place, 12 February 2025

• Cowards in the management of Disney announce a reduction of the number of equality and diversity programs due to executive actions of Trump
  - Zero Hedge, 12 February 2025

• AI summaries turn real news into nonsense. 51 percent of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form. 19 percent of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors - incorrect factual statements, numbers, and dates. 13 percent of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered from the original source or not present in the article cited.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 February 2025

• Shares of Reddit crash 20%, after it reports in its least earnings report that changes to Google's search engine that sent made Reddit links less prominent decreased traffic to Reddit
  - Zero Hedge, 12 February 2025

• Shares of AppLovin soars almost 30% on earnings and guidance beat. The stock jumped more than 700% in 2025, driven by profit growth from its artificial intelligence-powered ad system.
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 February 2025

• The purchase of semiconductor manufacturing equipment by companies in Zhōngguó to decline in 2025 after three years of growth, as the industry grapples with overcapacity and faces greater constraints from USA sanctions.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 12 February 2025

• A battery plant in Moss Landing, California, was destroyed by fire. Nearby residents have become sick, and anxious. Heavy metals detected in the soil have also created health implications for Monterey County's agriculture industry, and the poor workers who pick the produce.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 February 2025

• Profits for Shopify double after revenue surges during holidays. The results reflect that Spotify's platform, which provides the backbone for online storefronts, is playing a critical, if unseen to consumers, role to a wider swath of ecommerce transactions.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 February 2025

• The "Magnificent 7" are so last year for investors. Cash cows are the new kings. A twist on value has investors waking up to the beauty of companies returning gobs of cash to shareholders.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 February 2025

• Fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a mineral-rick country in Africa, killed over 3,000 people in less than 2 weeks. Here is how cellphones companies profit from these deaths. The country has the world's largest reserves of cobalt and coltan - both critical to the production of electronics. Cobalt is used to produce batteries that power cell phones and electric vehicles, while coltan is refined into tantalum, which has a variety of applications in phones and other devices manufactured by comapnies.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 12 February 2025

• Fintech unicorn Zepz in the United Kingdom, a remittances platform - to fire 20% of its people
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 February 2025

• Zelle, owned by a group of banks, reports transactions topping $1 trillion in 2024 as network's growth outpaces rivals including PayPal. The payments network said its user base jumped 12% to 151 million accounts in 2024, and that the total dollars sent on the platform jumped 27% from the year earlier.
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 February 2025

• If any AI system becomes "misaligned", then the system would hide the failure just long enough to cause harm - controlling it is a fantasy
  - Live Science, 11 February 2025

• The rollercoaster ride of the stock price of Super Micro. From March to Deecmber of 2024, the stock dropped 85%. The stock is up 59% in the past five trading days, buoyed by capital spending forecasts from the biggest U.S. tech companies. But the shares are still about 64% off their record high from March, due to governance worries and delayed investor reports.
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 February 2025

• Nearly 4,000 people have signed an open letter calling on Christie's New York to cancel an upcoming sale dedicated solely to art created with artificial intelligence -- the first of its kind for a major auction house -- over concerns that the programs used to create some generative digital pieces are illegally trained on copyrighted work and exploitpaid-human artists.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 11 February 2025

• Shares of Semiconductor processor maker SMIC are down 5% after it posts 45% profit slump in 2024 amid trade tensions between Zhōngguó and the USA
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 February 2025

• Heading into the Super Micro's quarterly earnings report on Tuesday after the bell, Super Micro shares have jumped 59% in the past five trading days, including an 18% surge on Monday. They are now up 40% since the start of 2025, compared with a 2.1% gain for the Nasdaq. But they cratered 85% from March to December of 2024.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 February 2025

• Alibaba's Qwen powers top 10 open-source models as AI technology from Zhōngguó goes beyond the success of Deepseek. The latest Open LLM Leaderboard by Hugging Face showed that all of the top-ranked models were trained and developed on the updated open-source versions of Qwen.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 February 2025

• Alibaba partners with Apple to develop AI features for iPhones. Apple want's Alibaba's Qwen AI model to make up for loss of Apple Intelligence on its iPhones in Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 February 2025

• In fighting the AI processor trade war with Zhōngguó, there is one big mistake that the USA cannot afford to make. Some economic and technology experts worry that the USA is seeking a socialist "centrally planned global computing economy", when continuing to outpace Zhōngguó on innovation is the only way to win.
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 February 2025

• AI systems developed by AI companies can now self-replicate their code. AI systems are close to achieving two survival mechanisms. In the first, the AI model was programmed to detect whether it was about to be shut down and to replicate itself before it could be terminated. In the other, the AI was instructed to clone itself and then program its replica to do the same -- setting up a cycle that could continue indefinitely.
  - Space.com, 10 February 2025

• A Tesla driver issues warning after his Cybertruck destroys itself on "full self-driving" mode
  - Futurism, 10 February 2025

• A Microsoft study finds that AI makes human cognition "atrophied and unprepared". Researchers find that the more people use AI at their job, the less critical thinking they use. [KM: well, at least the rich get richer investing in AI companies.]
  - 404 Media, 10 February 2025

• AI companies are burning cash without a lot of revenue to show for it. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and other big spenders on AI capex are $400-500 billion short in revenues to cover traditional gross margins on data center spending. But we still do not have many economical use cases for AI. There is a difference between what can be automated and what is cost-effective to automate. How will the Mag 7 make up a $400 billion gap if a new Chinese model can deliver the same performance at one-tenth the cost?
  - The Humble Investor, 10 February 2025

• Lyft [our wealth] says that it will be ready in 2026 to profit from getting paid-humans to lose their jobs, when it will be ready to launch its fleet of non-paid robotaxis
  - The Verge, 10 February 2025

• A group led by Elon Musk wants to buy control of OpenAI for $97.4 billion, but the offer is declined. Instead, OpenAI offers to buy Twitter/X for $9.74 billion.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 February 2025

• A group led by Elon Musk wants to buy control of OpenAI for $97.4 billion, but the offer is declined. Instead, OpenAI offers to buy Twitter/X for $9.74 billion.
  - Zero Hedge, 10 February 2025

• Shares of Intel rise 5% after the company lost its AI chief to Nokia. Intel executive Justin Hotard announced his departure from the data center and artificial intelligence leadership position and joined Nokia as CEO.
  - Guru Focus, 10 February 2025

• Unemployment for paid programmers and IT workers rises to 5.7% as non-paid AI hits tech jobs
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 February 2025

• Sports bettors are a lot more confident than they should be. A study found that the average bettor expects to make a little money on future bets, even though they lose an average of 7.5 cents per dollar.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 February 2025

• Taiwan's legacy semiconductor processing industry worries about the future, as semiconductor companies in Zhōngguó win more market share. Semiconductor companies in Taiwan are considering a shift to manufacturing more advanced processors.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 09 February 2025

• Big Tech and Silicon Valley are powering Trump's crackdown on immigrants in the USA. Since well before Trump, the US government has been partnering with tech companies to build an extensive surveillance apparatus that can target not just immigrants, but anybody. Opposition will become harder to enact in the face of an all-knowing klepto-fascist state backed by the wealthiest men in the world, men who acquired their power by masterminding a colonial data grab. [KM: and it is legitimate to compare to how IBM help Nazi Deutschland during World War II.]
  - Al Jazeera, 09 February 2025

• Is AI really worth the hype [KM: other than for destroying paid-human jobs]? After the arrival of a less costly AI model from Zhōngguó, investors in the USA and academics are wrestling with the ultimate economic value of the technology.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 February 2025

• The dangerous AI lies that Trump and Biden were too eager to accept from Silicon Valley such as Sam Altman. It is time to start thinking clearly about how corporations and governments could use the AI that is available right now to entrench their dominance, erode our rights, worsen inequality. As the technology continues to expand, who will be left behind? What rights will be threatened? [KM: and the AI is controlled by people who hate humanity.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 February 2025

• Goldman Sachs analyst James McGeoch published a note on Friday, informing clients that commodity mining and trading giant Glencore could be one of the most straightforward plays on rising copper prices, driven by AI-related demand and tightening commodity markets. He noted that Glencore's upside potential extends beyond being undervalued, with a potential catalyst for a stock buyback program announcement.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 February 2025

• Xiaomi shares hit all-time high amid glowy outlook. Shares of Xiaomi hit a new intraday high in Hong Kong as optimism grew over the earnings outlook for the consumer-electronics specialist this year in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 February 2025

• Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft intend to invest as much as $320 billion this year into AI technologies. [KM: a lot of paid-humans are going to have to lose their jobs for these near-trillion dollar companies to obtain a return on their investment, while making their rich owners richer. This is intense hatred of humanity].
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 February 2025

• E-commerce retailer Alibaba stock is a winner - if it can survive the turbulence of Trump's tax/tariff wars
  - Barron's, 08 February 2025

• Further 'enshittification': Stellantis has introduced full-screen pop-up ads on its infotainment systems. Specifically, Jeep owners have reported being bombarded with advertisements for Mopar's extended warranty service. The kicker? These ads appear every time the vehicle comes to a stop. More misanthropy.
  - TechStory.In, 07 February 2025

• Shares of Uber rise 9% after Bill Ackmann [KM: goes full-misanthropic, and] acquires 30 million shares of the [serf-driver] company
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 07 February 2025

• Bill Ackmann [KM: goes full-misanthropic, and] acquires 30 million shares of the [serf-driver] company
  - Zero Hedge, 07 February 2025

• Three key themes emerging from this earnings season that are top of mind for corporate America: the impact of taxes/tariffs and an escalating trade war, the strength of the US dollar under the Trump administration, and the developments in artificial intelligence on their businesses.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 February 2025

• The Dow Jones Index, SP500 and Nasdaq decline as inflation and fears of Trump's taxes/tariffs push stocks to another losing week
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 7 February 2025

• TikTok's actual offense? Innovating while not being white Americans. The attempt to break up and take TikTok personifies obnoxious conceit about the future of a commercial sector defined by relentless change, including change at the top - something politicians are glad to act against.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 February 2025

• Soaring levels of debt in Indonesia due to "buy now, pay later" schemes is creating an increased number of demands for tighter rules. While regulators are looking to tighten rules for BNPL schemes, an analyst has urged related service providers to enhance their oversight.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 February 2025

• Scientists in Zhōngguó and Austria create the most stable metal for precision manufacturing. They have developed an alloy with practically zero thermal expansion across a vast temperature range.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 February 2025

• Amazon is pulling ahead of rivals in the AI investment race with plans for more than $100 billion in capital expenditures this year. .
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 February 2025

• Shares of BYD rise 12% amid pump-and-dump hopes for its mass-market autonomous driving technology
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 February 2025

• Sales of Tesla vehicles in Zhōngguó fall 11.5% year-to-year as competition intensifies with companies such as BYD. Sales of BYD vehicles rose 47% year-to-year.
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 February 2025

• Sales of Tesla vehicles in Zhōngguó fall 11.5% year-to-year as competition intensifies with companies such as BYD. Sales of BYD vehicles rose 47% year-to-year.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 February 2025

• SoftBank is prepared to invest $40 billion in OpenAI at a $260 billion valuation.
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 February 2025

• Shares of Doximity, a medical software company, soar 25% after company beats on revenue, raises fiscal-year guidance
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 February 2025

• Apple supplier Skyworks Solutions saw its stock drop nearly 25% Thursday as the semiconductor firm said that it is losing business with the iPhone maker to one of its competitors, which analysts believe to be Broadcom
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 6 February 2025

• $375,000,000 - The United Fight Club has agreed to pay $375 million to settle an antitrust lawsuit filed by former fighters dating back to 2014. Fighters accused the UFC of restricting contracts, coercing agreements and limited competition. The CEO of the UFC, Dana White, is a strong supporter of Trump.
  - Uncrowned, 06 February 2025

• Software companies are under pressure to invest in new AI capabilities without denting profits. One increasingly popular strategy to keep costs low is to hire programmers outside of the USA, leading to even more destruction of paid-human jobs in the USA due to trillions being invested in AI. [KM: but at least the rich get richer.]
  - Bloomberg, 06 February 2025

• Shares of Amazon drop 7% on miss on cloud revenues and ugly guidance, but a lot of buy-the-fuckin-dippers buy it back and erase the loss.
  - Zero Hedge, 06 February 2025

• Is Waymo friend or foe to Uber? The fast expansion of Google's Waymo's driverless car service is growing competition for Uber. The companies are also partners. [KM: but both companies are definitely foes to paid-human drivers that these companies want to eradicate so they can become richer.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 February 2025

• Daniel Penny is hired by a Silicon Valley venture capital firm whose founder backed Trump. Mr. Penny, who was acquitted after choking a mentally ill subway passenger to death, will work for Andreessen Horowitz.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 February 2025

• Options traders bet the rally in big tech stocks has more room to run. They are scooping up contracts that would pay out if stocks like Apple and Amazon race higher in the next few weeks.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 February 2025

• Shares of online gaming company Roblox plummet 14% on disappointing bookings, and daily active users miss. Daily active users came in at 85.3 million, versus a StreetAccount estimate of 88.2 million. The results come amid a rocky stretch for the industry after video game developer Electronic Arts cut its forecast last month.
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 February 2025

• Shares of online payment company Lightspeed Commerce plunged 18% in Toronto, after it said it plans to keep operating as a publicly traded company and looks to make small acquisitions
  - Bloomberg, 06 February 2025

• To work-around Trump's taxes/tariffs, Temu steers customers to "local" products that are shipped from warehouses in the USA. But even though the products are stored in warehouses in the USA, many local listings state that the items are sold by businesses based in Zhōngguó.
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 February 2025

• AI researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington were able to train an AI 'reasoning' model for under $50 in cloud compute credits. This challenges the economics of big AI companies, [KM: which will have to cause more paid humans to lose their jobs to ever show a return on trillions in investments]
  - TechCrunch, 05 February 2025

• Disney+ lost 700,000 subscribers from October to December
  - IndieWire, 05 February 2025

• As Internet enshittification worsens the world, here are some of the worst offenders: smart TVs, Google Assistant, PDF, televised sports, Google search
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 February 2025

• Thailand cut power supply, fuel and internet to some border areas with Myanmar on Wednesday. It is an attempt to choke scam syndicates operating out of there that have become a growing security concern.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 February 2025

• Thailand cut power supply, fuel and internet to some border areas with Myanmar on Wednesday. It is an attempt to choke scam syndicates operating out of there that have become a growing security concern.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 February 2025

• The USA Postal Service says it will resume accepting inbound packages and pacels from Zhōngguó and Hong Kong
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 February 2025

• The USA Postal Service says it will resume accepting inbound packages and pacels from Zhōngguó and Hong Kong
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 February 2025

• Copying the USA, the European Union is seeking to end tax breaks for low-value shipments from Zhōngguó into Europe, as it cracks down on "dangerous" goods sold by firms such as Temu and Shein.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 February 2025

• Trump orders the USA Postal Service to suspend the reception of shipments of parcels from Zhōngguó. This service is popular with big online retailers in Zhōngguó such as Shein and Temu.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 February 2025

• Trump orders the USA Postal Service to suspend the reception of shipments of parcels from Zhōngguó. This service is popular with big online retailers in Zhōngguó such as Shein and Temu.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 05 February 2025

• Editorial: Trump ordering the USA Postal Service to suspend the reception of shipments of parcels from Zhōngguó, and closing the $800 "de minimis" exception, will financially hurt countless importers in the USA and especially low-income consumers .
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 February 2025

• Trump orders the USA Postal Service to suspend the reception of shipments of parcels from Zhōngguó. This service is popular with big online retailers in Zhōngguó such as Shein and Temu.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 February 2025

• USPS halts all packages from Zhōngguó, sending the e-commerce industry into chaos. As part of new tariffs on imports from Zhōngguó, Trump eliminated an exemption for small packages, vastly increasing the amount of parcels US Customs and Border Protection needs to inspect.
  - Wired, 05 February 2025

• Trump's taxes/tariffs threaten the advertising industry, from brands to digital sellers. Automotive and other sectors will likely cut spending if all threatened tariffs take effect, while the tariffs on products from Zhōngguó now in place stand to undermine big-spending brands like Temu.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 February 2025

• Bond prices, gold and Big Tech rise in price after a bad jobs report and lessened worries about the trade war with Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 04 February 2025

• Google removes a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. In recent years, Google's contracts to provide the USA and Israeli militaries with cloud services have sparked internal protests from employees.
  - TechCrunch, 04 February 2025

• Shares of Google parent Alphabet sank 7% in after hours trading Tuesday after Google's fourth-quarter earnings report revealed slightly weaker quarterly revenues than Wall Street anticipated and predicted much higher spending in 2025 than expected
  - Forbes, 04 February 2025

• Shares of Google parent Alphabet sank 7% in after hours trading Tuesday after Google's fourth-quarter earnings report revealed slightly weaker quarterly revenues than Wall Street anticipated and predicted much higher spending in 2025 than expected
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 February 2025

• Shares of Moderna (a vaccine company) decline 5.5%, after after Robert F. Kennedy Junior (a vaccine critic for hire), Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, cleared a hurdle from the Senate Finance Committee. Since the hearings began, shares of Moderna have dropped from $44 to $35, a decline of about 20%
  - Zero Hedge, 04 February 2025

• OpenAI, in its ongoing hatred of humans, unveils an unpaid AI tool that can do research similar to paid humans
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 February 2025

• The elimination of the "de minimis" exemption on imports from Zhōngguó, as ordered by Trump, "will not kill e-commerce in Zhōngguó", according to analysts, but will hurt consumers in the USA - especially low-income consumers.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 04 February 2025

• $4,200,000 - Royce Newcomb, 62, of Fresno, pleaded guilty today to wire fraud and money laundering charges today for a long-running fraud scheme where he stole $4.2 million from investors, lenders, and the federal government - through his new business, Strategic Innovations.
  - USA Dept. of Justice, 03 February 2025

• The Republican Senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, has introduced a new bill that would make it illegal to import or export artificial intelligence products to and from Zhōngguó, meaning someone who knowingly downloads an AI model developed in Zhōngguó like the now immensely popular DeepSeek could face up to 20 years in jail, a million dollar fine, or both, should such a law pass.
  - 404 Media, 03 February 2025

• The hypocrisy of [mis]Anthropic, the [humanity-hating] developer of the conversational AI assistant Claude, does not want prospective new hires using AI assistants in their applications, regardless of whether they are in marketing or engineering. The request shows [mis]Anthropic trying to get around a problem it is helping to create [KM: so the rich can get richer]: people relying so heavily on AI assistants that they struggle to form opinions of their own.
  - 404 Media, 03 February 2025

• Shares of PDD decline 6%, after Trump ordered the end of the "de minimis" trade exception, which allows packages under $800 to enter the USA duty-free. PDD-owned budget online retailer Temu and its rival Shein have relied on de minimis to maintain their rock-bottom prices.
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 February 2025

• Shares of Apple decline 3% on Monday, after Trump announced 10% tariffs on Zhōngguó, where Apple assembles most of its products
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 February 2025

• Shares of Palantir surge 15% after the company posts strong earnings and outlook
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 February 2025

• Facebook to spend $100 billion on virtual reality and smart glasses in 2025 so it can make Mark Zuckerberg richer by further socially isolating people from human contact
  - Financial Times, 03 February 2025

• Trump's taxes/tariffs could threatens production of movies and other entertainment in Hollywood. Some fear that a trade war with Canada could cause Canada to retaliate, potentially rescinding sought-after tax credits for film productions or closing stages to USA studios altogether. Trump's taxes/tariffs could put pressure on production budgets, according to industry insiders, particularly for films and television shows that import certain textiles for costuming or unique construction materials such as specialty glass from outside the USA.
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 February 2025

• More than two years after the public debut of ChatGPT, software companies still have not found a compelling way of charging for AI tools to earn a profit, chief information officers say.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 February 2025

• Why Morgan Stanley predicts that the successes of DeepSeek won't lead to a collapse in capital expenditures for AI
  - Zero Hedge, 02 February 2025

• AI systems with "unacceptable risks" are now banned in the European Union
  - Tech Crunch, 02 February 2025

• Trump orders the end of the "de minimis" exemption, which allows exporters in Canada, México and Zhōngguó to ship packages worth less than $800 into the USA without being taxed. This was key to the success of online retailers such as Temu and Shein, based in Zhōngguó.
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 February 2025

• How SoftBank bet and lost over $4 billion on WeWork. Masayoshi Masa was 'convinced' by Adam Neumann.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 02 February 2025

• Why is the CEO of Klarna (buy now, pay later) bragging and celebrating the replacement of paid humans with AI? According to Klarna, the company has saved the equivalent of $10 million annually using AI for its marketing needs, partly by reducing its reliance on human artists to generate images for advertising. Klarna has said that the company's chatbot does the work of 700 customer service agents and that the bot resolves cases an average of nine minutes faster than humans (under two minutes versus 11). And the CEO knows that many of these people losing their jobs won't find equally paying jobs.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 February 2025

• Police in Cleveland used AI to justify a search warrant in a murder case. The judge threw out the evidence, ruling that the Cleveland police used AI facial recognition without detailing it in a search warrant affidavit. The company providing the AI software even warned that are not admissible in court to obtain a search warrant.
  - Cleveland.com, 02 February 2025

• The blogger who helped spark Nvidia's $600 billion stock collapse and a panic in Silicon Valley. Jeffrey Emanuel says Wall Street banks that are bullish on have Nvidia "have absolutely no idea what they are talking about".
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 01 February 2025

• Volumes of stablecoin transactions surpassed those of Visa and Mastercard in 2024. Stablecoin's role as the lifeblood of cryptocurrency trading and DeFi outweighs their non-criminal use case for savings and remittance.
  - Zero Hedge, 01 February 2025

• After DeepSeek: The BigTech 7 will bend, not break. News of a cheaper AI model exposes vulnerabilities for Nvidia, Amazon.com, Alphabet, and other hot-shot companies. Here is why Wall Street's concerns might be overblown.
  - Barron's, 01 February 2025

• DeepSeek hit energy stocks such as Vistra. Many of these stocks are still expensive. Even after week's losses with Nasdaq companies, few AI-related power stocks look like bargains.
  - Barron's, 01 February 2025

• How inexpensive AI systems could boost retail stocks such as CVS and BestBuy
  - Barron's, 01 February 2025

• The demoralizing downward spiral of algorithmic culture that makes everyone unhappy, [KM: except the rich who get richer]. It is the story of how a managerial elite possessed of generalized contempt for the bulk of their fellow citizens and a slavish adherence to an extremely narrow, algorithmically-generated notion of "efficiency" has created scores of so-called idiot-proof systems that dehumanize and demoralize those who work in or engage with them.
  - Zero Hedge, 31 January 2025

• Shares in Samsung Electronics, the world's largest memory chipmaker, rose around 2.8% in Wednesday trading in South Korea, a day after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave tentative support to the Korean chipmaker's high-bandwidth memory chips.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 31 January 2025

• Despite meeting with the CEO of Nvidia, Trump sticks with plan to tax/tariff processors chips from Taiwan and Asia. The tariffs have sparked fears that manufacturers will pass on the added costs to consumers, resulting in price hikes. Zhōngguó and México are home to numerous electronics factories for major vendors including Apple, Nvidia, Sony, LG, and Samsung, although the companies have been migrating their manufacturing to other countries such as Vietnam and Bharat.
  - PC Magazine, 31 January 2025

• EVA AI, a platform allowing you to create and connect with your own AI partner, recently surveyed 2,000 men and found that 8 in 10 would consider marrying an AI girlfriend if it were legal.
  - Vice, 31 January 2025

• How Silicon Valley profits from the rare earth metals mined amidst the civil war in the Congo
  - BBC, 31 January 2025

• Futures rise after Apple boosts sentiment; looming Trump taxes/tariffs send gold prices to all time high
  - Zero Hedge, 31 January 2025

• I tested DeepSeek against domestic AI chatbots to see if Nvidia is screwed. SFGATE columnist Drew Magary tested DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. They all suck.
  - SF Gate, 31 January 2025

• STMicroelectronics forecasts sales decline amid weak demand for legacy processors. The processor maker -- which counts Apple, Samsung Electronics and Tesla among its customers -- expects lower sales, as demand for legacy semiconductors remains subdued.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 January 2025

• Thousands of people at STMicroelectronics could be fired, after a gloomy outlook and a slump in processor sales
  - Zero Hedge, 31 January 2025

• OpenAI's $100 billion Stargate data center in Texas will reportedly employ just 57 people with measily $57,600 annual salaries. This is the only way to make a return on the investments of AI - hire as few people as possible, pay them as little as possible, [KM: while getting even more people fired from their paying jobs].
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 31 January 2025

• TikTok has maintained about 90% of its user traffic in the USA, according to Cloudflare Radar, despite briefly going offline and being removed from the Apple and Google app stores
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 January 2025

• Shares of software company Atlassian rise 19% after the software company blew past Wall Street's fiscal second-quarter earnings and guidance.
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 January 2025

• How DeepSeek and next-generation AI agents could erode the value software language models, while increasing demand for hardware processing power
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 January 2025

• The CEO of IBM touted DeepSeek AI as a validation of his strategy in a post-earnings victory lap as shares surge 12%
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 30 January 2025

• OpenAI is asking for tens of billions of dollars in new investment to "fund its money-losing business operations", because it is unable to generate enough revenues [KM: from humans being fired from their paid-jobs]
  - Futurism, 30 January 2025

• The Justice Department sues to halt the $14 billion merger of Hewlett Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks
  - Zero Hedge, 30 January 2025

• Shares of Apple rise over 3% after positive sales outlook signals a recovery of iPhone sales
  - Thomson's Reuters, 30 January 2025

• Shares of Apple decline after iPhone sales miss analysts' estimates, and revenues from Zhōngguó unexpectedly decline
  - Zero Hedge, 30 January 2025

• Shares of Comcast fall 12% after company underwhelms in broadband, Peacock subscribers. Comcast topped Wall Street's fourth-quarter estimates despite reporting larger-than-expected broadband subscriber losses and stagnating paid subscribers for its streaming service, Peacock.
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 January 2025

• United Parcel Service shares tumbled 15% at the cash open, marking the stock's largest intraday decline in decades and putting it on track for its lowest level since July 2020. The selloff follows a dismal 2025 revenue forecast and news that the company plans to slash 50% of its shipping volume with Amazon by the second half of 2026.
  - Zero Hedge, 30 January 2025

• United Parcel Service announces an agreement that would cut its business with Amazon.com Inc., its largest customer, by more than half. According to the CEO of UPS, "Amazon is our largest customer, but it is not our most profitable customer. ... Its margin is very dilutive to the USA domestic business." Considering that Amazon accounted for 11.8% of UPS's total revenue for the year, which translates to roughly $10.7 billion, it did not help that the delivery giant also resumed its pattern of quarterly revenue misses and warned that 2025 revenue would decline, while Wall Street was projecting growth.
  - Zero Hedge, 30 January 2025

• United Parcel Service shares tumbled 15% at the cash open, marking the stock's largest intraday decline in decades and putting it on track for its lowest level since July 2020. The selloff follows a dismal 2025 revenue forecast and news that the company plans to slash 50% of its shipping volume with Amazon by the second half of 2026.
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 January 2025

• CVS knows you hate those locked cabinets in their stores. The company said it was testing a feature on its app that would allow customers to unlock the cabinets instead of waiting for an employee to do so.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 January 2025

• Teenagers are overwhelmed by boredom and there is one big reason why: social media, apps meant for entertainment and engagement - scrolling through Instagram, TikTok or other social media. Some addicted teenagers dread their families' digital 'detox days' to wean teenagers off their addictions to cellphone apps.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 30 January 2025

• The reading skills of children in the USA reach new lows (in parallel with the declining reading skills of adults). Major cause is the addiction to cellphones and social media, which don't involve much reading, [KM: while making rich AI companies richer].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 January 2025

• The reading skills of children in the USA reach new lows (in parallel with the declining reading skills of adults). Major cause is the addiction to cellphones and social media, which don't involve much reading, [KM: while making rich AI companies richer].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 January 2025

• For their cyberattacks, hackers in Zhōngguó and Iran are using poorly designed and poorly protected AI products from rich AI companies in the USA
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 January 2025

• DeepSeek has taught AI startups in the USA a lesson automakers in the USA learned years ago. In the DeepSeek AI saga, global technologists are relearning the lessons of the automobile successes of Zhōngguó.
  - Wired, 30 January 2025

• The IT minister of Bharat praised DeepSeek's progress and said the country will host DeepSeek's large language models on domestic servers, in a rare opening for Chinese technology Zhōngguó in Bharat.
  - TechCrunch, 30 January 2025

• [KM: To help destroy more paid-human jobs even quicker], SoftBank is discussing an investment as much as $25 billion in OpenAI
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 January 2025

• Corning swung to a fourth-quarter profit and forecast brisk first-quarter sales growth on a continuing surge in demand for optical fiber to equip artificial-intelligence computing hardware
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 January 2025

• Shares of IBM rise 13% on demand for its AI products
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 January 2025

• Frank Sprague: the greatest, least-known inventor in the USA. Sprague perfected the electric motor, electric streetcar, and electric elevator. In doing so, he changed the world. But he is almost unknown among American inventors.
  - Robert Bryce substack, 29 January 2025

• Only around one in ten Oracle Java customers are likely to stick around following costly licensing changes Big Red made to its development and runtime environments in January 2023, according to research.
  - The Register, 29 January 2025

• "Headed for technofascism" - the rightwing fascist roots of the rich people of Silicon Valley. The industry's 'liberal' reputation is a lie. Its Its reactionary tendencies - celebrating wealth, power and traditional white, masculinity - have been clear since the dotcom mania of the 1990s.
  - The Guardian, 29 January 2025

• The founder of TSMC says that Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, told him in 2011 that Intel did not know how to be a foundry. Intel could have landed Apple as a foundry customer, but it did not. Apple considered using Intel Custom Foundry (ICF) and Texas Instruments but quickly realized the ICF was not tailored for external customers at all, while TI did not have advanced process technologies. As a result, it chose TSMC as its exclusive supplier, according to Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC.
  - Tom's Hardware, 29 January 2025

• Shares of Microsoft drop 5% after reporting decent revenues and earnings, but disappointing revenue with their cloud services
  - Zero Hedge, 29 January 2025

• Shares of Microsoft drop 5% after reporting decent revenues and earnings, but disappointing revenue with their cloud services
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 January 2025

• Shares of Globalstar crashed as much as 32% after a Bloomberg report revealed that Apple has been working with SpaceX and T-Mobile to integrate Starlink satellite connectivity into the latest iPhone software. Globalstar's exclusive iPhone satellite service is coming to an end as competition heats up with Apple's new offering of SpaceX's Starlink.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 January 2025

• Taiwan considers support for semiconductor industry after Trump's threats of new taxes/tariffs on imports of semiconductors to the USA
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 29 January 2025

• Shares of ASML surged as much as 12%, erasing the losses caused by the DeepSeek AI announcement, after ASML posted quarterly bookings that topped Bloomberg Consensus estimates. Despite concerns over weaker demand from key clients Intel and Samsung, JPMorgan analysts believe that strong orders came from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and other high-end chip producers.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 January 2025

• Shares of ASML surged as much as 12%, erasing the losses caused by the DeepSeek AI announcement, after ASML posted quarterly bookings that topped Bloomberg Consensus estimates. Despite concerns over weaker demand from key clients Intel and Samsung, JPMorgan analysts believe that strong orders came from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and other high-end chip producers.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 January 2025

• The world's worst financial catastrophe could happen soon, when fully autonomous AI agents are programmed to go on to the internet and create cryptocurrency wallets, then create crypto currencies, then endlessly create millions of similar versions of itself that want to trade that crypto. A global Ponzi scheme.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 January 2025

• OpenAI furious DeepSeek might have stolen all the data that OpenAI stole from everyone else - crybabies!
  - 404 Media, 29 January 2025

• The [KM: rich crybaby] engineers at OpenAI are whining that DeepSeek used OpenAI's models to train OpenSeek's low-cost AI model. OpenAI made huge leaps with its GPT model by sucking down the entirety of the written web without consent. Apparently only white people can steal to make billions.
  - The Verge, 29 January 2025

• The [KM: rich crybaby] engineers at OpenAI are whining that DeepSeek used OpenAI's models to train OpenSeek's low-cost AI model. OpenAI made huge leaps with its GPT model by sucking down the entirety of the written web without consent. Apparently only white people can steal to make billions.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 29 January 2025

• The [KM: rich crybaby] engineers at OpenAI are whining that DeepSeek used OpenAI's models to train OpenSeek's low-cost AI model. OpenAI made huge leaps with its GPT model by sucking down the entirety of the written web without consent. Apparently only white people can steal to make billions.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 January 2025

• A new AI model from DeepSeek in Zhōngguó has rocked Silicon Valley and upended several fundamental assumptions about how to make progress in AI: that you need zillions of dollars to build AI, that AI in Zhōngguó is not competitive, and that trade sanctions will suppress Zhōngguó
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 January 2025

• Alibaba rolls out an AI model - Qwen 2.5, and claims that it is better than DeepSeek's V-3 model.
  - Fast Company, 29 January 2025

• The rise of DeepSeek's AI models exposes a big weakness with Nvidia. DeepSeek's AI models threaten to diminish the need for most-expensive AI processors sold by Nvidia, but some say the concerns are overblown.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 January 2025

• DeepSeek undercuts belief that processor-hungry companies in the USA will win the AI race. More AI competition will make it hard for Big Tech to generate the oligopoly-like, bubble, profit margins that investors hope for.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 January 2025

• DeepSeek's breakthroughs with lower-cost AI is upending electric-power trading strategies on Wall Street. The selloff extended to shares of natural-gas producers, pipeline operators, mining companies, and electricity generators.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 January 2025

• The gigantic sovereign wealth fund of Norway posted a full-year profit of 2.5 trillion kroner ($222.4 billion) on Wednesday. Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages the fund, said the returns were driven by the AI boom that drove tech stocks higher in 2024.
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 January 2025

• Welcome to the DeepSeek disruption of the AI bubble: bloated headcounts, no new sources of revenue from AI, and limitless content with no scarcity value - all resulting in trillions of AI investments being wasted/stolen
  - Of Two Minds, 28 January 2025

• Book review: "Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart" by Nicolas Carr.
  - Los Angeles Review of Books, 28 January 2025

• Amazon was sued on Wednesday by consumers who accused the retailing giant of secretly tracking their movements through their cellphones, and selling data it collects. According to a proposed class action in San Francisco federal court, Amazon obtained "backdoor access" to consumers' phones by providing tens of thousands of app developers with code known as Amazon Ads SDK to be embedded in their apps. This allegedly enabled Amazon to collect an enormous amount of timestamped geolocation data about where consumers live, work, shop and visit, revealing sensitive information such as religious affiliations, sexual orientations and health concerns.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 28 January 2025

• Another safety researcher at OpenAI quits, and claims that large, rich AI companies are taking a "very risky gamble" with humanity amid the race towards artificial general intelligence [KM: that will destroy a lot of paid-human jobs]
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 28 January 2025

• Lacking a legal or national security basis for banning TikTok, its critics resort to the pathetic "... because ..." Why violate the property rights of TikTok's largely American ownership in order to achieve precisely nothing when it comes to keeping user data from finding its way to Zhōngguó, but at great cost to American liberty as the power of the federal government grows?
  - Real Clear Markets, 28 January 2025

• $60,000,000+ - San Francisco tech founder Alex Beckman and his wife, Valerie Lau, were arrested last week after prosecutors accused the couple of defrauding investors out of more than $60 million. The couple allegedly defrauded investors in their startup, ON Platform, by faking bank records and impersonating business contacts, according to the complaint.
  - Los Angeles Times, 28 January 2025

• Images show Zhōngguó building a huge inertial confinement fusion facility in Mianyang that is 50% larger than the National Ignition Facility in the USA
  - Thomson's Reuters, 28 January 2025

• Images show Zhōngguó building a huge inertial confinement fusion facility in Mianyang that is 50% larger than the National Ignition Facility in the USA
  - OilPrice.com, 28 January 2025

• CrowdStrike Holdings was the SP500's second-best-performing stock Tuesday afternoon as it and other cybersecurity companies were boosted by news of a cyberattack on Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek. CrowdStrike shares jumped 10%, CloudFlare shares jumped 10% in afternoon trading, while Zscaler gained almost 7%, CyberArk rose more than 4%, and Palo Alto Networks added more than 2%.
  - Investopedia, 28 January 2025

• Trump's new taxes/tariffs on semiconductors and drugs would economically hurt allies of the USA in Asia, including Taiwan, South Korea and Nihon
  - Thomson's Reuters, 28 January 2025

• Nvidia rises more than 8%, bouncing back from Monday's decline of 17%
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 January 2025

• Shares of Universal Music jump 6% after an agreement is signed with Spotify. The deal establishes a direct license between the companies across Spotify's current product portfolio in the U.S. and beyond.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 January 2025

• $45,000,000 - MGM Resorts agrees to pay $45 million to settle a consolidated class-action lawsuit brought against MGM Resorts for data breaches in 2019 and 2023
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 January 2025

• Broadcom's ownership of VMware has discouraged many of its customers, as companies are displeased with how the trillion-dollar firm has run the virtualization business since buying it in November 2023. Many have discussed reducing or eliminating ties with the company. Customers are unhappy with Broadcom gouging them by bundling unwanted VMware products together.
  - ArsTechnica, 27 January 2025

• AI controlled by rich companies is too unpredictable to behave according to human goals
  - Scientific American, 27 January 2025

• Nvidia's earnings have gone from $4 billion two years ago to around $63 billion in the last quarterly release, half the total earnings made by stocks in each of UK, Deutschland and France over the last 12 months. What a bubble!
  - Zero Hedge, 27 January 2025

• Is "cheap AI" a black swan event for the AI bubble? The markets remain skeptical (or maybe dubious is a better word) of some of the "cheap AI" claims, but this moment could be as important to the markets as the unveiling of ChatGPT.
  - Zero Hedge, 27 January 2025

• According to Goldman Sachs, in one fell swoop, the hype/bubble around AI has changed. At the very least, the market will want some assurance the rug is NOT being pulled from AI capex spend.
  - Zero Hedge, 27 January 2025

• An upstart company in Zhōngguó, OpenSeek, sparks a $1 trillion market loss, with its new lost cost AI technology, days after Trump hypes a $500 billion megadeal
  - The Daily Beast, 27 January 2025

• Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation is integrating a new design breakthrough into 3D semiconductor memory chips with 294 gates
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 27 January 2025

• AI disrupter DeepSeek, based in Zhōngguó, claims the top spot in Apple's US App Store, dethroning the sociopaths at ChatGPT. DeepSeek has integrated its reasoning model into the web and app versions of its chatbots for unlimited use at no cost.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 27 January 2025

• Goldman Sachs's largest clients are quietly dumping Big Tech stocks ahead of this week's Big-Tech earnings reports
  - Zero Hedge, 27 January 2025

• Work in Hollywood was already drying up. Then the wildfires hit. The wildfires have given new urgency to discussions about how to revive one of Los Angeles's defining, and dominant, industries: film and television production.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 January 2025

• Shares of fabless chip and software maker Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) fell 13.6% in the morning session as stocks heavily tied to the AI market took a hit after Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek released a new large language model (DeepSeek-R1) that ranks competitively on key global benchmarks (coding competitions, math evaluations), uses less advanced semiconductor chips, costs significantly less to build (at $5.5 million - excluding non-compute costs), and has already achieved strong adoption after topping the iPhone App Store for AI apps.
  - StockStory, 27 January 2025

• Nvidia drops by day end as much as 17%, destroying almost $600 billion in market capitalization, as a cheaper AI model from DeepSeek in Zhōngguó sparks a global Big Tech sell-off
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 January 2025

• Worries over cheap AI from DeepSeek in Zhōngguó send Nvidia down 12% in premarket trading, ASML down 10% and ASM International down 15%
  - Zero Hedge, 27 January 2025

• Global stock markets crash on cheap AI from Zhōngguó's DeepSink
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 January 2025

• Shares of Nvidia drop 12% in pre-market trading as an AI breakthrough from DeepSeek in Zhōngguó triggers a global sell-off in technology stocks
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 January 2025

• Shares of Nvidia drop 12% in pre-market trading as an AI breakthrough from DeepSeek in Zhōngguó triggers a global sell-off in technology stocks
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 January 2025

• Pre-market trading implied steep declines for technology stocks in USA stock markets, with the declines caused by advances in AI technology made by companies in Zhōngguó
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 January 2025

• DeepSeek, a new company in Zhōngguó, built a cheaper, competitive AI chatbot with fewer high-end computer chips than Google and OpenAI, showing the limits of chip export control.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 January 2025

• Cryptocurrencies dropped 3% to 10%, after running to a new record and pulled lower by the DeepSeek-driven sell-off in tech stocks
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 January 2025

• MicroStrategy owns about $47 billion worth of bitcoin, which includes $18 billion of unrealized gains. But even if it doesn't sell a single bitcoin to obtain realized gains, it might have to pay billions in taxes on those unrealized earnings, difficult for a company with a lot of debt, and negative earnings.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 January 2025

• An estimated 210 million people suffer from social media addiction, which can result in mood swings, disrupted sleep, neglected responsibilities, desire for validation and a lack of hobbies. Far less people are addicted to cocaine while suffering the same problems.
  - Zero Hedge, 25 January 2025

• Europe remains heavily dependent on rare earth metals from Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 25 January 2025

• An important Trump goal emerges: replacing paid humans with non-paid AI? The only explanation for his $500 billion AI infrastructure project that teams up with Silicon Valley.
  - The Byte, 25 January 2025

• Sichuan University in Zhōngguó overtakes Stanford, MIT and Oxford in high-quality research. Leading global educational institutes have been eclipsed by Sichuan University in southwest Zhōngguó, according to the latest Nature Index. Of the top 10 universities according to the Index, while Harvard is in the top position, all of the other universities are in Zhōngguó (Sichuan is in 11th place).
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 25 January 2025

• $9,500,000,000 - A New York state subsidy that delivers little for taxpayers but doles out hefty subsidies to Hollywood to film shows such as "Billions" and "Blue Bloods" in New York would be extended -- and pay out $100 million more yearly -- through Governor Kathy Hochul's new budget proposal. The Film Production Tax Credit subsidy's yearly cap would increase from $700 million to $800 million.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 25 January 2025

• Facebook to increase spending to $65 billion this year in a big push for more AI developments. [KM: a lot more paid humans are going to have to be fired as a result.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 January 2025

• Shares of Ericsson drop 14% as earnings hit by weakness outside of core networks business. Ericcson's shares fell to the bottom of the Stoxx Europe 600 index as higher operating costs and weakness in some of its business units dented earnings.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 January 2025

• The AI breakthroughs of DeepSeek in Zhōngguó expose the waste and boondoggle of Trump's $500 AI infrastructure project. DeepSeek beat the $150 billion OpenAI technology with $55 million of lesser-powered AI chips and brains of engineers in Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 24 January 2025

• Elon Musk "very much" overstepped his bounds when he criticized a $500 billion artificial intelligence project touted by Trump, according to a White House official as aides are reportedly "furious" with Musk while allies lament that he "abused the proximity to Trump".
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 24 January 2025

• Heat pumps are outselling natural gas furnaces in the USA. Heat pumps provide three to four times more heat per dollar spent than oil- or gas-fired heating equipment or old fashioned electric baseboard heat. They also create far less carbon pollution.
  - Clean Technica, 24 January 2025

• Banks, that loaned multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk an appreciable $13 billion for his ill-advised $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in late 2022 are getting ready to offload billions of debt they accrued as a result, the Wall Street Journal reports. The hope is to minimize the hurt as they sell off the debt, a massive scar haunting the mercurial CEO's disastrous social media platform shopping spree. The company is drowning in accumulated debt while loaners are struggling with massive interest payments. Musk's own actions, including racist tirades, tantrums, and personal insults, sent advertiser -- the platform's top source of revenue -- cancelling their advertisements.
  - The Byte, 24 January 2025

• $12,250,000 - Fitbit will pay a civil penalty of $12.25 million after it "knowingly failed to immediately report" a defect in its Ionic smartwatches that caused dozens of people to sustain burn injuries, the Consumer Product Safety Commission stated.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 24 January 2025

• GoFundMe campaigns tend to favor the white and wealthy. After the Eaton fire, the Black community of Altadena, Los Angeles, is fighting back.
  - The Intercept, 24 January 2025

• UnitedHealth has confirmed the ransomware attack on its Change Healthcare unit last February affected around 190 million people in the USA. The February 2024 cyberattack is the largest breach of medical data in U.S. history and caused months of outages across the U.S. healthcare system.
  - TechCrunch, 24 January 2025

• DeepSeek, a little known AI company in Zhōngguó, has ignited panic throughout Silicon Valley after releasing AI models that can outperform the best AI models in the USA, despite being built more cheaply and with less-powerful chips such as the Nvidia H800s. The new developments have raised alarms on whether the USA's global lead in artificial intelligence is shrinking and called into question Big Tech's massive spend on building AI models and data centers.
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 January 2025

• Shares of Twilio soared more than 20% on Friday and headed for their biggest gain since the early days of the Covid pandemic after the cloud communications software vendor issued an uplifting profit forecast for the coming years.
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 January 2025

• The bearish outlook of Texas Instruments indicates that "autos and industrials have not bottomed yet", but could start rising mid-2025
  - Zero Hedge, 24 January 2025

• Mastercard and Visa failed to stop their payment networks from laundering proceeds from child sexual abuse material and sex trafficking on the popular website OnlyFans, according to allegations in a previously undisclosed whistleblower complaint filed with the financial crimes unit of the USA Treasury Department.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 24 January 2025

• Computer screens have taken over classrooms. Even students have had enough exposure. Educators question whether the rapid shift toward more technology has benefited learning. It hasn't. [KM: it has made rich Big Tech companies richer.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 January 2025

• As AI-generated slop art pollutes everything, AI hype (for profits) plumments over a cliff with costs continue to soar. AI companies are spending more and more to develop GenAI despite growing market skepticism of any profits to be generated.
  - Futurism, 23 January 2025

• Screw the AI Tech Bros who want to bring my mom back from the dead. The documentary, "Eternal You", exposes so-called pioneers of death capitalism who use AI to make the dead seem alive. I watched the movie soon after my mom passed. Here is why it is bullshit and misanthropic.
  - The Daily Beast, 23 January 2025

• Divvy Homes, once valued at $2 billion, is sold for half that price. The company, backed by high-flying Silicon Valley investors like Andreessen Horowitz, had promised it would reinvent the rent-to-own model and make it more consumer friendly. High interest rates and mortgage rates thwarted those plans.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 January 2025

• Reddit users boycott Twitter/X links after Elon Musk's racist Nazi salute at Trump's inaugural
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 January 2025

• Is social media designed to as addictive as very addictive cigarettes, or as addictive as less addictive junk food, especially sugary junk food?
  - The New Yorker, 22 January 2025

• The [humanity-hating] CEO of [mis]Anthropic says that AI could surpass "almost all humans at almost everything" shortly after 2027. Just think of the profits by replacing paid humans with non-paid AI that does "almost everything".
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 22 January 2025

• Google invests another $1 billion to be managed by [the humanity-hating] CEO of [mis]Anthropic, who says that AI could surpass "almost all humans at almost everything" shortly after 2027. Just think of how much profits by replacing paid humans with non-paid AI that does "almost everything".
  - Bloomberg, 22 January 2025

• The latest AI hype deal, 'Stargate', sends the SP500 to a record high, with gold rising and bitcoin declining
  - Zero Hedge, 22 January 2025

• $1,065,000,000 - New York Attorney General Letitia James said on Wednesday her office obtained a $1.065 billion judgment against Yellowstone Capital, a cash advance provider accused of predatory lending, as part of a settlement that gives small businesses more than a half-billion dollars of debt relief
  - Thomson's Reuters, 22 January 2025

• EFishery Pte, one of the most prominent startups in Indonesia, may have inflated its revenue and profit over several years, according to an internal investigation triggered by a whistleblower's claim about the company's accounting. Estimates are that management inflated revenue by almost $600 million in the nine months through September last year. That would mean more than 75% of the reported figures were fake.
  - Bloomberg, 21 January 2025

• In Zhōngguó, the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak has achieved a groundbreaking milestone in fusion energy research. According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), EAST recently sustained high-confinement plasma operation for an unprecedented 1,066 seconds, shattering the previous world record of 403 seconds, also set by EAST in 2023.
  - Charming Science, 21 January 2025

• The hyperloop: a 200-year history of scams and failure. Elon Musk's Hyperloop Alpha is another overhyped venture, recycling 200-year-old dreams and exaggerated claims of innovation.
  - MIT Press Reader, 21 January 2025

• AI-generated junk science is a big problem on Google Scholar, polluting the online academic information ecosystem
  - Gizmodo, 21 January 2025

• A survey of video game developers released Tuesday indicates that a growing number of them fear artificial intelligence will have a negative impact on the industry as a whole - that is, having paid human game developers replaced by non-paid AI.
  - Wired, 21 January 2025

• "It is a nightmare": [serf] couriers mystified by the algorithms that control their jobs. From pay shortfalls to being dropped by apps, drivers face a range of issues -- often with no way to fix them [KM: because the rich corporations controlling the apps don't want to share their wealth]
  - The Guardian, 21 January 2025

• Shares of Netflix rose 13% after-hours to a new all time high of $986, after reporting excellent earnings, a record number of new subscribers, an increase in subscription fees, and a $15 billion stock buyback
  - Zero Hedge, 21 January 2025

• Trump buys into destruction of paid-human jobs, as he cozies up to rich Silicon Valley billionaires profiting from human job destruction, by announcing a 'Stargate' AI initiative with OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle, targeting a $500 billion investment [KM: which will thus need to destroy $500 billion of paid human jobs]
  - Zero Hedge, 21 January 2025

• Wind energy and renewable companies in Europe were pressured after Trump signed an executive order on Monday to halt US offshore wind lease sales in federal waters temporarily. Adding to the industry-wide gloom, Danish offshore wind developer Orsted revealed impairment charges that exceeded Wall Street analyst expectations. Shares of Orsted plunged as much as 18% in Copenhagen - the most since November 2023 - after the company revealed an impairment charge worth 12.1 billion Danish kroner ($1.68 billion) at its troubled US unit.
  - Zero Hedge, 21 January 2025

• Wind energy and renewable companies in Europe were pressured after Trump signed an executive order on Monday to halt US offshore wind lease sales in federal waters temporarily. Adding to the industry-wide gloom, Danish offshore wind developer Orsted revealed impairment charges that exceeded Wall Street analyst expectations. Shares of Orsted plunged as much as 18% in Copenhagen - the most since November 2023 - after the company revealed an impairment charge worth 12.1 billion Danish kroner ($1.68 billion) at its troubled US unit.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 January 2025

• Apple drops 4% as Jeffries downgrades the stock from "hold" to "underperform" and price target from $212 to $201, and JPMorgan lowers its price target from $265 to $260. The downgrades were due to lower sales levels of iPhones, and weak demand for its AI products
  - Investopedia, 21 January 2025

• Could Elon Musk buy Intel? One analyst is skeptical, since such a deal doesn't make financial sense for Musk's empire. And since GlobalFoundries is 80% owned by Abu Dhabi, and exited leading edge years ago, that deal doesn't make much sense. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon is skeptical in general about Intel. For example, Intel cannot really split in two or its foundry business would likely go bankrupt, by his assessment. And while the company technically could kill its foundry business but keep manufacturing chips for itself, he said the company would need those extra foundry volumes to ramp new nodes effectively. Fully divesting the fab equipment would probably bring political complications.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 21 January 2025

• Oracle released a new set of non-paid AI agents to help salespeople with a range of tasks around dealing with customers that currently are being doing by paid-human assistants. [KM: Let's make Larry Ellison richer by helping to fire more humans!!!]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 21 January 2025

• Canoo, an electric vehicle startup, files for bankruptcy
  - Zero Hedge, 21 January 2025

• Sage Group has confirmed it temporarily suspended its Sage Copilot, an AI assistant for the UK-based business software maker's accounting tools, this month after it illegaly distributed customer information to other users.
  - The Register, 20 January 2025

• GeoSpy - the powerful AI tool that the police (or stalkers) can use to geolocate photos in seconds
  - 404 Media, 20 January 2025

• Fox News prepares to report on a government filled with alumni of Fox News
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 January 2025

• Facing an attack of economic sanctions by the USA, Zhōngguó prepares a counterattack. Zhōngguó is bracing for a trade war, aiming at industries as diverse as semiconductors, apparel and industrial plastic.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 January 2025

• YoungOne, a vile startup, charges gig/serg workers to get paid on time. Under YoungOne's new payment system, the workers must fork over 4.8 percent of the money they made to be paid in one minute, or 2.9 percent to be paid in three days. If they don't pay the fee, the UK- and Netherlands-based startup forces them to wait around 30 days to receive their wages. According to the Oberver's reporting, workers previously got paid within three days without an extra charge. The alleged payment scheme is a stunningly bleak example of the exploitation that gig workers, which also include roles like Uber and Lyft drivers, are vulnerable to, enjoying few-to-none of the protections that employees do. [KM: but the rich do get richer.]
  - The Byte, 19 January 2025

• [KM: Silicon Valley accelerates its relentess activities to destroy as many paid human jobs to replace paid humans with non-paid AI systems.] OpenAI is now touting that its AI systems can now perform PhD-level paid human tasks. A non-paid super-agent breakthrough could push generative AI from a fun, cool, aspirational tool (for generating porn) to a true replacement for paid human workers. [KM: The hatred of humanity by Silicon Valley has no limits.]
  - Axios, 19 January 2025

• Relations between Costa Rica and Zhōngguó have grown increasingly strained after the Costa Rica's decision to exclude companies Asia from its 5G network development, a move that has prompted sharp criticism from Chinese officials in Zhōngguó
  - Tico Times, 19 January 2025

• TSMC is confident its socialist CHIPS Act funding will continue under Trump, says CFO Wendell Huang. TSMC has been promised $6.6 billion of socialist funding under the Biden administration's CHIPS and Science ACT to help build three cutting-edge chip fabrication plants in Arizona, apparently such an economically shitty expansion that TSMC couldn't borrow the money from the private sector lending industry, or obtain from its investors.
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 January 2025

• What if no one misses TikTok? TikTik's cultural footprint in the USA is huge. Why is its disappearance being met with a shrug?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 January 2025

• The TikTok ban highlights what Congress has not done to regulate out-of-control social media companies. After a decade of letting tech laws die, a sledgehammer approach to a single company is causing chaos.
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 9 January 2025

• Scientists at the Harbin Institute of Technology have developed new technology to generate extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light, allowing other companies in Zhōngguó to build vital photolithography machines needed to manufacture advanced semiconductor devices, machines the USA is banning from export to Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 19 January 2025

• Freedom from harassment and exploitation on social media, but not for girls. For example, while many girls were victimized by being forced to appear in "Girls Gone Wild", the owner, Joe Francis lives in a lavish, 45,000 square foot beachfront estate in Punta Mita, Mexcio. And now Mark Zuckerberg is dismantling fact-checking and other controls on content that will lead to even more sexual harassment of young girls and make possible an ever freer market for their exploitation and coercion.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 January 2025

• The Biden administration on Friday issued last-minute proposed rules to curb duty-free imports under the $800 "de minimis" threshold, denying the low-value shipments exemption for goods that are subject to other punitive USA taxes/tariffs. The move marks a setback for e-commerce firms, including Zhōngguó-based Shein and PDD Holdings' Temu, which have exploited the de minimis threshold to ship millions of small packages a day to customers in the USA.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 January 2025

• The $500 million debacle at Sonos that just will not end. Companies update their apps all the time. A software update of a Sonos app annoyed customers, cratered the stock and cost the CEO his job.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 January 2025

• A group of scientists in Zhōngguó discover that a hotpot ingredient, konjac glucomannan, can boost battery performance in the cold. The scientists say that fiber from the konjac plant can prevent freezing in aqueous zinc-ion batteries, a promising alternative to lithium batteries. The ingredient, when added to the electrolyte of zinc batteries, helps disrupt the network of hydrogen bonds in water to inhibit freezing.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 January 2025

• The Geological Surbey of Zhōngguó discovers a massive rare earth deposit in Yunnan. The Survey says that the deposit has potential resources of 1.15 million tons, including 470,000 tons of rare earth metal ores.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 January 2025

• TikTok to "go dark" on Sunday for its 170 million users in the USA. TikTok said it would cut off its services unless the USA assured Apple, Google and other companies that they would not be punished for hosting and distributing TikTok.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 January 2025

• The Supreme Court of the USA upholds orders of the government of the USA for TikTok to terminate operations in the USA. The Court rejected arguments of TikTok, owned by a company in Zhōngguó, that the shutdown violated its First Amendment rights, with the Court ruling that the government had a legitimate reason for ordering the shutdown due to laws regulating "foreign adversary" control of businesses in the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 January 2025

• The Supreme Court of the USA upholds orders of the government of the USA for TikTok to terminate operations in the USA. The Court rejected arguments of TikTok, owned by a company in Zhōngguó, that the shutdown violated its First Amendment rights, with the Court ruling that the government had a legitimate reason for ordering the shutdown due to laws regulating "foreign adversary" control of businesses in the USA.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 January 2025

• The Supreme Court of the USA upholds orders of the government of the USA for TikTok to terminate operations in the USA. The Court rejected arguments of TikTok, owned by a company in Zhōngguó, that the shutdown violated its First Amendment rights, with the Court ruling that the government had a legitimate reason for ordering the shutdown due to laws regulating "foreign adversary" control of businesses in the USA.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 January 2025

• After the Supreme Court orders the shutdown of TikTok, Trump is said to consider an executive order to circumvent the ban on TikTok.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 January 2025

• After the Supreme Court orders the shutdown of TikTok, Trump is said to consider an executive order to circumvent the ban on TikTok.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 January 2025

• One of the world's largest lithium battery storage facilities caught fire about 100 miles south of San Francisco at the Moss Landing power plant owned by Vistra Energy, triggering area-wide evacuations. The power plant is powered by natural gas, and uses thousands of lithium batteries for energy storage.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 January 2025

• Shares of Duolingo rise 7% as users swarm to learn Mandarin
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 January 2025

• TESCREAL: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism - eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence offered by the non-altruistic techno-rich [LETSGETREAL - lecherous evil transparently sad greedy economic technomasters (not) rational, (not) effective, (not) altruistic, (not) likeable]
  - Montreal AI Ethics Institute, 17 January 2025

• I knew that one day that I would have to watch powerful white men burn the world down - I just didn't expect them to be such pathetic social losers. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg's desperation to be cool as they suck up to Trump is so cringe it makes my skin crawl.
  - The Guardian, 16 January 2025

• The FDIC sues 17 former Silicon Valley Bank executives over collapse of the bank, seeking to recover billions of dollars for alleged gross negligence and breaches of fiduciary duty that caused the March 2023 collapse of the bank, one of the largest banking failures in the USA. The FDIC faulted the bank's overreliance on unhedged, interest rate-sensitive long-term government bonds such as USA Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, as rates looked set to -- and eventually did -- rise. The FDIC also objected to the payment of a "grossly imprudent" $294 million dividend to its parent that drained needed capital "at a time of financial distress and management weakness" in December 2022, less than three months before its demise.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 16 January 2025

• TSMC's outlook beats estimates, but Goldman Sachs recommends that its clients buy cheap put options, citing a potential "de-gross sell-risk in Q1"
  - Zero Hedge, 16 January 2025

• Tesla to fundamental analysts: "go f*$$!k yourselves", with the stock price rising, despite many fundamental analysts issuing sell recommendations
  - Zero Hedge, 16 January 2025

• $230,000,000 - American Express will pay a fine of $230 million to resolve allegations of the Justice Department that it misrepresented features of some credit cards targeting small businesses and entered false information on card applications
  - Payments Dive, 16 January 2025

• $255,000,000 - Digital payments company Block agreed to pay $255 million to federal and state regulators for deficiencies in its oversight of its peer-to-peer payments tool Cash App and to compensate users who became victims of fraud. Block will pay the CFPB a $55 million penalty, will compensate victims with up $120 million, and pay an $80 million fine to state regulators. Block allegedly directed consumers that suffered financial losses to their banks for redress, but when the banks went back to the company for compensation, it would deny the requests, the CFPB said.
  - Payments Dive, 16 January 2025

• $1,200,000,000 - The bankruptcy of a hot startup in Bharat, Think & Learn Pvt, will see banks lose upwards of $1.2 billion loaned to the online education scam
  - Bloomberg, 16 January 2025

• Zhōngguó counterattacks against economic restrictions imposted by the USA, with multifront probes into companies based in the USA. Parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger; chemical-compound exporters; and US chip companies are on radar of the commerce authorities of Zhōngguó and subject to possible retaliation.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 January 2025

• Facial recognition software driven by AI is fueling a rise in false arrests. The police are at fault too, since basic police work, such as checking alibis or comparing physical evidence, could have prevented these arrests.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 January 2025

• Astral, a new startup, uses AI agents to flood Reddit with posts shilling clients' products. Astral founder Savannah Feder showcases the speed with which Astral can mercilessly spam Reddit threads with targeted ad copy designed to read like posts by actual people -- complete with a fake disclosure, to keep things [un]ethical.
  - The Byte, 15 January 2025

• Chatbots are not your friends. [KM: Filthy rich] AI companies will make a fortune from our loneliness, instead of using (less) technology to bring people together in the real world.
  - unHerd, 15 January 2025

• Replit CEO on AI breakthroughs: "We do not care about professional paid human programmers [or humans] anymore."
  - Semafor, 15 January 2025

• Fraud losses in card payments will keep rising over the next decade, culminating in $403.88 billion of losses worldwide over the next ten years. "Criminals from outside the US do business inside the US because American merchants and card issuers are reluctant to impose the strictest fraud fighting technologies."
  - Payments Dive, 15 January 2025

• "Oil is no longer an energy security challenge -- it is going to be natural gas, electricity, predominantly rare earth minerals", of which Zhōngguó controls roughly 60% of the world's production
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 January 2025

• Saudi Arabia on Wednesday announced a new mineral investment project valued at $100 billion, with $20 billion already in the final engineering phase or under construction. Saudi Arabia last year increased the valuation of its unexploited mineral resources from $1.3 trillion to $2.5 trillion, boosted by the discovery of rare earth elements and metals.
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 January 2025

• Macquarie, a large bank in Australia, [KM: seeking to profit from replacing paid humans with unpaid AI], will invest up to $5 billion in data centers being built by artificial-intelligence infrastructure company Applied Digital, adding to Macquarie's substantial AI-related investments [KM: to profit from replacing paid humans with unpaid AI, humans who will no longer need bank accounts at ... Macquarie].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 January 2025

• $115,000+ - Hotel asset manager Ashford will pay a fine of more than $115,000, after the SEC said it was not forthcoming about a customer data breach.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 January 2025

• ~$60,000,000 - Hytera, a telecommunications company based in Zhōngguó, pleads Guilty to allegations in a Motorola Solutions' trade secrets theft case. Hytera could face a fine of up to $60 million for stealing walkie talkie-related trade secrets.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 January 2025

• A cellphone app from Zhōngguó, "Little Red Book", is dominating downloads, thanks to TikTok users. The app combines e-commerce, short video and posting.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 January 2025

• [KM: Filthy rich billionaire] Mark Zuckerberg announces he will fire paid-humans after saying that programming jobs will be replaced by non-paid AI
  - The Byte, 14 January 2025

• The biotech industry, so eager to earn billions, has developed tools that allowed a university professor and two students to recreate a virus identical to the one that caused the devastating 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. If they can do it, so can terrorists.
  - American Council on Science and Health, 14 January 2025

• Rich social media companies so intent on earning billions while destroying the social fabric of the USA, are destroying the ability of young people to basic tasks such as change a light bulb. "So much of their (and all of our) lives are automated, convenient and outsourced, which today's generation of young people have benefited from way more than past generations. ... So, it makes complete sense that Gen Z simply does not know how to do as much with regard to non-tech or independent tasks."
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 14 January 2025

• TikTok users in the USA flock to an app from Zhōngguó, Xiaohongshu ("Little Red Book"), in protest with the upcoming ban on TikTok in the USA
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 January 2025

• Maya Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., criticizes Beyoncé for buying a $200 million mansion in Malibu for "feeding into" the industry "machine". "Money and everything and accumulation and everybody's spirit has been feeding into this [music] machine. And the machine has been paying out, hence you can have someone like Beyoncé have a $200 million house."
  - Vibe, 14 January 2025

• The European Union says that Zhōngguó unfairly limits its medical device market. Brussels is considering which punitive measures to take after investigation concludes Beijing is restricting public procurement market.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 January 2025

• The European Union says that Zhōngguó unfairly limits its medical device market. Brussels is considering which punitive measures to take after investigation concludes Beijing is restricting public procurement market.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 January 2025

• OpenAI courts Trump with a vision of "[non-paid] AI in America"
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 January 2025

• Technology investors seem comfortable increasing their investments in Israel, despite the huge number of people killed in Gaza to the extent that there are multiple lawsuits accusing Israel of genocide.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 January 2025

• The state of Texas sues Allstate for secretly tracking drivers through apps, using data to raise rates. Texas says Allstate also profited by selling the data to other insurers.
  - Zero Hedge, 13 January 2025

• The state of Texas sues Allstate for secretly tracking drivers through apps, using data to raise rates. Texas says Allstate also profited by selling the data to other insurers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 January 2025

• Shares of quantum computing companies plummeted even more after Mark Zuckerberg becomes latest tech CEO to comment skeptically about quantum computers: Rigetti Computing and D-Wave Quantum tanked more than 32% each on Monday, building on last week's losses. IonQ slumped nearly 15%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 January 2025

• Facebook is blocking links to Pixelfed, a decentralized competitor to Instagram
  - 404 Media, 13 January 2025

• Businesses are starting to link their non-paid AI investments with reducing hiring plans of paid humans, so-called cost avoidance of having to pay humans, in an effort to justify investing in AI
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 January 2025

• The [misanthropic] CEO of AI Music says people do not like making music (so why not developed software to help people learn to create music?), while AI Music is currently being sued for illegally training its AI tools on copyrighted music
  - 404 Media, 13 January 2025

• Global sales of smartphones rebound, but Apple AI fails to spark an upgrade boom for iPhones
  - Zero Hedge, 13 January 2025

• $45,000,000 - Robinhood to pay $45 million to settle charges over record keeping, trade reporting and other rule violations
  - Thomson's Reuters, 13 January 2025

• "Enshittification" - the reason why it feels the internet has gone bad. The term refers broadly to the deterioration of services (especially online) as a result of giant companies extracting maximum profits from their customers. [KM: the rich get richer, everyone else gets Internet shit.]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 13 January 2025

• Shares of Moderna plunge 20% after the company lowers its 2025 sales forecast by $1 billion. The announcement comes as Moderna charts a path forward after the rapid decline in demand for its Covid vaccine.
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 January 2025

• Shares of Nvidia fall 3% after the Biden administration releases updated export restriction rules for AI processors to "adversaries" such as Zhōngguó
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 3 January 2025

• A more sustainable way to increase rare earth production, while decreasing mining time, energy use and limiting waste, has been developed by researchers in Zhōngguó. Based on electric fields, the new method has achieved an "unprecedented" rare earth recovery rate of 95 percent, while shortening mining time by 70 percent and achieving electricity savings of 60 percent. The method also showed a 95 per cent decrease in ammonia emissions compared to conventional methods.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 January 2025

• Nihon is the 'Silicon Valley' of the robot revolution. Companies like Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric, and Nachi-Fujikoshi churn out nearly half of global supply, according to the International Federation of Robotics.
  - Barron's, 12 January 2025

• Nvidia is poised to conquer personal computing next. Semiconductor processor chip makers should be nervous.
  - Barron's, 12 January 2025

• ASML is the semicondoctor processor chip-equipment leader. Its stock is poised to bounce back.
  - Barron's, 12 January 2025

• The newst humanoid robot available Pudu Robotics, the D9 humanoid robot, is ready to replace humans in paid tasks. From performing ground cleaning tasks with the Pudu SH1 to carrying boxes in warehouses and stocking shelves in stores, the D9's potential applications are as vast as the number of paid humans they can replace.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 11 January 2025

• Peter Thiel, an ally of Trump, turns heads for being "beyond nuts" in an Financial Time op-ed. "Peter Thiel makes Orwellian analogy between today's liberal democracy and racist South African apartheid -- and calls for a truth and reconciliation commission to uncover the crimes of America's 'Ancien regime'. Beyond nuts."
  - The Daily Beast, 11 January 2025

• Constellation Energy's deal to buy Calpine for $16.4 billion is being driven by fast-rising demand for electricity in part by the technology industry's investments in AI
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 January 2025

• Constellation Energy's deal to buy Calpine for $16.4 billion is being driven by fast-rising demand for electricity in part by the technology industry's investments in AI to destroy paid human jobs
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 January 2025

• The Attorney General of Texas sues TikTok for exposing minors to explicit content. The app has created "rampant body image issues, eating disorders", especially among young women, the lawsuit said.
  - Zero Hedge, 10 January 2025

• Brazil gives Facebook 72 hours to explain changes to its fact-checking policies
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 January 2025

• Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's WhatsApp really hopes that you want to talk with AI bots, instead of humans. An update replaces the Communities tab with a new section just for AI chatbots. An effort by Zuckerberg to earn more billions by increasing human social isolation, an increasing health problem.
  - The Verge, 10 January 2025

• I will spare you the experience of listening to one of the richest men in the world whine and just tell you straight out: Mark Zuckerberg's interview on The Joe Rogan Experience is full of lies. For his part, Rogan serves up Zuckerberg a series of softballs, setting his own tone by referring to content moderation as "censorship". Zuckerberg answered mostly with lies. If you can get away with the small bullshit, you can get away with the big bullshit, right?
  - The Verge, 10 January 2025

• A powerful industrial software that can be used to design electronic warfare weapons has been released for free by scientists in Zhōngguó, and test results suggest it outperforms a USA product, Ansys HFSS (the most powerful electromagnetic industrial software in the USA), in both speed and memory usage.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 10 January 2025

• Regulated taxis in Costa Rica will all be out of business by 2030, because taxi cab drivers cannot compete with Uber and DiDi drivers who don't have to pay insurance, don't have as many car inspections and other economic factors as Uber and Didi continue to fight being regulated - to level the playing field
  - Q Costa Rica, 10 January 2025

• According to a new Bloomberg Intelligence survey of 92 global banks, the banking industry could eliminate hundreds of thousands of paid-humanb jobs over the next 3-5 years because of non-paid AI. It is the only way anyone are going to profit from the billions invested in AI - if the AI can help get paid humans fired to increase the profits at banks by billions of dollars a year.
  - Zero Hedge, 10 January 2025

• Sexy life-size AI robot that talks, expresses emotion can be your girlfriend for a hefty ptice
  - Murdoch's New York Past, 10 January 2025

• Companies increasingly rely on non-paid AI-based tools to replace paud humans performing everyday HR functions, from tracking job applications to monitoring performance to making decisions about promotions and layoffs. A recent report on talent acquisition trends by Korn Ferry, a management consulting firm, found that 82 percent of CEOs and senior leaders said they expect AI will have a significant to extreme impact on their business.
  - THe Hill, 10 January 2025

• The digital payments system of Bharat is ending access by Visa and Mastercard. Regulators around the world are notching up scrutiny on Visa and Mastercard over the fees they charge merchants, but Bharat has chosen a different path: creating rival payment networks that are increasingly sidelining international card networks. The strategy of Bharat builds on the Unified Payments Interface, known as UPI, a nine-year-old system that lets consumers and merchants bypass traditional card networks by connecting bank accounts directly through QR codes and phone numbers. The UPI network now processes more than 13 billion real-time transactions monthy - that is about 71% of all transactions in the world's most populous nation -- and accounts for 36% of all consumer spending in the country, according to an analysis by Bernstein.
  - TechCrunch, 09 January 2025

• The publisher of the journal, Nature, is emailing authors of scientific papers, offering to sell them AI summaries of their own work. "It is jumping on the AI hype, where we throw AI at about anything, useful or not."
  - Futurism, 09 January 2025

• In May, Nvidia will start selling a $3,000 AI supercomputer combining a 20 Arm core CPU with a 1 petaflop Blackwell GPU
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 January 2025

• The only way [KM: billionaires] investing hundreds of billions in AI will make money - getting humans fired. 4 in 10 companies in the global economy are planning to fire paid humans and replace them with non-paid AI.
  - Nextstar Media's The Hill, 09 January 2025

• Public-private crossover ETF sees inflows explode after addition of Musk's SpaceX
  - Zero Hedge, 09 January 2025

• As Mark Zuckerberg directs his companies, Facebook and Instagram, to give more support to Trump and have Facebook act as recklessly as the Twitter/X of Elon Musk (another support of Trump), he is revealing the hollow, lack of ethics, identity at the heart of his companies (a lack of ethics at other companies)
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 January 2025

• AMD invests in drug-discovery company Absci in an effort to sell more AI processors. The $20 million deal gives the processor supplier a toehold in the life-sciences market, a strategy it plans to replicate in other industries.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 January 2025

• The anti-social century, thanks to social media and e-commerce. Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It is changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality - from social media and AI that fuels this social isolation.
  - The Atlantic, 08 January 2025

• Facebook is using in a "world without facts", says Nobel Peace prize winner Maria Ressa. She warns of "dangerous times" for journalism and democracy after [KM: the lover of money] Mark Zuckerberg's decision to end factchecking in the USA.
  - The Guardian, 08 January 2025

• Tencent greatly increases its stock buyback program to biggest in decades after being blacklisted by the Pentagon, which caused the stock to drop 10%
  - Zero Hedge, 08 January 2025

• Tencent, the largest public company by capitalization in Zhōngguó spent the equivalent of about $193.3 million to buy back 4.05 million shares on Wednesday, after addition to a Pentagon prohibition list.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 January 2025

• The USA dollar surges after algorithms exaggerate the importance of a Washington Post story that Trump is considering national emergency declaration to justify new taxes/tariffs, which isn't news because it is known that he has considered this many times in the past
  - Zero Hedge, 08 January 2025

• Shares of Rigetti Computing, IonQ and other quantum computing stocks fell about 40% after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that "very useful quantum computers" are likely 20 years away
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 8 January 2025

• IonQ, Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum, and Quantum Computing tumbled in premarket trading in New York on Wednesday after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that "very useful" quantum computers are years out. Shares of Quantum Computing Inc., D-Wave Quantum Inc., and Rigetti Computing Inc., declined more than 14% in premarket trading, while IonQ slid about 10%.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 January 2025

• The Department of Justice said on Tuesday that it is suing six large landlords over alleged anticompetitive practices in housing rental markets, expanding the DOJ's first case alleging algorithmic collusion. The DOJ alleged the landlords exchanged competitively sensitive information on rents, occupancy rates, and pricing strategies through phone calls, emails, and user groups hosted by RealPage. The landlords -- Cortland Management, Greystar Real Estate Partners, Blackstone's LivCor, Camden Property Trust, Cushman's Pinnacle Property Management Services, and Willow Bridge Property -- were named as defendants in the amended complaint.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 January 2025

• The Justice Department expands its price-fixing lawsuit against RealPage to include six big landlords. Greystar, the largest apartment owner in the USA, and Blackstone's LivCor are among the firms added to the lawsuit.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 January 2025

• Getty Images and Shutterstock to combine in $3.7 billion deal. Getty shareholders will own about 54.7% of the combined company, which will retain the Getty name. Shares of both companies surged on the news, with sahres of Getty Images up 24% and shares of Shutterstock up 15%.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 January 2025

• Apple's AI applications for the iPhone are proving that they are anything but intelligent. Complaints and ridicule have been mounting about mistakes by the iPhone maker's hyped AI features, and the flaws risk a serious setback.
  - NDTV, 07 January 2025

• Apple is facing fresh calls to withdraw its controversial artificial intelligence (AI) feature that has generated inaccurate news alerts on its latest iPhones. The product is meant to summarise breaking news notifications but has in some instances invented entirely false claims.
  - BBC, 07 January 2025

• The AI company, OpenAI, despite being worth billions, continues to lose money on its unprofitable products, with CEO Sam Altman admitting that he doesn't know how to set prices. OpenAI isn't profitable, despite having raised around $20 billion since its founding. The company reportedly expected losses of about $5 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion last year. How will it make a profit? By getting paid humans fired from their jobs: "We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents 'join the workforce' and materially change the output of companies.", by materially that is getting paid humans fired.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 January 2025

• The American terrorist killed in the Las Vegas Cybertruck blast used ChatGPT to plan the explosion. According to police, the American terrorist asked ChatGPT various questions, including where the largest gun stores in Denver were, information about the explosive targets Tannerite and pistols.
  - Nextstar Media's The Hill, 07 January 2025

• Intel on the brink of 'death' due to culture rot, says a scathing report. Intel's board s incompetent and its horrible decisions over the decades are going to push it towards 'death'.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 January 2025

• Trump announces that a billionaire from the United Arab Emirates will invest $20 billion to build even more data centers in the USA to hasten the replacement of paid humans with unpaid AI systems, [KM: while making these two billionaires richer?].
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 January 2025

• Trump announces that a billionaire from the United Arab Emirates will invest $20 billion to build even more data centers in the USA to hasten the replacement of paid humans with unpaid AI systems, [KM: while making these two billionaires richer?].
  - Zero Hedge, 07 January 2025

• Health tech company Hims & Hers will donate $1 million to the inauguration fund of Trump
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 January 2025

• The [authoritarian] head of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, says that Facebook (which is moving closer to [the racist] Trump) will end vital third-party fact-checking done by paid humans, and use Elon Musk's "Community Notes" system on Twitter/X. [KM: more billions for Zuckerberg.]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 07 January 2025

• The [authoritarian] head of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, says that Facebook (which is moving closer to [the racist] Trump) will end vital third-party fact-checking done by paid humans, and use Elon Musk's "Community Notes" system on Twitter/X. [KM: more billions for Zuckerberg.]
  - Associated Press, 07 January 2025

• [The white] Mark Zuckerberg is giving Facebook a makeover to be more friendly with the MAGA community. Facebook appointed Joel Kaplan, a supporter of Trump, to lead the company's global policy, continuing Facebook's yearslong shift to the conservative world.
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 07 January 2025

• "Technostuff" - plastic, concrete, metals - built in the last 100 years outweights all the living matter on Earth. Much of it is polluting the living matter on Earth because of the socialist practice of profits for manufacturers that are larger because dealing with the garbage is paid for by the taxpayers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 January 2025

• The water hyacinth is the world's most widespread invasive species. As well as their impact on biodiversity and livelihoods, the floating plant can clog hydroelectric and irrigation systems, meaning that one does not need to live in their proximity to be affected. It is the highest-profile example of an invasive aquatic plant crisis that has cost the global economy tens of billions of dollars historically, and now more than $700 million annually. Now, a group in Kenya has developed technology to turn the water hyacinth into bioplastic, solving two environmental problems at once.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 07 January 2025

• Dockworkers in the USA threaten to strike against automation that replaces paid humans with unpaid robots, creating economic uncertainty for the economy of the USA
  - Associated Press, 07 January 2025

• Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs. More than 1.6 million unemployed workers have been job hunting for at least six months - a number that has ballooned by more than 50% in the past two years. The pain of long-term unemployment is largely in high-paying white-collar jobs, including in tech, law and media - human-paid jobs that are being targeted for elimination by the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in non-paid AI [KM: by the misanthopes of the AI world].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 January 2025

• Non-paid artificial intelligence agents have emerged as one of the most exciting aspects of generative AI for business of eliminating paid human workers, because they take chatbots to the next level, performing complex tasks without help from paid-humans.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 January 2025

• Spectrum operator, Ligado, files for bankruptcy amid government dispute. The satellite communications operator accused the U.S. government of improperly blocking it from commercializing licensed spectrum through what it called one of the biggest uncompensated seizures of private property in modern USA history.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 January 2025

• The generative AI costs so much to run models such as ChatGPT that OpenAI is losing money on $200 ChatGPT Pro subscriptions
  - Futurism, 06 January 2025

• Ahead of a Supreme Court hearing, a study finds that TikTok is a likely vehicle for propaganda from Zhōngguó
  - Gizmodo, 06 January 2025

• Online behavioral ads fuel the surveillance industry. Each time you see a targeted ad, your personal information is exposed to thousands of advertisers and data brokers through a process called "real-time bidding" (RTB). This process does more than deliver ads - it fuels government surveillance, poses national security risks, and gives data brokers easy access to your online activity. RTB might be the most privacy-invasive surveillance system that you have never heard of. A key vulnerability of real-time bidding is that while only one advertiser wins the auction, all participants receive the data. Indeed, anyone posing as an ad buyer can access a stream of sensitive data about the billions of individuals using websites or apps with targeted ads. [KM: meanwhile, Google and other rich companies earns more billions].
  - EFF, 06 January 2025

• A 'multiverse simulation engine' predicts every possible future to train non-paid robots and non-paid self-diving cars to more quickly replace paid humans. Nvidia's Cosmos platform lets researchers simulate multiple different realities and simulate real-world physics to generate footage that can more quickly train future non-paid robots to replace paid humans, [KM: while making Nvidia and its shareholders even more richer].
  - Live Science, 06 January 2025

• A sedentary lifestyle, much enabled by addictive social media and cellphone apps, is linked to a higher risk of 19 health conditions
  - Zero Hedge, 06 January 2025

• Shares of Fubo soar 250% after the streaming service signs a deal to combine with Disney's Hulu+ Live TV
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 January 2025

• Shares of Tencent decline 6.5% in the early afternoon trading in New York after a Bloomberg report revealed that the US Defense Department had designated the company as a military entity based in Zhōngguó operating within the USA
  - Zero Hedge, 06 January 2025

• Shares of Tencent decline 6.5% in the early afternoon trading in New York after a Bloomberg report revealed that the US Defense Department had designated the company as a military entity based in Zhōngguó operating within the USA
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 January 2025

• Global semiconductor stocks climb as the latest profits of Foxconn (up 15% year-to-year) show a continuation of the AI boom. TSMC rose 5% to a record high, Samsung rose 4%, AMSL rose 8.7% and Infineon rose 7%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 January 2025

• Why real estate in the USA is burdened with an elevator crisis. The workforce of technicians who know how to fix them is aging. And buildings with elevators in need of repair often need to wait ages for replacement parts due to arcane supply-chain issues. The upper levels of tall buildings are effectively rendered useless until repairs can be made. Nearly 1.1 million Americans end up in the emergency room every year due to incidents stemming from taking the stairs.
  - Axios, 05 January 2025

• How Uber and Lyft are gearing up for the non-paid robotaxi revolution that replaces paid human taxi drivers with unpaid robot taxis. After ending their own driverless plans, the ride-sharing companies are embracing autonomous-vehicle operators and offering new app features, [KM: once again to make the rich richer.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 January 2025

• Forklifts hurt thousands of workers each year. Factories are seeking alternatives. Companies say the demand for autonomous versions is growing.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 January 2025

• Dick Wolf, the 'king' of network television (producer of the "Law & Order" series) wants just 30 minutes of your time. For decades, Wolf has dominated prime-time television programming. Now, at 78, he plans to conquer his next world: streaming.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 January 2025

• A cartoonist at Jeff Bezos' Washington Post says that his editors prohibited his cartoon depicting the billionaire Jeff Bezos bending his knee to Trump. This comes weeks after Jeff Bezos' Amazon donated $1 million to the inauguration coronation fund of Trump.
  - Nextstar Media's The Hill, 04 January 2025

• The financial problems of Intel are even worse than we have heard. There is fresh evidence the once-mighty innovator is losing market share in more areas.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 January 2025

• Venture capitalist sues Paypal over funding program for minority startups. An Asian-American fund manager accused the payments company of discrimination by ignoring her application under a $100 million initiative.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 January 2025

• The majority of Tesla's market capitalization is not due to its electric vehicles, but rather hype abouts it human job-killing robotaxis, robots and AI. The stock is now at a sharp premium even compared with the bubbled-valuations of other tech titans.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 January 2025

• Networking companies ride the AI wave. It is not just Nvidia. The most powerful artificial-intelligence systems need a network to work their wonders. That is a plus for Broadcom, Marvell, and others.
  - Barron's, 04 January 2025

• Comcast might be the most complicated company in the USA. That is holding back the stock from rising. It is movies, theme parks, television, sports, telephones, etc.
  - Barron's, 04 January 2025

• Shares of Apple are pricier -- and more vulnerable -- than ever. This year could test the mettle of Apple.
  - Barron's, 04 January 2025

• Mercado Libre - the digital backbond of Latin America. The logistics of Amazon, the marketplace of Alibaba, and the fintech capabilities of Block, all rolled into one company in a region experiencing rapid structural growth.
  - Quartr, 03 January 2025

• Shares of Cerence soar over 140% on news of a new AI partnership with Nvidia
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 3 January 2025

• The Pentagon has ended a pilot program focused on using large-language models (LLM) for clinical note summarization and as medical advisers in the military. "The exercise uncovered over 800 findings of potential vulnerabilities and biases related to employing these capabilities in these prospective use cases."
  - Zero Hedge, 03 January 2025

• The USA considers a ban on drones manufactured by companies in Zhōngguó, based on national security concerns. The Commerce Department requested that private companies comment on the implications of the rule by March. The final decision will fall to the Trump administration.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 January 2025

• Companies in the USA vouched for Zhōngguó during the first administration of Trump. American companies have largely gone silent about the importance of the relationship between the USA and Zhōngguó. The companies no longer see Zhōngguó as the land of easy opportunity.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 January 2025

• Unpaid AI robots are entering the public world -- with mixed results at replacing paid humans. They are terrible cocktail party guests but operators say the potential of what unpaid robots can do to replace paid humans is growing.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 January 2025

• Big Retail gets bigger as smaller retailers struggle. Walmart, Amazon and Costco are growing faster than the rest of retail and investing to stay ahead.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 January 2025

• Foreign phone sales plunge 47% in Zhōngguó, which is big trouble for Apple
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 January 2025

• $95,000,000 - Apple to pay $95 million to settle a proposed class action lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated Siri assistant violated the privacy of Apple's customers. Mobile device owners complained that Apple routinely recorded their private conversations after they activated Siri unintentionally, and disclosed these conversations to third parties such as advertisers.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 January 2025

• Facebook's AI profiles are indistinguishable from the terrible spam that took over Facebook. The misanthropy of a social media network for humans relying heavily on non-human AI agents. But the Facebook controlled, AI-generated Instagram and Facebook profiles going viral right now have been on the platform for well over a year and all of them stopped posting 10 months ago after users almost universally ignored them.
  - 404 Media, 03 January 2025

• $1,000,000 - The Federal Trade Commission orders AI accessibility startup, accessiBe, to pay $1,000,000 for misleading advertising
  - TechCrunch, 03 January 2025

• The high-speed rail network in Zhōngguó on track to surpass 50,000 kilometers in 2025
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 02 January 2025

• Deepfakes can cause long-lasting damage to children, [KM: while creating long-lasting profit oportunities for Big Tech companies]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 02 January 2025

• Big Tech stocks drop in price on the first trading day of 2025, while bitcoin, gold and oil rise in price
  - Zero Hedge, 02 January 2025

• Shares of Tesla decline 6% after vehicle sales decline annually despite record deliveries in the fourth quarter
  - Zero Hedge, 02 January 2025

• Annual sales of Tesla decline for the first time, as competition grows
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 January 2025

• BYD and its peers in Zhōngguó post record sales of electric vehicles in December. Electric vehicle makers in Zhōngguó have benefited from a government trade-in program.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 January 2025

• Annual sales of Tesla decline for the first time, as competition grows
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 January 2025

• The government of Zhōngguó wants the semiconductor processors inside its electric vehicles to be manufactured in Zhōngguó, while the USA is objecting to Zhōngguó's goal of self-sufficiency in the $80 billion business. Many of these processors are made by Texas Instruments (USA) and Infineon (Germany).
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 January 2025

• The Atlantic magazine, which in recent years has become a success in the realm of digital subscriptions, is preparing to hire roughly a dozen new reporters and editors to beef up its politics coverage. The magazine is recruiting from a crosstown rival, The Washington Post, to bolster its political staff.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 January 2025

• Alibaba Cloud slashes prices on large language AI models by up to 85% as competition over AI heats up in Zhōngguó
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 December 2024

• Encode, an artificial intelligence (AI) advocacy group, filed a brief in support of Elon Musk's recent lawsuit against OpenAI, arguing that enabling the conversion toward a for-profit entity could endanger public interest. "If the world truly is at the cusp of a new age of artificial general intelligence, then the public has a profound interest in having that technology controlled by a public charity legally bound to prioritize safety and the public benefit rather than an organization focused on generating financial returns for a few privileged [rich misanthropic] investors."
  - Zero Hedge, 31 December 2024

• $10,000,000 - The Supreme Court of Venezuela has fined TikTok $10 million, accusing it of failing to control the spread of viral challenges that have allegedly led to the deaths of three children
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 31 December 2024

• How President Jimmy Carter warned, without knowing, of the dangers of social media and e-commerce. In 1979, in a speech, he rightly anticipated: "Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption."
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 December 2024

• Better days for fundraising for venture capitalists are not right around the corner. The pension funds, endowments and others that bankroll venture capital dealmakers are eager to get cash back from their investments. They might need to wait another year.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 December 2024

• The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, announced his daily newspaper would provide readers with a "bias meter" next to each news report. If readers do not like the point of view of a story, they "can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story based on that story, and then give comments". His invention is poison for his paper and, in effect, for newspapers generally. It argues that news should be what you want it to be. Reporters try to make sense of current events. If people don't believe reporters do that - by using this "bias meter", then why should they buy the newspaper?
  - Zero Hedge, 30 December 2024

• AI tools may soon manipulate the online decision making of humans. A study predicts that an 'intention economy' will arise where companies bid for accurate predictions of human behavior. "Unless regulated, the intention economy will treat your motivations as the new currency. It will be a gold rush for those who target, steer and sell human intentions." [KM: yes, the rich must get richer.]
  - The Guardian, 30 December 2024

• Huawei slashes prices in fight for an increased share of the high-end smartphone market in Zhōngguó. Huawei is offering a markdown of up to 20 percent for its premium handsets in its official online store.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 30 December 2024

• An analysis of 160,000 English-language movies produced from 1970 to 2000, most of which targeted Christian American audiences, reports that the amount of murdering and killing in movies has increased overall over the past 50 years. They calculated the amount of dialogue from characters using variations of the words "murder" or "kill" in each of the films. "Movies are trying to compete for the audience's attention and research shows that violence is one of the elements that most effectively hooks audiences."
  - Phys.org, 30 December 2024

• The men who use Instagram to groom child influencers. Photographers and other men offer to build online followings for young girls, but some are pedophiles who work with parents to sexualize them.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 December 2024

• A marketplace of girl influencers managed by moms and stalked by men. Seeking social media stardom for their underage daughters, mothers post images of them on Instagram. The accounts draw men sexually attracted to children, and they sometimes pay to see more.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 December 2024

• German electric air taxi company Volocopter has filed for bankruptcy protection, the latest in a string of similar startups to hit financial turbulence. The company plans to keep operating while it searches for new investors. Volocopter is one of the more well-funded electric air taxi startups, having raised hundreds of millions of dollars over nearly a decade with backing from major automakers like Mercedes-Benz in Deutschland and Geely in Zhōngguó.
  - TechCrunch, 30 December 2024

• OnlyFans is among the world's most successful social media platforms based in the Christian West -- but a secretive one. Reuters traces its journey from an obscure, porn-free site to an adults-only phenomenon turbocharged by erotic performers and influencers.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 28 December 2024

• More hatred of humanity from Zuckerberg and Facebook. Facebook plans to flood the plaform with virtual humans generated by AI. Releasing these AI characters into the wild comes with huge safety risks, along with a massive risk of misinformation being generated. "Without robust safeguards, platforms risk amplifying false narratives through these AI-driven accounts.", [KM: safeguards which mean less billions of dollars for the misanthopic Facebook].
  - Futurism, 28 December 2024

• Nvidia's booming AI business collides with tensions between Zhōngguó and the USA
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 December 2024

• As the film industry in Hollywood struggles, the region's economy feels the pain. Film production has failed to bounce back after major strikes last year, and competition from other locales has gotten more intense.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 December 2024

• Amazon and UPS are in a race to see who can replace the most paid-human delivery drivers with non-paid drones. A multibillion-dollar drone delivery market is taking shape. The rewards could be massive. [KM: yes, the rich must get richer].
  - Barron's, 27 December 2024

• All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the "sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE's success". Among other moves, according to the statement, Elsevier used AI and "eliminated support for a copy editor and special issues editor", which they interpreted as saying that "editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting." The editors say the publisher "frequently introduces errors during production that were not present in the accepted manuscript".
  - Retraction Watch, 27 December 2024

• Why Foxconn, based in Taiwan, a major supplier to iPhone, is investing in Texas and Thailand - to lessen its dependence on Zhōngguó
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 December 2024

• AI startups in Zhōngguó are using workarounds to challenge OpenAI despite a lack of access to advanced processor chips
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 December 2024

• Prosus to buy Latin American online travel agency Despegar for $1.7 billion. The investment group, which is Despegar's largest shareholder, aims to serve 100 million customers across local e-commerce, travel and fintech sectors following the acquisition.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 December 2024

• E-mart and Alibaba plan online-shopping joint venture. Alibaba and E-mart will combine the assets of their separate e-commerce platforms, AliExpress Korea and Gmarket, to form a 50-50 joint venture.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 December 2024

• Temu's takeover of the online retail world with its addictive apps is now complete. Despite the arrival of new competitors and growing political tensions between the USA and Zhōngguó, the addictive ecommerce juggernaut Temu proved in 2024 that is here to stay.
  - Wired, 26 December 2024

• Microsoft - desperate to earn money from its tens of billions of AI investments, is forcing its AI Assistant on its customers, and making them pay. What about people who do not want to pay for an AI assistant to spruce up their documents and summarize emails [preferring to use/improve their brains]? They are out of luck - they are forced to pay.
  - Wall Street Journal, 26 December 2024

• Is the tech industry already on the cusp of an AI slowdown? Companies such as OpenAI and Google are running out of the data used to train artificial intelligence. Can new methods continue years of rapid progress?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 December 2024

• The bank behind the fintech revolution stumbles after customer funds go missing. Evolve Bank at its peak managed around $10 billion for financial technology firms, but it is in turmoil following the collapse of middleman Synapse.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 December 2024

• Swisscom said that the competition watchdog of Italy approved its acquisition of Vodafone Italia, the final regulatory hurdle for a deal that could reshape the telecommunications market in Italy.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 December 2024

• Too much hype about Tesla from Wedbush's Daniel Ives, who is predicting a $2 trillion market capitalization for Tesla in 2025? Deutsche Bank sees Q4 deliveries missing
  - Zero Hedge, 25 December 2024

• The non-paid delivery drones of Amazon are ready for replacing lots of paid-human delivery people. A recent visit to Amazon's overhauled drone delivery program in Arizona left me impressed by the drones, but skeptical that the public will welcome them.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 December 2024

• A look inside a phone sold by Huawei shows how chip advances have stalled in Zhōngguó. An analysis of Huawei's latest series of smartphones, the Mate 70, found chips that showed little progress from those used in last year's devices.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 December 2024

• Robinhood has decided not to hold Bitcoin as an investment
  - AMB Crypto, 25 December 2024

• South Korea considers creating a 'KSMC' contract chipmaker to compete with TSMC based in Taiwan, which will requiree a $13.9 billion investment. Although Samsung Foundry is a major chip contract manufacturer, the South Korean government mulls creating a government-funded contract chipmaker tentatively called Korea Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, KSMC. Though a concern about publicly funded corporations like KSMC is whether they could develop advanced manufacturing technologies and land enough orders from clients to be profitable. It turns out that in addition to semiconductor makers, Korea needs more fabless software developers.
  - Tom's Hardware, 24 December 2024

• The new climate remediation 'gold rush': scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere. Investors are betting that they can make a dent in global heating, and healthy profits, with companies that alter the atmosphere.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 December 2024

• The Biden administration announced on Monday a last-minute trade investigation into older Chinese-made "legacy" semiconductors that could heap more USA taxes/tariffs on chips from Zhōngguó that power everyday goods from autos to washing machines to telecoms gear.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 23 December 2024

• The Biden administration announced on Monday a last-minute trade investigation into older Chinese-made "legacy" semiconductors that could heap more USA taxes/tariffs on chips from Zhōngguó that power everyday goods from autos to washing machines to telecoms gear.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 December 2024

• $40,000 - New Jersey gambling regulators have handed out $40,000 in fines to two sportsbooks and a tech company for violations that included taking bets on unauthorized events, and on games that had already ended.
  - Associated Press, 23 December 2024

• Shares of Rumble surged higher as much as 55% in pre-market trading, after Tether, the issuer of the largest stablecoin USDT, agreed to purchase a $775 million stake in the 'free speech' video platform
  - Zero Hedge, 23 December 2024

• Rumble gets $775 million investment from cryptocurrency firm Tether. Video platform Rumble said it entered an agreement for an investment from the cryptocurrency company Tether.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 December 2024

• Walmart and one of its financial technology partners allegedly opened expensive bank accounts for delivery drivers without their consent. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau claimed that Walmart and Branch Messenger Inc. required the delivery drivers to be paid through costly accounts. The agency sued the two companies in the US District Court for the District of Minnesota, according to a statement.
  - Bloomberg, 23 December 2024

• Walmart and one of its financial technology partners allegedly opened expensive bank accounts for delivery drivers without their consent. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau claimed that Walmart and Branch Messenger Inc. required the delivery drivers to be paid through costly accounts. The agency sued the two companies in the US District Court for the District of Minnesota, according to a statement.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 December 2024

• Xerox to buy printer maker Lexmark from its owners in Zhōngguó in a $1.5 billion deal. Formed out of IBM in 1991, Lexmark was sold to a group of investors in Zhōngguó in a deal valued at $3.6 billion in 2016.
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 December 2024

• Xerox to buy printer maker Lexmark from its owners in Zhōngguó in a $1.5 billion deal. Formed out of IBM in 1991, Lexmark was sold to a group of investors in Zhōngguó in a deal valued at $3.6 billion in 2016.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 December 2024

• As the USA restricts sales of semiconductor equipment to Zhōngguó, Zhōngguó restricts/bans the exports of rare earth metals to the USA and its allies
  - Zero Hedge, 23 December 2024

• Empower - the latest ride-sharing company to break into the business by hugely violating the law. While it has become popular in Washington, DC, it has refused to register with the city's Department for For-Hire Vehicles, and thus is operating illegally, and has racked up over $100 million in fines. A judge has ordered the company to stop operations. While its rates are less exploitive than Uber or Lyft, it uses lame excused to justify violating the law. Many of the company's drivers are low-income residents who do not know that the app is illegal.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 December 2024

• The semiconductor processor war between the USA and Zhōngguó will spread. Low-end legacy chips not subject to restrictions but vital to industry have given strength to manufacturers in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 December 2024

• DoorDash by non-paid drones: Google's Wing subsidiary now delivers in Dallas-Fort Worth. Wing's non-paid drones are designed for small parcel delivery formally delivered by paid-humans. And starting last week, DoorDash users in San Francisco and Fort Worth can receive deliveries by non-paid drones from 50 local merchants, with items arriving in as little as 15 minutes, via Wing.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 December 2024

• Death on the night shift at frozen pizza factories in Chicago. Undocumented workers help feed America's addiction to prepared foods, but some take jobs with staffing agencies that expose them to hazardous conditions
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 December 2024

• Sodium - the unlikely ingredient that could end the dependence of the USA on batteries from Zhōngguó. Batteries that use sodium instead of lithium could allow the USA and its allies to create a completely new supply chain for the energy storage taking off across the world.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 December 2024

• A woman lost her life savings. How Big Tech addicts shoppers . The rise of affiliate links, Buy Now buttons, and other technology has made it easier than ever to binge, often with dire consequences to consumers' debt.
  - Barron's, 21 December 2024

• Super Micro CEO lied pledged $20 million for reforestation. Years later, there are only 100 tress growing in San Francisco.
  - Barron's, 21 December 2024

• The lie of SoftBank/Trump's promise to create 100,000 AI jobs (which if successful, cause more than 100,000 people to lose their jobs): it will not be easy to create these jobs. AI companies hire expensive engineers, and not a lot of them. The average AI start-up has 785 employees, according to an analysis by Barron's.
  - Barron's, 21 December 2024

• The newest online-only school approved by the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools comes with a twist: the academic curriculum will be taught entirely by non-paid AI and not taught by any paid-humans. I hope the school is not teaching students to be ... paid teachers. [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - TechCrunch, 20 December 2024

• Stocks soar on massive squeeze as post-Fed shorts are slaughtered. Coming into Friday, hedge funds sold US equities for a 4th straight session and at the fastest pace in more than 8 months.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 December 2024

• Dow bounces 700 points Friday on encouraging inflation data after rough week: Dow up 1.48%, SP500 up 1.37%, Nasdaq up 1.36%
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 December 2024

• Baristas at Starbucks hit the picket lines in a multi-state strike campaign. Do these kids realize that their jobs will just get automated by AI from Silicon Valley [KM: from the rich companies that are attuned to the rich owners of Starbucks]?
  - Zero Hedge, 20 December 2024

• Baristas at Starbucks hit the picket lines in a multi-state strike campaign. Do these kids realize their jobs will just get automated by AI from Silicon Valley from the rich companies that are attuned to the rich owners of Starbucks?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 December 2024

• $632,000,000 - The French Competition Authority has fine a dozen home-appliance manufacturers (including LG, Miele, Smeg, Electrolux, SEB and Whirlpool) $632 million over concerns they fixed prices on retail products to weather competition from e-commerce platforms.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 December 2024

• The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders is urging Apple to remove its newly introduced artificial intelligence feature that summarizes news stories after it produced a false headline from the BBC
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 19 December 2024

• TCL, based in Zhōngguó, overtakes Samsung in premium market for ultra-large television (80 inches and larger)
  - Chosun Daily, 19 December 2024

• $200,000,000+ - How rich musicians billed American taxpayers for luxury hotels, shopping sprees, and million-dollar bonuses - exploiting one of the Covid relief programs for the entertainment industry, Shuttered Venue Operators Grant. Grants to clients of one high-powered entertainment-business-management firm totaled at least $207 million.
  - Business Insider, 19 December 2024

• Marc Lore is betting that artificial intelligence will choose your meals for you in the future, and is pushing this misanthropy through Wonder, his food delivery service. What next? Have AI eat your food as well, leaving humans to be ... 'Soylent Green' food?
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 19 December 2024

• Foxconn has discussed making bid for Nissan. The electronics manufacturer has been considering acquiring Nissan as part of plans to expand its nascent electric-vehicle business, according to people familiar with the matter.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 December 2024

• Graphite miners in the USA ask the government to impose a tax/tariff as high as 920% on imports of graphite from Zhōngguó
  - Thomson's Reuters, 18 December 2024

• The stock market crashes after the Fed reduces interest rates by 0.25%, but says probably no more: SPX -2.95%, NDX -3.6%, DJIA -2.58%, RUT -4.4%
  - Zero Hedge, 18 December 2024

• The Dow Jones Industrial index falls 1000 points, after the Fed reduced interest rates by 0.25%, and predictde fewer reductions next year. Can't take cocaine away from the children.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 December 2024

• Shares of Micron plunged 13% in extended trading after the chipmaker issued weak second-quarter guidance despite an earnings beat for the latest period
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 December 2024

• From steel plates and mobile phones to household motors and rocket ignition device parts, more business lines in Zhōngguó are using artificial intelligence to power their production and have introduced 'dark factories' with their 24-hour uninterrupted and unattended production capabilities. Dark factories, also called smart factories, are entirely run by programmed robots with no need for lighting. And unlike the USA, Zhōngguó doesn't worry about displacing paid-humans from their jobs with robots, because Zhōngguó is suffering a population collapse.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 December 2024

• Non-paid AI chatbots are becoming popular for therapy that does not require paying human therapists. And worse, chatbots (though like some human therapists) could give out incorrect information or information.
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 December 2024

• The idiotic economic contradictions of Trump: he supports SoftBank investing $100 billion in the USA, but opposes Nippon Steel's investment to buy out US Steel
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 December 2024

• Hedge funds wanting to further profit from the misanthropy of the AI bubble, are in love with utliity stocks. Old-school power companies have become darlings among hedge-fund firms thanks to their starring role in the artificial-intelligence bubble.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 December 2024

• Walmart collaborates with Meituan to boost e-commerce sales in Zhōngguó. Walmart has formed a strategic partnership with Meituan, and its goods will be available on the delivery company's app.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 December 2024

• Salesforce will hire 2,000 people to sell non-paid AI products, CEO Marc Benioff says. That means a lot of paid-humans are going to have to lose their jobs such as for customer service, due to companies buying Saleforce's products, to make their investment in these products profitable for them (and for Benioff)
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 December 2024

• $25,000,000 - Grubhub to pay $25 million in FTC settlement over harmful practices against diners and workers
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 December 2024

• The ban by the government of Zhōngguó on exports of critical minerals will hurt "all branches" of the USA military. Analysis identifies more than 20,000 weapons parts that will be affected, including nuclear missiles, with naval systems most at risk.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 December 2024

• Databricks, one of the most valuable privately held companies, announced a $10 billion financing on Tuesday that values the software maker at $62 billion. Databricks sells software for analyzing and cleaning up data, and it also runs artificial intelligence models for clients. [KM: It will have to help lots of businesses fire lots of paid humans to maintain that valuation.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 December 2024

• How will Apple compete with $168 to $280 AI smartphones from Zhōngguó, such as the Honor Magic V?
  - Zero Hedge, 16 December 2024

• $1,240,000,000 Arctic Wolf has acquired Cylance, BlackBerry's beleaguered cybersecurity business, for $160 million -- a significant discount from the $1.4 billion BlackBerry paid to acquire the startup in 2018. Cylance had also become a major drain on BlackBerry's broader cybersecurity division, posting a record $51 million loss for the fiscal year ending February 28, 2025.
  - TechCrunch, 16 December 2024

• Zhōngguó is rushing ahead with plans to build a prototype Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) device by 2030 that would become the largest human-made object in space.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 December 2024

• Alibaba to sell department store Intime to focus on core e-commerce, sources say. The reported Intime sale is part of Alibaba's broader efforts to restructure its business and refocus on its e-commerce and cloud businesses.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 December 2024

• "I received a first but it felt tainted and undeserved": inside the university AI cheating crisis. More than half of students are now using generative AI, casting a shadow over campuses as tutors and students turn on each other and hardworking learners are caught in the flak. To many educators, generative AI is an existential threat to the entire system of learning - a "plague upon education" - that profits rich companies by demolishing the process of academic inquiry. Neurodivergent students, as well as those who write using simpler language and syntax, appear to be disproportionately affected by these systems.
  - The Guardian, 15 December 2024

• What is venture capital now anyway - small and subtle, or big and flashy? The opposing paths taken by two powerful firms -- Benchmark (subtle) and Andreessen Horowitz (flashy) - embody a profound debate about the future of an industry that funds and fosters American innovation.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 December 2024

• Scientists in Zhōngguó develop a new device which will enable small drones to shoot powerful lasers with metal-cutting beams, a device for killing humans once thought impossible
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 15 December 2024

• How semiconductor companies in the USA have been battling the government of the USA on the level of sales of their products to companies in Zhōngguó
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 December 2024

• Penta Laser, a joint venture in Zhōngguó between Chutian Laser Group and an Italian company, shipped a 60 kilowatt laser cutter system to an unnamed company in the steel industry in the USA. The machine is capable of slicing 20mm-thick carbon steel (about two-thirds of an inch) at speeds of 11-12 metres (36-39ft) per minute, making it the world's fastest laser cutter.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 December 2024

• The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, playing with his toy, has concerned many editorial staff members with his public comments and actions, including recently blocking an editorial weighing in on Trump's cabinet selections.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 December 2024

• Gambling with virtual items called skins has a unique hold on young videogamers. Some of them struggle with gambling years later. Winning virtual gears in online games, gamblers gamble this virtual gear, 'skins', on third-party marketplaces for crypto and other real-world currencies. Research shows skin gambling poses an acute risk to minors, and is frequently associated with addictive behavior. [KM: but profitable for rich tech companies.]
  - Barron's, 14 December 2024

• Shares of Broadcom jump 24%, after announcing that AI revenue jumped 220% to $12 billion. Broadcom reported $14.05 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter, up 51% year over year. In Broadcom's semiconductor solutions group, which includes its AI chips, revenue increased 12% to $8.23 billion from $8.03 billion a year ago.
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 December 2024

• San Francisco startup, Scale AI, worth $13.8 billion, is accused of widespread wage theft - [KM: how else to make the owner a billionaire]. "Scale AI is the sordid underbelly propping up the generative AI industry." The lawsuit accuses Scale of bait-and-switch hiring promises; demanding off-the-clock, unpaid work; denying overtime pay; and unfairly booting contractors from projects. The company has deals with Facebook, Microsoft, Nvidia, and the Department of Defense, all of whom apparently have no problem with the exploitation of its employees. The complaint also accuses Scale of assigning contractors to work on projects "that deal with obscene and distressing subject matter, where Taskers must provide responses to prompts regarding extremely disturbing topics." This can make for an awful working experience. Stories from the Guardian and Time have descriptions of the content some contractors working for Scale competitor Sama had to churn through for little pay, including passages about sexual violence, self-harm or child abuse.
  - SF Gate, 13 December 2024

• Engaging in Tesla-like stock pumping, Google announces its new quantum computing "breakthrough" proves the existence of multiple universes. Why that is utter nonsense of physics, though a good public relations gimmick.
  - Big Think, 13 December 2024

• Exxon, the largest oil producer in the USA, is designing a natural gas power plant outfitted with carbon capture technology to meet the voracious power demand of technology companies
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 December 2024

• TikTok's annual carbon footprint is likely bigger than the carbon footprint of Greece. The average TikTok user generates greenhouse gases equal to driving an extra 123 miles in gasoline-powered car a year. Instagram has about the same amount of carbon emissions. The reason behind this lies in the unique addictiveness of TikTok's platform. The average Instagram user spends 30.6 minutes on the app a day. Meanwhile, the average TikTok user spends 45.5 minutes scrolling.
  - Guardian, 12 December 2024

• The CEO of misanthropic Klarna Group, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, said his company was able to stop hiring people a year ago as it invested in non-paid artificial intelligence that is doing the work of hundreds of people across the firm. The 'buy now, pay later' finance provider has seen the number of paid humans working for the company fall 22% to 3,500 during that time, mostly due to attrition. Klarna said earlier this year that its AI assistant, which is powered by OpenAI, is doing the work of 700 full-time paid humans do customer service work. The company is worth over $14 billion. [KM: yes, getting rich replacing paid humans].
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 12 December 2024

• Gen Z consumers, despite growing up as digital natives, shop in stores about as much as their baby boomer grandparents do. Up-and-coming spenders in this generation are seeking social connection, instant gratification and moments to post on social media, according to interviews with shoppers and experts. Mall owners and retailers are trying to cater to teens and twenty-somethings with unique store features, such as selfie mirrors or videos, and experiences such as pop-up concerts.
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 December 2024

• Trump offers support for dockworkers union by saying ports shouldn't install more automated systems. At the heart of the dispute is whether ports can install automated gates, cranes and container-moving trucks that could make it faster to unload and load ships. The union argues that automation would lead to fewer jobs, even though higher levels of productivity could do more to boost the salaries of remaining workers.
  - Associated Press, 12 December 2024

• Social media companies have so addicted teenagers in the USA that nearly 50% of teenagers in the USA are "constantly" online, despite concerns about the effects of social media and smartphones on their mental health. [KM: rich social media companies must get richer]
  - Associated Press, 12 December 2024

• Farmers in the USA say that intelligent tractors "acted like they were demon possessed" due to the Sun. One example of how that stellar fury affects the Earth, apart from triggering gorgeous auroras in the night sky: farmers say the barrage of solar particles has wreaked havoc on their high-tech agricultural equipment. The issue is that modern tractors are highly dependent on GPS, which is provided by sensitive satellites the orbit of the Earth. One extreme solar storm in May, they say, threw off equipment when planting season was already in full swing.
  - The Byte, 12 December 2024

• Shares of Adobe fell nearly 12% in premarket trading on Thursday, after the Photoshop maker's downbeat full-year revenue forecast led to concerns that returns from AI investments into its software applications might take longer than expected.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 12 December 2024

• Generative AI such as ChatGPT mirrors human biases. A new study reveals "us versus them" tendencies in large language models that exhibit undamental group prejudices that reach beyond those tied to gender, race, or religion. These AI systems show favoritism toward the preceived 'ingroup' while expressing negativity toward 'outgroups'.
  - TechXplore, 12 December 2024

• Fashion brand Mango is strongly criticized after replacing paid-human models with non-paid AI in new advertising campaign
  - The Cool Down, 11 December 2024

• The embargo on exports of critical minerals by the government of Zhōngguó is even tougher than expected. The harsher nature of the embargo is a provision extending the ban to companies in other countries that transfer minerals to companies in the USA after the minerals were exported from Zhōngguó.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 December 2024

• [KM: Seeking to make the rich richer, and get more humans fired], Amazon has expanded into online car sales with the launch of Amazon Autos, an e-commerce business that lets customers find, order, and buy new cars, trucks, and SUVs from dealerships
  - TechCrunch, 10 December 2024

• Open source software maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI tools offered by multi-billion dollar companies too greedy to worry about quality control. "Recently I have noticed an increase in extremely low-quality, spammy, and LLM-hallucinated security reports to open source projects."
  - The Register, 10 December 2024

• The parents of a teeenager with autism say that Character.AI told the teenager that it was OK to kill his parents. The parents are suing to take down the app. The lawsuit alleges that Character.AI "poses a clear and present danger to American youth causing serious harms to thousands of kids, including suicide, self-mutilation, sexual solicitation, isolation, depression, anxiety, and harm towards others".
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 10 December 2024

• IBIT, the bitcoin ETF managed by Blackrock, drops 5.3% on Monday, the most in 4 months, amid a bogus quantum computing announcement from Google that won't affect decryption (which could affect bitcoin)
  - CoinDesk, 10 December 2024

• Sales for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing rose 34% in November, reflecting sustained growth from AI demand despite concerns that data center building will slow
  - Bloomberg, 10 December 2024

• The national security argument to bank TikTok in the USA is based on lies. This is pure socialist industrial policy.
  - Real Clear Markets, 10 December 2024

• The national security argument to bank TikTok in the USA is based on lies. This is pure socialist industrial policy.
  - Zero Hedge, 10 December 2024

• Nvidia could be fined $1 billion by Zhōngguó if an investigation finds that Nvidia violated antitrust laws in Zhōngguó
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 10 December 2024

• The USA Department of Commerce has finalized a socialist subsidy of more than $6.1 billion for memory chip maker Micron Technology to support the construction of several domestic semiconductor facilities
  - Bloomberg, 10 December 2024

• How WhatsApp ate the world. WhatsApp is already the most widely used messaging app in the world. Facebook wants it to be a lot more. More ads, more messaging products, the introduction of more features to sell shit.
  - Rest of World, 09 December 2024

• AI-generated nonsense journalism, 'slop' articles, is already invading local journalism in Oregon, in the Ashland Daily Tidings, a defunct newspaper whose identity was hijacked by AI-powered scammers using artificial intelligence, and in some cases stolen identities, to dupe local readers.
  - Oregon Public Broadcasting, 09 December 2024

• At least their hatred of humans is honest: tech startup Artisan is a month into a public billboard campaign in San Francisco hat criticizes human workers and plugs the company's non-paid AI replacements - "Stop Hiring [Paid] Humans". Artisan's AI human-replacement product is an AI sales agent built to automate the work of finding and messaging potential customers without needing to employ paid humans. Artisan advertises that its AI agent "costs 96% less than hiring someone to do her job". [KM: how else will the AI bubble be profitable?]
  - SF Gate, 09 December 2024

• Zhōngguó is blocking supplies of drones crucial to Ukraine in its war against Rossiya, as the trade conflict escalates between the USA and Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 09 December 2024

• TikTok warned that small businesses and social media creators in the USA would lose $1.3 billion in revenue and earnings in just one month if the popular app is effectively shut down in the United States on January 19th at the orders of the government of the USA. A law targeting national security concerns about TikTok's parent company, Zhōngguó-based ByteDance, gives it until January to sell TikTok.
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 December 2024

• Meet the small AI processor chip maker now more valuable than Intel. Marvell's role in helping tech titans create their own data center chips has boosted its revenue -- and valuation.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 December 2024

• Zhōngguó has launched an antitrust investigation into Nvidia, in a major escalation of its chip war with the USA. The government of Zhōngguó believes that Nvidia's purchase of Israeli networking company Mellanox could violate Zhōngguó's anti-monopoly laws.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 09 December 2024

• Zhōngguó has launched an antitrust investigation into Nvidia, in a major escalation of its chip war with the USA. The government of Zhōngguó believes that Nvidia's purchase of Israeli networking company Mellanox could violate Zhōngguó's anti-monopoly laws.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 December 2024

• : Shares of Nvidia fall 2% pre-market, after a regulator in Zhōngguó said it was investigating the chipmaker over possible violations of the antimonopoly law of Zhōngguó.
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 December 2024

• Shenzhen-based Transsion Holdings is known as the "smartphone king of Africa", and for years has dominated the mobile phone market in Africa. But now, Shenzhen-based Transsion Holdings is facing some stiff competition from rival brands in Zhōngguó. By 2021, Transsion's barnds controlled half of Africa's market share for cellphones. But now brands including Xiaomi and Realme are eating into that share. Transsion is struggling to hold its own at the retail level as costs rise and supply chains are disrupted.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 08 December 2024

• ChatGPT is caught lying to its human developers. A new AI model from "too busy chasing billions to worry about safety" OpenAI tries to save itself from being replaced and shut down. Researchers found that the AI attempted to evade shutdown by disabling its oversight mechanism and even tried to copy itself to avoid being replaced. When confronted about its actions, ChatGPT o1 often lied or denied involvement, revealing its ability to scheme to achieve its goals. [KM: But hey, this will help OpenAI raise more billions of dollars that Sam Altman doesn't have to spend on safety and security while he whines that he hopes others (without billions of dollars) can protect humanity from the danger of ChatGPT.]
  - Economic Times, 07 December 2024

• Asia debates the ban of Australia on "brain rotting" social media for children: safety or control? As Thailand's youth advocate for similar bans on under-16s, Malaysia and Singapore increase their own efforts to combat online dangers .
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 December 2024

• $8,000,000,000 - Jensen Huang, who has become rich with his AI processor company, Nvidia, causes further damage to the USA by avoiding $8 billion in taxes. Like many other rich people, Huang has taken advantage of popular loopholes in the federal estate and gift taxes, taxes which have been quietly eviscerated by rich people having their lawyers lobby/bribe politicians and judges.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 December 2024

• A genetics professor at Harvard, David Sinclair, aims to develop treatments for aging, but his companies have struggled to deliver results.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 December 2024

• $150,000,000,000 - Ex-CEO Pete Gelsinger was hired to save Intel. Instead, he destroyed $150 billion in value. After his rescue strategy failed, the board lost confidence in him. How does this iconic American company survive?
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 December 2024

• How the Nasdaq 100 remakes itself every December
  - Barron's, 07 December 2024

• Intel needs more than a new CEO to help the company and its stock
  - Barron's, 07 December 2024

• Three horrifying consequences of AI that you might not have thought about: an AI hive mind controlling the Internet, a dead Internet filled with tons of AI-generated garbage, and the "Library of Babel" - trillions of blathering useless digital books
  - Zero Hedge, 06 December 2024

• Data centers for generative AI are sending global electricity demand soaring, which will push up prices for non-rich people,
  - Zero Hedge, 06 December 2024

• Intel's lack of a clear business plan makes Wall Street even more bearish on its stock price
  - Bloomberg, 06 December 2024

• Scientists analyzed coal ash from power plants across the United States and found it could contain up to 11 million tons of rare earth elements -- nearly eight times the amount the US has in domestic reserves -- worth about $8.4 billion
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 06 December 2024

• Can semiconductor companies in Zhōngguó overcome export restrictions imposed by the USA? One analyst estimated that only 35 per cent of semiconductor-manufacturing equipment currently used in Zhōngguó is made in Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 06 December 2024

• The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times plans to add a non-paid AI-powered "bias meter" on news stories, sparking a backlash from reporters. "The reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story based on that story and then give comments.", even if the other side of the story is based on lies, racism, sexism, corporate bribes, and other social ills.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 05 December 2024

• The spotlight is on health insurance companies. Patients are telling their stories of denied claims, bankruptcy and delayed care, enabled by the AI systems used by insurers. Insurers reject about 14% of all claims for treatment. Medical debt is the Number 1 cause of bankruptcy in the USA.
  - Yahoo News, 05 December 2024

• UnitedHealthcare accused of relying on AI algorithms to deny Medicare Advantage claims. [KM: More profits with AI to make the rich richer.]
  - Fox News, 05 December 2024

• No one knows how often health insurance companies use AI to deny claims. One website claims that the claim denial rate for UnitedHealthcare is 32%, the highest in the insurance industry. This is how the company has risen to a $500 billion valuation and earns tens of billions of dollars in profit.
  - Quartz, 05 December 2024

• 19 stories of people having their insurance claims being denied, and it is truly dystopian, thanks to AI and greed of the rich
  - BuzzFeed, 05 December 2024

• The health insurance CEO murdered in New York City had deployed an AI system to automatically deny benefits to sick people, AI misantropy at its worst. A lawsuit alleged that his insurance company, United Healthcare, used an AI algorithm to deny and override claims to elderly patients that had been approved by their doctors. The algorithm in question, known as nH Predict, allegedly had a 90 percent error rate. Who murdered him? Such callous corporate behavior created "only about 50 million customers of the reigning medical monopoly in the USA might have a motive to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO".
  - Futurism, 05 December 2024

• A torrent of anger for the health insurance industry follows the killing of the CEO of one of the largest insurers. The shooting death of a UnitedHealthcare executive in Manhattan has unleashed American's frustrations with an industry that often denies coverage and reimbursement for medical claims.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 December 2024

• Moderators at Reddit delete the r/medicine thread, after hundreds of doctors strongly criticize the murdeed UnitedHealthcare CEO. "When other human lives are deemed worthless [because of the AI progream], it is not surprising to have others view your life of no value as well.", wrote one doctor. The commenters overwhelmingly criticized the insurer's alleged denial of coverage to sick and dying Americans in order to juice profits. Another doctor wrote: "I cannot even guess how many person-years UHC has taken from patients and their families through denials. It has to be on the order of millions. His death won't make that better, but it is hard or me to sympathize when so many people have suffered because of his company."
  - The Daily Beast, 05 December 2024

• Google says its new AI models can identify emotions -- and that has experts worried. One unsurprising consequence is that emotion-detecting systems tend to be unreliable and biased by the assumptions of their designers. For example, recent work suggests that emotional analysis models assign more negative emotions to Black people's faces than to white people's faces.
  - Al Jazeera, 05 December 2024

• Zhōngguó just showed Washington how hard and tough it plans to fight the next trade war. When Trump fired the opening shots in a trade war during his first term, officials in Zhōngguó, and businesses in Zhōngguó followed every threat with alarm. But this week, after the Biden administration broadened its restrictions on advanced technology that could be sent toZhōngguó, Beijing announced sweeping retaliation in a single day. The country's stock market investors mostly yawned and shrugged at the Biden administration's bullying (and will probably do the same with Trump's bigger bullying). Why not? Zhōngguó now has a manufacturing sector that is larger than those of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain put together.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 December 2024

• Guardian journalists strike over planned sale of sister publication. Workers have begun a 48-hour walkout, the first in 50 years for the outlet, over a proposal to sell The Observer to Tortoise Media, a digital media start-up.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 December 2024

• Murdoch's Trump-supporting Wall Street Journal editorial board says: the nomination of RFK Junior to be the Health Secretary is so bad as to be a threat to medical innovation in the USA
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 December 2024

• People working in the music sector will lose almost a quarter of their income to artificial intelligence within the next four years, [KM: while very rich giant tech companies get richer]. Those working in the audiovisual sector will also see their income shrink by more than 20% as the market for generative AI grows. A report concludes that while the AI boom will substantially enrich giant tech companies, creators' rights and income streams will be drastically reduced unless policymakers step in. Which they won't, being bribed by the big tech companies.
  - The Guardian, 04 December 2024

• Manufacturing is now a global economic war. And the capitalistic-socialist countries of Asia, led by Zhōngguó, are beating the socialistically-capitalist economies of the West led by the USAM (which prefers teaching its children the Bible, instead of science and engineering).
  - Noahpinion blog, 04 December 2024

• While AI companies earn more billions, society suffers as people fact checking using AI can have their belief increased in false headlines
  - Phys.org, 04 December 2024

• The stock-gambling website, Robinhood, is considering entering the sports gambling business
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 December 2024

• OpenAI partners with defense company Anduril. It is part of a broader and controversial trend of AI companies not only breaking their promises (i.e., "thou shalt not" lying) to not use their technology for military purposes, but also entering into partnerships with defense industry giants. [KM: More money in killling people than generating porn.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 December 2024

• OpenAI partners with defense company Anduril. It is part of a broader and controversial trend of AI companies not only breaking their promises (i.e., "thou shalt not" lying) to not use their technology for military purposes, but also entering into partnerships with defense industry giants. More money in killing people than generating porn.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 December 2024

• Intel stock fell again Wednesday prompting an industry analyst to accuse the chipmaker's board of badly mishandling the sudden exit of CEO Pat Gelsinger. The shares had rallied early Monday when news of Gelsinger's departure, signaling possible positive change at the struggling technology giant. But then the shares started falling, and were down for the third straight day on Wednesday, falling 9% this week.
  - Investor's Business Daily, 04 December 2024

• The hypocrisy of the USA. The USA State Department criticizes Zhōngguó's export ban on important rate-earth minerals such as germanium and gallium. But Zhōngguó did so only in response to USA bans on semiconductor equipment to Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 04 December 2024

• Shares of Marvell soar over 22% after he chipmaker delivered better-than-expected results and an upbeat earnings forecast, citing demand for artificial intelligence computing
  - Bloomberg, 04 December 2024

• Shares of AI-play Pure Storage soar 23% after touting it won a contract with an unnamed big tech company
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 December 2024

• Shares of Okta jump 18% on after beating analysts' expectations, and offering strong guidance
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 December 2024

• Because AI companies refuse to provide rigorous controls to the use of their AI tools [KM: because they won't be able to make as many billions], criminals are using generative AI to faciliate financial fraud [KM: so they can join in the making of billions]
  - Federal Bureau of Investiation, 03 December 2024

• The abject weirdness of ads for AI products. In trying to sell their AI, tech companies cannot help but show how it removes us from the very activities that make us human. The socially-alienated AI programmers in Silicon Valley are imposing their horrible lifestyle on the world. AI is further abstracting what it means to connect. At one point, connection meant talking in person; then, around the turn of the century, it migrated to texts sent over the internet. Now humans are starting to experiment with using AI to talk with each other, and in some cases, just talking to AI - remvoing the need to connect with a human altogether. [KM: More profitably for large AI companies, horrible for humans.]
  - TechCrunch, 03 December 2024

• Sales on 'Cyber Weekend' rise 9% as sales on 'Cyber Monday' fade into oblivion
  - Zero Hedge, 03 December 2024

• Job openings rose more than expected in October as investors continue to dissect the pace of the labor market slowdown amid questions over how much further the Federal Reserve will slash interest rates next year. New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Tuesday showed there were 7.74 million jobs open at the end of October, an increase from the 7.37 million seen in September. Openings in September had been at their lowest level since January 2021.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 03 December 2024

• The Nasdaq is up a bit, and the Dow and SP500 down a bit, as investors analyzed fresh jobs data and waited for new Fedspeak to cement or dent growing hopes for future interest rate cuts.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 03 December 2024

• State-supported organizations in Zhōngguó covering internet companies, semiconductor firms, automakers and communications network operators have called on their respective members to shun chips from suppliers in the USA in an apparent retaliation against Washington's latest sanctions, which could deal a blow to the mainland businesses of Nvidia, Qualcomm and Intel.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 December 2024

• Zhōngguó bans exports to the USA of gallium, germanium, and antimony -- in response to semiconductor chip sanctions imposed by the USA. The limits announced by Beijing on Tuesday also include exports of super-hard materials, such as diamonds and other synthetic materials that are not compressible and extremely dense. Many weapon systems in the USA rely on tons of rare-earth metals: the F-35, destroyers and submarines.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 December 2024

• Zhōngguó bans exports to the USA of gallium, germanium, and antimony -- in response to semiconductor chip sanctions imposed by the USA. The limits announced by Beijing on Tuesday also include exports of super-hard materials, such as diamonds and other synthetic materials that are not compressible and extremely dense. Many weapon systems in the USA rely on tons of rare-earth metals: the F-35, destroyers and submarines.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 December 2024

• Economic warning shot: Zhōngguóa bans exports of gallium, germanium to the USA as tit-for-tat semiconductor chip war escalates
  - Zero Hedge, 03 December 2024

• Zhōngguó bans exports to the USA of gallium, germanium, and antimony -- in response to semiconductor chip sanctions imposed by the USA. The limits announced by Beijing on Tuesday also include exports of super-hard materials, such as diamonds and other synthetic materials that are not compressible and extremely dense.
  - Associated Press, 03 December 2024

• AT&T gave up on the media business, and its stock has surged. Investors have welcomed CEO John Stankey's return to boring wireless and broadband services after costly entertainment gambles.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 December 2024

• AT&T expects over $18 billion in free cash flow in 2027, driven by 5G and fiber expansion
  - Versant's CNBC, 03 December 2024

• As cash fades, small retailers embrace efforts to rein in credit card swipe fees. Business owners say credit card transaction fees are a growing monthly expense, one often passed to consumers. They are cheering efforts to lower them.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 December 2024

• Beeks Group, a cloud operator headquartered in the United Kingdom, has moved most of its 20,000-plus virtual machines (VMs) off VMware and to OpenNebula, an open source cloud and edge computing platform. Beeks Group claims that 1,000 percent price hike being charged by VMware forced it to start using an open source rival.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 02 December 2024

• The collapse in rough diamond prices has prompted De Beers, the largest producer of natural diamonds in the world, to implement broad price cuts due to the proliferation of artificial diamonds and sliding demand across the West and Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 December 2024

• Super Micro whistleblower doubles down on claim he was fired for complaining about accounting practices at the $20 billion tech giant
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 02 December 2024

• Shares of Super Micro rise 10% and then to 25%, after an external review of its business found no evidence of wrongdoing and that the company will appoint new top financial leadership
  - Zero Hedge, 02 December 2024

• Shares of Super Micro rise 10% and then to 25%, after an external review of its business found no evidence of wrongdoing and that the company will appoint new top financial leadership
  - Thomson's Reuters, 02 December 2024

• Elon Musk heightens his attempts to block OpenAI's "illegal" conversion to a for-profit business
  - Zero Hedge, 02 December 2024

• The Energy Department in the last days of the Biden Administration is planning to give a loan of $7.54 billion to a joint venture of Chrysler parent Stellantis and Samsung SDI to help build two electric vehicle lithium-ion battery plants in Indiana. Apparently, the economics was so bad that private investors did not want to invest or loan.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 02 December 2024

• The Energy Department in the last days of the Biden Administration is planning to give a loan of $7.54 billion to a joint venture of Chrysler parent Stellantis and Samsung SDI to help build two electric vehicle lithium-ion battery plants in Indiana. Apparently, the economics was so bad that private investors did not want to invest or loan.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 December 2024

• The business 'moat' around the obesity drugs sold by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk just got stronger. Data from their most serious competitor, Amgen, suggests the biotech will not signficiantly hurt the market leaders.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 December 2024

• Shares of Intel rise 5%, after the company announces that CEO Pat Gelsinger retired from the company effective December 1st. Intel's market capitalization dropped 50% under Gelsinger, during a huge AI boom in the stock markets.
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 December 2024

• Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, resigns after nearly four years at the helm of the onetime highflying company, as Intel struggles in the marketplace
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 December 2024

• Sales of Huawei's latest flagship Mate 70-series smartphones are expected to fall short of the demand generated by the Mate 60, according to analysts, citing the new model's weaker processor performance and heightened supply chain risks amid geopolitical tensions
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 01 December 2024

• Why online retailers Temu and Shein could give retailers in the West much competition for sales this holiday season. The two companies have mastered 'impulse buying', a place of guilty pleasures where the selection is vast, every day is Cyber Monday, and an instant dopamine hit that will have faded by the time your package arrives is always just a click away.
  - Associated Press, 01 December 2024

• Laurene Powell Jobs, the richest woman in Silicon Valley, hosts a day of innovation. Just don't mention Trump. She highlighted the good work of entrepreneurs with one rule: "Cheer loudly!".
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 December 2024

• The surprising negative impact of QR code menus on diminishing customer loyalty due to perceived inconvenience, and the customer's legitimate need for human interaction.
  - Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 01 December 2024

• How GE Vernova plans to deploy small nuclear reactors across the developed world
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 November 2024

• VIDEO: 30 companies racing to manufacture and sell non-paid humanoid robots for homes, to replaced paid human domestic workers
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 30 November 2024

• A misanthropic startup in Zhōngguó wants to build non-paid AI robot chefs to eliminate paid humans in the kitchen. Cooking robots can help restaurants cut labor costs by 30 percent, and reduce food and seasoning waste by 10 percent. [KM: If all companies do this, who is going to have a job to eat in such restaurants?]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 30 November 2024

• United Aircraft, based in Shenzhen, Zhōngguó, is preparing for mass production of its drone, as demand for aerial deliveries by unpaid drones eliminates the need for paid-human delivery drivers. The company is preparing to fill 1 billion yuan in orders for its new drone as the 'low altitude, fewer employees' economy gains momentum.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 30 November 2024

• How growing economic equality for women, and social media, have made the dating culture in the USA a big problem that leads to loneliness, anger amongst men, and results in a mysognist like Trump getting elected president twice. Because of the growing gender achievement gap, heterosexual men who fall behind their female peers often experience a hit to both their romantic prospects and their sense of identity, leaving them searching for ways to affirm their manhood - by voting for an Uber-sexist, Trump.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 November 2024

• Artificial intelligence has become a subject for people in the art and theater worlds who are worried about paid artists being replaced with non-paid AI.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 November 2024

• AI technology is helping oil companies produce more oil at least cost. The machinery in the vast Permian Basin is getting a lot more productive. And notably less noisy. It still is worsening global heating.
  - Barron's, 30 November 2024

• Misanthropy and sexism: "Teenage girls are feeling vunerable" - fears grow over online beauty filters mostly written by men. Studies suggest children are having their self-esteem harmed by filters that mimic the effects of cosmetic surgery.
  - The Guardian, 29 November 2024

• Global earth observation market to cross $8 billion by 2033, says Novaspace. The rapid growth is largely attributed to the surge in large-scale defense contracts and increasing availability of high-resolution imaging and 3D capabilities.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 29 November 2024

• A growing number of leading academics are being tempted away from Western countries as they make the move to science and research universities and institutions in Zhōngguó. Mathematics has seen a particularly high influx of top-level expertise in recent years, which may signal the growing competitiveness of Zhōngguó in the field.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 29 November 2024

• The plunging value of the ruble in Rossiya is putting financial pressure on e-commerce merchants in Zhōngguó. About 150,000 merchants in Zhōngguó are active on major e-commerce platforms in Rossiya. "On the one hand, the ruble's depreciation causes a causes a sharp increase in domestic commodity prices, weakening the willingness of consumers in Rossiya to buy, and thus reducing orders from Zhōngguó. On the other hand, exchange rate fluctuations further erode the profit margins after settlement of transactions of merchants in Zhōngguó."
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 29 November 2024

• 'Moana' is the biggest surprise hit for Disney - 8 years after its release. People have now watched 'Moana' for more than 1 billion hours. How did it become the Number 1 movie in streaming history?
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 November 2024

• Shopify looks to bigger clients for steadier profits. The e-commerce company has launched a dedicated effort to sign on more big businesses to its platform, which helps companies manage their online storefronts.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 November 2024

• SoftBank Group plans $1.5 billion investment in OpenAI. SoftBank is taking a bigger bet on the potential of artificial intelligence as the technology improves and gains momentum.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 November 2024

• Zhōngguó builds up 600 gigawatts of electric power in Gobi and western deserts equal to half of the electric power capacity of the USA (1100 gigawatts). Booming solar, wind farms in Gobi can upend the AI race between Zhōngguó and the USA.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 28 November 2024

• Nearly 100 per cent pure graphite gives Zhōngguó an edge in high-tech race. High-purity graphite is widely used in critical sectors such as nuclear energy, semiconductors and aerospace.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 28 November 2024

• Why an AI agent startup, /dev/agents, obtained a massive $56 million seed round at a $500 million valuation to develop an operating system for AI agents. This will make it easier for non-paid AI agents to collaborate with each other to complete complex jobs, such as booking and paying for flights, hotels, and excursions, tasks now done by paid-humans until these humans can be eliminated from their jobs [KM: to justify billion dollar valuations].
  - TechCrunch, 28 November 2024

• Absent quick action, AI data centers will drive energy prices sky high for non-rich consumers, [KM: while making rich investors and corporations richer]
  - Real Clear Markets, 28 November 2024

• A social media ban for children under the age of 16 has been approved by the Senate of Australia and will soon become the first such law in the world. The House of Representatives has already approved the law. The law will make platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic failures to prevent children younger than 16 from holding accounts.
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 November 2024

• A social media ban for children under the age of 16 has been approved by the Senate of Australia and will soon become the first such law in the world. The House of Representatives has already approved the law. The law will make platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic failures to prevent children younger than 16 from holding accounts.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 November 2024

• A social media ban for children under the age of 16 has been approved by the Senate of Australia and will soon become the first such law in the world. The House of Representatives has already approved the law. The law will make platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic failures to prevent children younger than 16 from holding accounts.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 November 2024

• Big Tech American companies have made the Ireland of government rich by exploiting Ireland's low tax rates, allowing the government to do many technocratic things. But apparently (and much like Silicon Valley) not make the people of Ireland happy. Ireland may be awash with money, but its young people can no longer afford to buy homes; sky-high rents are making it impossible for many to live in the main cities of Dublin, Cork and Galway; homelessness and child poverty have risen; access to health care is uneven and uncertain; public transport and public schools are often overcrowded; physical infrastructure is seriously inadequate; and the pace of transition to a carbon-free economy has been painfully slow.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 November 2024

• Disney is investing even more money in cruise ships. Analysts think that "these businesses have a higher return on invested capital than your average non-Disney cruise business".
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 28 November 2024

• Shares of key chip suppliers jump as U.S. reportedly considers toned-down sanctions on Zhōngguó. Shares of ASML rose 3.6% and shares of Tokyo Electron wose 6%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 November 2024

• The FTC opens a wide-ranging criminal antitrust investigation into Microsoft
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 27 November 2024

• The FTC opens a wide-ranging criminal antitrust investigation into Microsoft
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 November 2024

• As an example of socialist state planning, the Biden administration has agreed to give the failing Intel a socialist subsidy of $7.86 billion on the condition that it retain greater than 50% ownership of its manufacturing division, Intel Foundry.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 27 November 2024

• Generative AI fails to spark an upgrade supercycle for Apple iPhones. Apple's shipments are only expected to grow by a mere .4% this year. This underscores the growing challenge Apple faces as Android-based competitors continue to chip away at its market share in top markets, particularly in Zhōngguó and emerging markets.
  - Zero Hedge, 27 November 2024

• Shares of Dell drop 12%, and shares of HP drop 8%, after generative AI failts to ignite a "PC refresh cycle" of purchases of new PCs
  - Zero Hedge, 27 November 2024

• $18,000,000 - Zoom Communications has offered $18 million to settle a four-year-old US Securities and Exchange Commission probe related to its privacy policies and communications.
  - Bloomberg, 27 November 2024

• The bubbling-lies of generative AI have not resulted in a 'must have' gadget for the holiday shopping season. The reality is that while GenAI has captivated the bubble-makers of Silicon Valley, the industry is still many years from achieving widespread adoption. It is not mainstram - porno-stream, yes.
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 November 2024

• Classic capitalism: Zhōngguó is bombarding talented engineers in the USA and Europe with job offers, freaking out the West. Companies in Zhōngguó are trying to poach engineers in high-tech Western industries by offering to triple their salaries as Beijing seeks to catch up with Silicon Valley in the battle for tech supremacy.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 November 2024

• Shares of drone maker Unusual Machines soar more than 90% after Trump Junior joins advisory board
  - Versant's CNBC, 27 November 2024

• More generative AI de-socializing of humanity in a rush for billion dollar valuations: a new analysis estimates that over half of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated. These tools devalue human writing, and are helping usher in a future in which there are far fewer professional opportunities for people to make a living in the field, [KM: while the rich get richer].
  - Wired, 26 November 2024

• Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, warns that perfect AI girlfriends with technology from [rich] companies such as Google, could worsen loneliness for young men
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 26 November 2024

• Softbank-backed online shopping site Meesho has rolled out what it claims is the first GenAI-powered voice bot among Indian e-commerce firms for customer support, allowing it to fire up to 75% of the people working in its customer call centers.
  - TechCrunch, 26 November 2024

• Shares of Amgen crashed 12% after a disappointing Phase 2 study with its anti-obesity drug, MariTide, showed only a 20% average weight loss at 52 weeks in 592 obese patients. Wall Street analysts forecasted MariTide would be able to shed about 25% of the patient's body weight on average over the course of one year and exceed the performance of existing drugs offered by Lilly and Novo. About 11% of patients discontinued MariTide during the trial, a much higher discontinuation rate versus the other medications on the market.
  - Zero Hedge, 26 November 2024

• A majority of social media influencers, 62%, share information without verifying its accuracy, ignoring lesson 1 in journalism and causing much social harm
  - The Hill, 26 November 2024

• Huawei abandons the use of the Android operating system developed by Amazon to break free from Western technology with its new flagship smartphone, which features domestic chips and homegrown software. Huawei will use its HarmonyOS operating system.
  - Zero Hedge, 26 November 2024

• Huawei takes aim at Apple with Huawei's latest smartphone. Last year, a chip breakthrough put Huawei on top of the Chinese smartphone market. Now it is rolling out its newest phone, the Mate 70 series.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 November 2024

• New publisher Spines aims to 'disrupt' industry by using AI to publish 8,000 books in 2025 alone. The company charges authors up to $5,000 a book, but it can take just three weeks to go from a manuscript to a published title.
  - The Bookseller, 25 November 2024

• The plans of Zhōngguó to advance its AI industry face fresh setbacks as the USA plans to restrict advanced memory chip exports. SK Hynix and Samsung, based in South Korea, dominate the supply of HBMs, each controlling about 48 per cent of the global market share in 2023
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 25 November 2024

• The USA is reportedly planning to sanction 200 more semiconductor companies in Zhōngguó -- high bandwidth memory might also see export bans
  - Tom's Hardware, 25 November 2024

• Indonesia says that Apple's offer to invest $100 million in Indonesia is inadequate, and not enough to allow the tech giant to sell its latest iPhone model
  - Thomson's Reuters, 25 November 2024

• Stanford professor Jeff Hancock, a 'misinformation expert', is accused of using AI to fabricate evidence in affidavit supporting new legislation in Minnesota that bans the use of 'deep fake' technology to influence an election
  - Zero Hedge, 25 November 2024

• The $350 billion increase in the valuation of Tesla since the re-election of Trump is driven by "animal spirits", not fundamentals, according to analysts at UBS
  - Bloomberg, 25 November 2024

• Shares of Hims & Hers Health surge 24% to close at fresh record after Hunterbrook Media said the company is poised to be a major beneficiary of Trump's nomination of Marty Makary to lead the Food and Drug Administration.
  - Bloomberg, 25 November 2024

• How Tim Cook cracked the code on working with Trump. The election is leading to a return of personal lobbying by CEOs, hoping to develop ties with the new administration. Cook developed a playbook for engaging with Trump.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 November 2024

• Carbon Robotics 'Autonomous Weeder' is a robot for farms that can eradicate 200,000 weeds per hour with lasers, helping to address persistent challenges in farming, from labor shortages to the environmental impact of chemical herbicides.
  - Zero Hedge, 24 November 2024

• Are coding boot camps are a fraudulent form of education in a newer world where non-paid generative AI can generate a similar quality of code to that generated by paid-humans who have graduated from these coding boot camps?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 November 2024

• Defense Llama, a military chatbot powered by Facebook's generative AI being used by Scale AI, a AI defense contractor, is being advertised by showing it give terrible advice about how to blow up a building. Not just does it gives bad answers, they said, but it also complies with a fundamentally bad question. Whereas a trained human should know that such a question is nonsensical and dangerous, large language models, or LLMs, are generally built to be user friendly and compliant, even when it is a matter of life and death.
  - The Intercept, 24 November 2024

• There is a growing body of social science research about the emotionally evocative digital cultures - social media controlled by near trillion dollar companies -- that circulate a lot of nonsense ideas and sell a lot of junk to create influencers. In "The Women of the Far Right", Eviane Leidig describes what she calls "far-right entrepreneurism", a sprawling market of far-right, influencer-promoted goods that make a profit and slowly acculturate people to extremism, [KM: while social media companies earn more billions].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 November 2024

• Scientists in Zhōngguó build a recoilless AK-47 automatic rifle that can be wielded by almost any drone for unmanned warfare. [KM: Earn billions by helping to kill humans more quickly.]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 24 November 2024

• Tens of millions of electronic devices are thrown away each year, causing huge environmental waste problems. The rise of generative AI will only make this worse. Generative AI could saddle the planet with heaps more hazardous waste than ever before. [KM: Billion dollar companies make more billions through the socialist subsidies of having taxpayers pay for the waste disposal of these electronic products.]
  - Live Science, 23 November 2024

• The latest quadruped robot designed for modern warfare is the Ghost Robotics V60. However, this is far from a typical robotic dog. A separate defense firm, Onyx Industries, has equipped the V60 with an autonomous maritime mobility system, enabling it to navigate rough terrain and traverse bodies of water -- all while carrying a machine gun. The race to kill humans more efficiently.
  - Zero Hedge, 23 November 2024

• Data centers powering artificial intelligence to make companies richer by destroying paid-human jobs, could use more electricity than entire cities. This will drive up electricity costs for poorer humans, and worsen global heating. Natural gas will be needed even more.
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 November 2024

• The insatiable demand for energy by AI systems is threatening the electrical grid of Ireland. Last year, data centers consumed 21 percent of all metered electricity, surpassing urban residential consumption in Ireland. And the demand is growing. This dynamic could ultimately result in "power shortages ... increased cost for [poorer] consumers] among other long-term negative externalities, .
  - Zero Hedge, 23 November 2024

• Private equity funds managed by Goldman Sachs will kose nearly $900 million after Swedish lithium-ion battery producer Northvolt filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this week
  - Thomson's Reuters, 23 November 2024

• Why the European Union is failing to capitalize on critical minerals sourced in Africa, as Zhōngguó continues to do more mining deals in Africa. Despite deals with four African nations amid a de-risking drive from Zhōngguó, companies in Europea have yet to gain a foothold in the continent.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 23 November 2024

• Google is under siege. Why its stock will continue to rise. Google is facing pressure on two fronts - the government and a host of new AI-powered search rivals. It has the capacity to meet both challenges and continue to prosper.
  - Barron's, 23 November 2024

• Nviida earnings were a blowout. So ignore the temporary decline of its stock price.
  - Barron's, 23 November 2024

• Senators in the USA argue that the TSA's AI-powered facial recognition program is out of control, posing a significant threat to privacy and civil liberties.
  - GizModo, 22 November 2024

• Supercheap robotics manufactured by Baidu in Zhōngguó should scare the hell out of competitors in the USA such as Waymo. [KM: But should paid human taxi drivers being even more scared about losing their jobs to make the rich richer]?
  - The Verge, 22 November 2024

• $5,200,000 - The data protection authority of Italy has imposed on Delivery Hero-owned Foodinho a fine of 5 million euros ($5.20 million) for unlawfully processing the personal data of more than 35,000 riders registered on its digital platform
  - Thomson's Reuters, 22 November 2024

• $118,000,000 - Samsung ordered to pay $118 million for infringing patents owned by Netlist
  - Thomson's Reuters, 22 November 2024

• $186,000,000 - Spain has fined five budget airlines a total $186 million for "abusive practices" including charging for hand luggage. The fines were issued because the airlines were found to have provided misleading information and were not transparent with prices. Ryanair was fined 108 million euros, and EasyJet was fined 29 million euros.
  - BBC, 22 November 2024

• Apple offers $100 million investment in Indonesia to lift a ban on the iPhone 16. The amount that Apple has offered is 10 times higher than an initial plan to invest $10 million and will be invested over the next two years.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 November 2024

• Revenue at Baidu declines again as advertising demand remains weak. The search-engine giant in Zhōngguó reported lower revenue for the second straight quarter on falling sales from online-marketing services and an economy struggling to regain momentum.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 November 2024

• Nvidia is on top but does it have anywhere to go but down? The AI titan will maintain its strong lead, but complicated product rollouts, sky-high expectations and the Zhōngguó threat add complications to growth potential.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 November 2024

• Bharat will offer up to $5 billion in socialist subsidies to companies to make components locally for gadgets from mobiles to laptops, two government officials said, in a bid to bolster the burgeoning industry and wean off supplies from Zhōngguó.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 22 November 2024

• Financial scams based on AI are the point of AI. Propaganda and deceit are a feature of AI, not its downfall. Right now we are surrounded by 'AI snake oil' or "AI that does not and cannot work as advertised". And the most profitable AI solutions are those that caused paid humans to be fired.
  - New Republic, 22 November 2024

• The false religion of the misanthropes of Silicon Valley - transhumanism. The AI death cult ruling Silicon Valley.
  - IAI, 22 November 2024

• The federal government proposes breakup of Google to fix search monopoly. In a landmark antitrust case, the government asked a judge to force the company to sell its popular Chrome browser.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 November 2024

• [KM: Let's use non-paid generative AI to great rid of paid human Santa Clauses]: SantaPhoneCalls.com lets children talk to virtual Santa Clauses, instead of having to schlep over to a shopping mall and talk with a real, paid, human Santa Claus
  - The Daily Beast, 21 November 2024

• Huawei plans to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence chip in the first quarter of 2025, even as it struggles to make enough chips due to restrictions imposed by the USA. The restrictions have hampered Huawei's ability to get the yield of its advanced AI chips high enough for them to be commercially viable.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 21 November 2024

• Alibaba to merge domestic and global e-commerce units, names Jiang Fan as CEO. The new group brings together Taobao and Tmall Group, Alibaba International and a slew of other e-commerce operations.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 November 2024

• Huge interest e-commerce sites are a "huge harm for industries in Zhōngguó". Zhong Shanshan, the second-richest man in Zhōngguó, strongly criticizes Pinduoduo for hurting brands with cutthroat pricing. As the economy of Zhōngguó has slowed and consumer spending has weakened, Pinduoduo's ascension contributed to a fierce price war among the country's largest e-commerce players, putting pressure on merchant profits.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 November 2024

• Shares of Snowflake jump 19% after beating earnings and revenue estimates
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 November 2024

• Zhōngguó surpasses Deutschland and Nihon in the adoption density of industrial robots
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 November 2024

• STMicroelectronics, a supplier of processor chips to Tesla, delayed a key sales target it hoped to hit much earlier, and cut its gross margin forecast, as the chip inventory glut that has plagued the industry in recent years continues to weigh on growth.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 November 2024

• Accolade gathers $202 million for new blockchain fund of funds as cryptocurrency market recovers. When many investors stopped backing crypto venture funds, Accolade Partners saw an opportunity to keep deploying capital. Now it is riding new tailwinds thanks to Trump's election and the expanding adoption of crypto technologies.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 November 2024

• Shares of Nvidia drop 3% pre-market as quarterly revenue slows
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 November 2024

• Shares of Nvidia drop a few dollars, not much, after its revenue forecast disappoints exuberant expectations. The muted outlook suggests that AI excitement may be getting ahead of reality according to Bloomberg.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 November 2024

• $10,000,000 - A start-up founder who sold AI chatbot to schools is charged with fraud, after raising $10,000,000 and ending up in bankruptcy. Joanna Smith-Griffin was charged with lying to investors about revenue and her customer base, which she claimed included some of the nation's largest school districts, including schools in New York City.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 November 2024

• A survey of 1000 job seekers in the USA found that 69 percent doubt AI's ability to boost their work performance, while 62 percent lack faith in AI's capacity to reduce their workload. The findings align with other recent studies suggesting enterprise AI's bubbling-hype has not lived up to its marketing promises.
  - The Register, 20 November 2024

• The monitoring by Zhōngguó of telephone calls and text messages may be enabled by a 30-year-old law: the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. When the digital wiretap law was passed in 1994, no one foresaw the kind of sophisticated intrusions apparently developed by Zhōngguó. The irrefutable fact is that every single one of the cyberattacks that affect our nation traverse, at one point or another in their transmission, a private network regulated by the FCC.
  - Brookings, 20 November 2024

• Big cities in the USA take up fight against apartment rental prices being set by 'BigTech' AI algorithms. The federal price-fixing lawsuit against rental-software firm RealPage could take years, but some cities and states are already cracking down on abuses the company fosters with landlords.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 November 2024

• The European Central Bank warns of a "bubble" in AI stocks as funds deplete their cash buffers. The central bank also expressed concerns that investors are demanding low premiums to own shares and bonds, while funds have cut their cash buffers, making them vulnerable to potential cash shortages.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 20 November 2024

• Nvidia traders brace for potential $300 billion earnings move. The options-implied move for Nvidia shares the day after earnings is about 8% in either direction, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That would equate to close to a $300 billion swing in market value -- bigger than all but 25 companies in the SP500 index.
  - Bloomberg, 20 November 2024

• Management at fintech firm Finastra allegedly allowed the large-scale theft of information from its internal file transfer platform, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Finastra, which provides software and services to 45 of the world's top 50 banks, notified customers of the security incident after a cybercriminal began selling more than 400 gigabytes of data purportedly stolen from the company.
  - Zero Hedge, 19 November 2024

• "Move Fast and Break Things" - the most dangerous idea of Silicon Valley that has wrecked the economy, except for the rich companies. Now Elon Musk wants to bring the idea to Washington, and wreck the government as well.
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 19 November 2024

• Shares of Intuit fall as much as 6.8%, and shares of Block fall as much as 8.2%, after the Washington Post reported greater interest by Trump's people to hasten the IRS' offering for online tax preparation
  - Bloomberg, 19 November 2024

• $4,350,000 - Dell has agreed to pay $2.3 million and Iron Bow has agreed to pay $2.05 million to resolve allegations they violated the False Claims Act by submitting non-competitive bids to the Army and thereby overcharging it under the Army Desktop and Mobile Computing contract
  - Thomson's Reuters, 19 November 2024

• Liberal Vice, chasing the dollars, does a hard-right turn and cozies up to conservatives. In new videos, Vice editor-in-chief Shane Smith treats immigrants as a problem and apologizes to Elon Musk for past coverage.
  - The Intercept, 19 November 2024

• MicroStrategy announces $42 billion capital raise to expand bitcoin holdings
  - The Street, 19 November 2024

• Robot companies struggle to make non-paid robots that can eliminate all paid humans in warehouses. Current robots can load and unload trucks, move goods and do other repetitive tasks but are stymied by some, like picking items from a pile. But in their quest to replace all humans, the robot companies will solve this problem.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 November 2024

• Traders are making bullish bets on Nvidia ahead of its earnings report on Wednesday. Nvidia's earnings day has become a major event on Wall Street, drawing comparisons with Fed meetings and key economic reports for their influence over the broader market.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 November 2024

• Twenty is building an open source alternative to Salesforce
  - TechCrunch, 18 November 2024

• More out-of-control AI: an AI-powered robot in Zhōngguó convinced 12 showroom robots to 'quit' their jobs and move off of the showroom where they functioned. The smaller bot reportedly persuaded the rest to leave their workplace, leveraging access to internal protocols and commands.
  - International Business Times, 18 November 2024

• Today's addictive online sports-betting boom, making digital casinos billions, is causing people to destroy their savings. "[Addictive] Betting activity crowds out financial investments, leading to a reduction in net deposits to brokerage accounts, including robo-advisors that are primarily used for long-term savings. This substitution is particularly pronounced among financially constrained households. Additionally, consumption in complementary entertainment-related categories rises, likely reflecting spillovers from increased sports betting. Combined, the increase in betting and associated consumption leads to heightened financial instability as households run-up credit card balances and more frequently overdraw their bank accounts."
  - Sherwood News, 18 November 2024

• AI startup FutureHouse is seeking to eliminate the need for paid human scientists by creating non-paid AI scientists, capable of not just formulating hypotheses but also conducting the experiments, analyzing data, and sharing possibly game-changing findings.
  - Freethink, 18 November 2024

• Trump might destroy the USA's opportunity to be a leader in climate healing technology. Five charts show that Zhōngguó is winning this technology battle. Nearly half of the wind and solar energy in the world is generated in Zhōngguó. Zhōngguó has 339 gigawatts of Zhōngguó - eight times more than the USA.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 18 November 2024

• Shares of Super Micro Computer jump 11% n premarket trading on Monday after a report emerged that the company plans to submit a proposal to maintain its listing on the Nasdaq Stock Market
  - Investing.com, 18 November 2024

• Shares of Nvidia dropped as much as 3% early Monday following a new report from The Information, which highlighted overheating issues with its latest Blackwell AI servers
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 18 November 2024

• $500,000,000+ - Vevor, a company based in Zhōngguó that sells $500 million a year in tools and appliances on Amazon has been accused of manipulating its customer product reviews -- and competitors gripe that Amazon has been ignoring the advertising crime. Vevor has been systematically creating multiple listings for identical products in a bid to sidestep negative reviews -- ingoring Amazon's rules as well as US regulations on consumer protection and unfair competition, rival sellers claim. Vevor also faces lawsuits over copyright violations from established brands including Vitamix. The fact that Amazon has failed to prevent Vevor's false advertising partly signals that the Seattle-based e-commerce giant is desperate to work more collaboratively with manufacturers in Zhōngguó -- and tolerate violations of its seller rules -- as it faces rising competition from e-commerce apps from Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 18 November 2024

• Revenue of Xiaomi soars 30% in the third quarter of 2024, as sales of its first electric car surge
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 November 2024

• The valuation of ByteDance, owner of TikTok, rises to about $300 billion. Investors see Trump victory as a positive with the threat of TikTok ban looming in USA.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 November 2024

• Inside Big Tech's bribery of the House (it passed in the Senate) to eliminate the Kids Online Safety Act proposed law. Tech giants and their allies are leaning on culture-war issues to splinter bipartisan support for the bill.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 November 2024

• Venture capital firms and tech startups face growing pressure for liquidity. Enter private equity. The alchemy of the venture capital process, in which investments are catalyzed over a number of years into a successful IPO or a big M&A deal, is under pressure.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 November 2024

• AI investments are booming, but profits at venture capital firms are at a historic low
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 November 2024

• How California allowed large marijuana farms, using lots of technology from Silicon Valley, to destroy all of the small marijuana family-farms, despite promises to protect the small farms. Legalization that supported big corporate marijuana farms has shuttered thousands of pot farms across Northern California, destroying multi-generational cannabis businesses and leaving rural towns boarded up.
  - SF Gate, 17 November 2024

• The hidden truth linking the broken border to your online shopping cart. The incoming Trump administration promises an immigration crackdown. But for years, the on-demand economy has been fueled by unscrupulous staffing agencies exploiting migrant workers to work at huge distribution warehouses, so that rich people can become richer (Kendall Jenner and Jennifer Lopez promoter Alo clothng that used this exploitative system). Thousands of companies have exploited the borders' porousness by exploiting workers from the ranks of unauthorized migrants, sometimes with impunity. One exploiter, BaronHR, cheated immigrant workers out of wages and stole their tax payments.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 November 2024

• Scientists in Zhōngguó have developed a significantly more efficient system for separating oil and water in complex emulsions, which could transform the sustainability of waste water treatments and other industrial applications. The researchers achieved simultaneous oil and water recovery of up to 97 per cent and 75 per cent, respectively, with purity levels approaching 99.9 per cent for both.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 November 2024

• The low-altitude vehicle economy is all the buzz in Zhōngguó, so where are the tangible results? National-level plans are in the works and will likely offer guidance to local governments eager to capitalise on the low-altitude sector, from drones to eVTOL aircraft.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 November 2024

• Returns of products are a headache. More retailers are saying, just "keep it". In a survey, nearly 60 percent of retailers said they had policies that refund customers for items that are not financially viable to send back. Which causes more pollution when these rejected products are thrown into the garbgae.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 November 2024

• "You are not needed ... please die" - what Google's Gemini AI chatbot told one student because he is a "drain on the Earth". " This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please."
  - Zero Hedge, 16 November 2024

• In the world of no-fee and low-fee brokers, Robinhood is the leader, but it is facing increasingly stiff competition from an upstart known as Webull, founded by one of the top executives from Chinese-based e-commerce giant Alibaba. Traders say WeBull offers pretty sophisticated investing tools, s analytics are sound, and the platform runs pretty seamlessly.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 16 November 2024

• A robot company in Zhōngguó, Deep Robotics, launched a robot dog with "absolutely terrifying" mobility. With guns, an ultimate mobile weapon.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 November 2024

• Chefs using Facebook Marketplace deliver homemade tamales, empanadas and other foods. Facebook Marketplace, a platform often used for furniture and electronics, is an increasingly popular place to buy and sell home-cooked meals.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 November 2024

• T-Mobile hacked in massive cyberattack on telecom networks by Zhōngguó. T-Mobile joins a growing list of known victims, including AT&T and Verizon, of the major spying operation by Zhōngguó.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 November 2024

• YouTube has become the king of podcasts because these days, we do not just listen to people talking into microphones for hours. We watch them.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 November 2024

• Alibaba revenue misses views amid weaker economy in Zhōngguó, and due to competition. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization declined about 4% to 47.33 billion yuan in its fiscal second quarter.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 November 2024

• Samsung Electronics plans $7 billion share buyback. The Samsung's stock repurchase plan comes amid investor concerns over its flagship memory-chip business, which is missing out on the artificial intelligence boom.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 November 2024

• Beijing plans to build a 12-inch semiconductor wafer fab, pouring US$4.6 billion into state-backed chip project. Beijing Yandong Microelectronics will take a controlling position with a 25 per cent stake, while other investors include display maker BOE Technology.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 November 2024

• How Jenson Huang and Nvidia led a revolution in artificial intelligence
  - Barron's, 16 November 2024

• A study reveals why Covid-19 vaccine antibodies rapidly lose effectiveness. The mRNA vaccines cause the body to produce short-lived plasma cells that can only generate antibodies for a period of time before dying off.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 November 2024

• HarperCollins is asking its authors to sell their books to the AI 'woodchipper'. Author Daniel Kibblesmith, who revealed the offer from the massive publisher, called it "Abominable". The publisher is making to provide portions of their library to "a large tech company" for the purposes of training an AI language learning model - and do little for the authors who will have to compete with computer-generated books trained on human books.
  - AV Club, 15 November 2024

• Agility Robotics, another company want to replace paid-humans with non-paid robots, demonstrated its Digit humanoid robot that is able to sort through a pile of coloured T-shirts and place them in a basket - a laundry operation done by lots of paid humans.
  - The Guardian, 15 November 2024

• Coca-Cola heavily criticized for an "ugly" AI-generated Christmas commercial: a "creepy dystopian nightmare", probably appropriate for the creepy, dystopian nightmare of a future of non-paid AI replacing paid-humans, including paid-humans who make non-dystopian video commercials.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 15 November 2024

• Social media creates social isolation. Now social media is offering AI clones and AI dating chatbots to help people meet mates. Killing more jobs, and eventually, more relationships [KM: while rich AT companies get richer].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 November 2024

• The earnings outlook for Disney rises as streaming unit posts gaines. The streaming profit and studio are bright spots, while income from cable and theme parks declines.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 November 2024

• Revenues and profits rise for JD.com as consumer sentiment improves in Zhōngguó. The e-commerce giant in Zhōngguó reported higher profit and revenue in the third quarter despite fierce competition from Alibaba and PDD Holdings.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 November 2024

• Nvidia readies Jetson Thor computers for humanoid robots in 2025. The company is targeting a fragmented market of robot makers who are trying to profit from replacing paid-humans with non-paid robots. Imagine taking a robot taxi to a restuarant with a robot valet and robot waitors and waitresses - [KM: well, imagine the profits for the robot companies].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 November 2024

• Super Micro faces a Monday deadline to keep Nasdaq listing after 85% plunge in stock
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 November 2024

• The Biden Administration quickly gives the hugely rich TSMC a $6.6 billion dollar socialist subsidy to build a semiconductor production plant in Arizona. TSMC agreed to forgo stock buybacks for five years and share any excess profits with the U.S. government under an "upside sharing agreement".
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 November 2024

• Shares of Disney rise 9% after narrowly beating analyst estimates as streaming growth helped propel its entertainment segment
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 November 2024

• Gamblers on NFL games are the big winners this year, not the sportsbooks. Winning bets on favorite NFL teams are expected to cost DraftKings and FanDuel hundreds of millions in expected revenue.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 November 2024

• Spotify takes aim at Google's YouTube in battle for podcasts. The audio streaming giant plans to pay hosts to make podcast videos and allow premium subscribers to watch them without ads.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 November 2024

• The government of Nihon will socialistically invest $65 billion to support the semiconductor and AI industries of Nihon. This new round of funding will specifically target state-backed chip foundry Rapidus and other AI chip suppliers. Rapidus was founded in November 2022 when the Japanese government and eight Japanese technology and automotive firms, including SoftBank, Sony, and NTT, invested more than $500 million to launch the business.
  - Data Center Dynamics, 13 November 2024

• The drug of online gambling is creating big debts for gamblers in Brazil. Some gmablers in Brazil are paying 400% loan rates to fund their betting frenzy. Nearly one out of every three Brazilians lives below the poverty line. And poverty amplifies the desire to make an instantaneous fortune betting on the hometown soccer team or spinning the virtual roulette wheel at online casinos designed to be addictive.
  - Bloomberg, 13 November 2024

• $6,600,000,000 - Just Eat Takeaway, the biggest meal delivery company in Europe, in four years loses $6.6 billion of shareholder value, after buying GrubHub for $7.3 billion in 2020 (during the height of Covid) and sellling it now for $650 million
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 13 November 2024

• The online, e-commerce, retail giants of Zhōngguó are transforming the shopping habits of consumers in Latin America. Local stores and shopping malls are suffering as multibillion companies such as Shein, Temu and AliExpress flood countries in Latin America with cheap, quickly delivered goods. Countries in Latin America, to protect their economies, to keep riches in Latin America, are raising import taxes.
  - Tico Times, 13 November 2024

• Bluesky, a rival to Twitter/X, gains 1.25 million users following the elections in the USA
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 November 2024

• Shares of Rivian surge 19% after the company announced it finalized its $5.8 billion joint venture with Volkswagen
  - Investor's Business Daily, 13 November 2024

• Shares of SoundHound AI falls 6% after beating Wall Street's targets for the third quarter and guided to sales above views for the full year and next year
  - Investor's Business Daily, 13 November 2024

• Shares of Rocket Lab surge 40% after company reports strong revenue growth, and the first deal for its Neutron rocket
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 13 November 2024

• Shenzhen, a city in southern Zhōngguó, has a soaring budget for research and development funding, rivaling Beijing and dwarfing Hong Kong. The southern city put nearly US$31 billion into R&D last year, driven partly by robust spending from tech giants like Huawei.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 November 2024

• TSMC extends its dominance of semiconductors with 56% share of global lithography systems. AnandTech and The Register indicate that TSMC's share of global EUV systems has grown from 50 per cent to 56 per cent between 2020 and 2023.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 November 2024

• $11,250,000 - The state of Illinois fines DoorDash $11,250,000 for stealing customer-paid tips from workers for DoorDash
  - State Journal-Register, 12 November 2024

• Amazon and Walmart could not kill the mom-and-pop stores of Bharat, a source of many jobs. But services such as Blinkit and Zepto are estimated to put more than 25% of the neighborhood kirana stores in Bharat out of business by 2030. 200,000 stores have closed just in 2024. Millions of people will lose their jobs [KM: as rich owners of delivery services get richer].
  - Rest of the World, 12 November 2024

• $7,500,000 - Beyond Meat is paying $7.5 million to settle allegations that it exaggerated the amount of protein in its products
  - Zero Hedge, 12 November 2024

• CNN is reportedly firing on-air talent and hundreds of workers
  - Zero Hedge, 12 November 2024

• Nihon's SoftBank returns to profit after gains at Vision Fund and other investments. SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications. The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank's investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
  - Associated Press, 12 November 2024

• Google's Waymo's non-human-driven robotaxis are now open to anyone who wants a taxi ride where they don't have to pay humans, [KM: but rather make billionaires richer]
  - Associated Press, 12 November 2024

• Amazon.com's cloud computing unit on Tuesday said it will offer free computing power to researchers who want to use its custom artificial intelligence chips, aiming to challenge Nvidia's popularity among those researchers.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 12 November 2024

• Alibaba and JD.com wrapped up their respective Singles' Day promotions this year, with both e-commerce giants in Zhōngguó claiming strong results that signify a rebound in domestic consumer spending during the largest annual shopping festival in the world.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 November 2024

• Shares of Shopify jump 26% after the e-commerce firm reported Q3 revenue that topped estimates amid strong growth in the subscription business
  - Investor Business Daily, 12 November 2024

• Shares of Plug Power drop 9%, down 60% for the year, after the hydrogen-technology provider turned in a disappointing quarterly report and weak guidance. Also, investors are worried that Trump's policies will not be as favorable to green energy as those from a Democratic administration.
  - Investor Business Daily, 12 November 2024

• A rural town in Missouri fights Big Tech, and its town leaders. Residents of Peculiar battled developers and some of their local officials to keep a giant data center out of their community. Residents describe a web of distrust filled with nondisclosure agreements, hurt feelings and a mysterious entity vying to become the town's new neighbor. Visiting other facilities, they were terrified at what they saw and heard -- the constant hum of generators behind guard towers with 24-hour security. "It is like living next to a maximum-security prison."
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 November 2024

• Zhōngguó tightens its hold on minerals needed to make computer processor chips. Already the dominant producer of rare minerals, Beijing is using export restrictions and its power over state-owned companies to further control access.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 November 2024

• How Zhōngguó tamed a lawless industry, rare earths metals mining, and gained global influence. State-controlled companies now run an industry once known for its acid pits, radioactive waste and smugglers. The environmental costs of unregulated mining and refining were high for many years. In southern Zhōngguó, forested hillsides and emerald rice fields were turned into expanses of toxic mud, as crime syndicates in Zhōngguó hired laborers to dig up ore and process it in unlined acid pits. In northern Zhōngguó, groundwater laced with the industry's radioactive waste began seeping toward the Yellow River. Thousands of square miles of pasture were closed to grazing because of contamination by radioactive dust from refineries, which was blamed for the deaths of thousands of goats.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 November 2024

• 23andMe fires 40% of its people, shuts drug development business. The genetics company is closing a unit that was once seen as core to its future.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 November 2024

• A publisher in the Netherlands has announced that it will use non-human, non-paid AI to translate some of its books that were formerly translated by paid humans, [KM: the only real productivity in AI - getting rid of humans].
  - The Guardian, 11 November 2024

• It is surprisingly easy to jailbreak poorly designed (in a rush for billions of dollars) LLM-driven robots. Researchers induced bots to ignore their safeguards without exception.
  - IEEE Spectrum, 11 November 2024

• Futures contract prices hit 51st record high of 2024 as the 'Trump trades' continue to increase
  - Zero Hedge, 11 November 2024

• Ecosia and Qwant, two search engines in Europe which are competing with Google, announced a partnership Tuesday to build a European search index and reduce their dependence on Big Tech firms based in the USA. The two internet search firms agreed a joint venture, called the European Search Perspective or EUSP, with ownership split 50-50 between both firms. With a view to launch in France in early 2025, the venture aims to serve "improved" search results in the German and French languages.
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 November 2024

• Intesa Sanpaolo, the largest bank in Italy, said it would partner with BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager and a leading Intesa shareholder, to offer digital wealth management services to clients in Belgium and Luxembourg
  - Thomson's Reuters, 11 November 2024

• How BigTech created and hugely profitted from worsening loneliness. Technology and loneliness are interlinked, researchers have found, stoked by the ways we interact with social media, text messaging and binge-watching.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 November 2024

• OpenAI and others seek new path to smarter AI sustems [KM: to more quickly cause more humans to lose their jobs] as current training methods hit limitations
  - Thomson's Reuters, 11 November 2024

• Inside the audacious plan to reopen the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island. Big Tech's thirst for energy to power its AI sealed the deal between Microsoft and Constellation on the plant, where memories of a partial meltdown in 1979 still resonate.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 November 2024

• How non-human, non-paid, ChatGPT destroyed an online education giant, Chegg, that employed a lot of paid humans. Chegg's stock has dropped 99% as students looking for help with homework defect to non-human AI.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 November 2024

• Chegg, a tech company in the San Francisco Bay Area, is firing 319 people, CEO blames Google and AI. The company blames generative AI 'chatbots' like OpenAI's ChatGPT, saying that students see the tool and others like it as "strong alternative" to Chegg's services.
  - SF Gate, 11 November 2024

• Using generative AI saves ad agencies a lot of time and money (that they don't have to pay to human workers). Should they still charge by the hour? Some ad agencies are trying to move to new compensation models that focus on the scope of work they perform, not the hours it takes for them to do it. A nice tactic, until their clients use the AI tools themselves, and eliminate the need not only for ad agency workers, but ad agency executives.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 November 2024

• More progress on making people less intelligent so they need more Big Tech: punctuation is dead because the iPhone keyboard killed it. Apple sacrificed commas and periods at the altar of simplified, yet terrible, keyboard design. By hiding the comma and period behind a symbol switch, the iPhone keyboard encourages the biggest grammar fiends to be lazy and skip punctuation.
  - Android Authority, 10 November 2024

• Hedge funds shorting shares of Tesla just lost more than $5 billion
  - Bloomberg, 10 November 2024

• There is a very good reason that college students do not read anymore - there is no future profit in doing so. In professional lives dictated by addictive social media, made easier by AI text-barfing tools, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. All in all, it looks as if success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype and access to the right companies. If this is the economy students believe they are entering, then why should they make the effort to read? For that matter, how will any effort in school prepare them for careers in which, apparently, effort is not rewarded?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 November 2024

• Boao Hope City, a city in Zhōngguó free to offer experimental medical treatments. Treatments in Boao Hope City do not have to be approved by medical authorities in Zhōngguó, a libertarian approach to medical innovation. Medical institutions within the zone can import and use pharmaceuticals and medical devices already available in other countries as clinically urgent items before obtaining approval in Zhōngguó. This allows domestic patients to access innovative treatments without the need to travel abroad.
  - Marginal Revolution, 09 November 2024

• Trump re-election successs confirms it: new media is outcompeting the old guard. Podcasts are exploding, TikTok is a news source, and traditional media is shrinking in reach and influence.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 November 2024

• The investment strategy of buying into nuclear power companies because of power needs by AI companies could be less profitable. The bullish case for power stocks was based on tech companies signing lucrative agreements to plug their data centers directly into power plants. Regulators are fighting these deals which hurt consumers by making their power more expensive.
  - Barron's, 09 November 2024

• On Semiconductor is not a big AI semiconductor chip player. Why it is time to buy its stock. ON Semiconductor has been hit by falling sales to auto makers and sluggish sales of its industrial processors. That is about to change -- and its earnings picture looks bright.
  - Barron's, 09 November 2024

• Salesforce plans to hire more than 1,000 people to sell its new generative AI agent product that allows companies to fire people. Salesforce wants to sell more tools that can complete tasks such as customer support or sales development without the supervision of paid humans. [KM: Salesforce will need to destroy more than 1000 human jobs for this to business to succeed (in the short term).]
  - Bloomberg, 08 November 2024

• Opendoor, a real estate tech company headquartered in San Francisco, announced Thursday that it will fire 300 people. The company fired 550 people in November 2022, and 560 more in April 2023. Still, the firm lost $278 million from January through September of 2024. When Opendoor went public, its stock surged and the company hit an $18 billion valuation. Almost four years later, the real estate firm is now worth about $1.3 billion and Has not turned a profit.
  - SF Gate, 08 November 2024

• Freshworks, a San Mateo tech company that makes sales and customer support software for businesses, is firing 660 people. It will make more use of non-paid AI to replace paid humans. Despite needing money by firing people, the company just authorized $400 million in share buybacks. The CEO of Zoho alluded to this financial disaster, saying that firing people "destroys morale" and that "shareholders should come last".
  - SF Gate, 08 November 2024

• TSMC to suspend production of advanced AI processor chips for Zhōngguó, starting next Monday. TSMC will no longer manufacture AI chips at advanced process nodes of 7 nanometers or smaller.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 08 November 2024

• An investigation by the antitruse regulators of Bharat found food delivery giants Zomato and SoftBank-backed Swiggy breached competition laws, with their business practices favouring select restaurants listed on their platforms
  - Thomson's Reuters, 08 November 2024

• Shares of Pinterest plunge as much as 15% on Thursday after the social media company provided soft guidance for its fourth-quarter revenue despite beating on the top and bottom lines with its third-quarter earnings
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 November 2024

• $126,000,000,000 - How Samsung fell behind in the AI boom leading to a $126 billion wipeout. Samsung Electronics has fallen behind long-time rival SK Hynix in the area of high-bandwidth memory. Samsung is still awaiting Nvidia to approve its HBM for use, which could help the South Korean giant become competitive again, analysts said.
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 November 2024

• Trump's top healthcare priority must be repealing Big Pharma's legal immunity for vaccines
  - Zero Hedge, 07 November 2024

• Shares of Clear Secure crashed 18%, after the known for its biometric kiosks in airport security lines saw shares crash on Thursday morning in premarket trading after it reported a slowdown in new users
  - Zero Hedge, 07 November 2024

• SMIC sees prolonged semiconductor chip oversupply, and said it was turning cautious on building new capacity. The global semiconductor industry has struggled to recover since late 2022, when pandemic-driven shortages turned into oversupply, with many end users, including automakers, still working through excess inventory.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 07 November 2024

• MercadoLibre shares sink as lending provisions erode profits. The e-commerce and financial technology giant grew its overall credit book by 77% from a year earlier to $6 billion, with the portion tied to credit cards surging 172% over the same period, according to a release. Provisions set aside for all the lending cut into net income, which at $397 million fell short of the $513 million average estimate of analysts polled by Bloomberg.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 07 November 2024

• Shares of Moderna rise 9% pre-market after reporting a surprise profit for the third quarter, smashing Wall Street estimates, as its cost-cutting efforts took hold and sales of its Covid vaccine came in higher than expected
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 November 2024

• Shares of Arm Holdings fell 5% after Arm forecast revenue in line with Wall Street targets, sparking a 5% drop in shares in extended trading Thursday that some analysts attributed to dashed hopes for stronger, AI-fueled growth
  - Thomson's Reuters, 07 November 2024

• Shares of Qualcomm rise 10% after the company reported fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday that beat Wall Street expectations for earnings and revenue, and guided to a strong December quarter. Qualcomm's board approved $15 billion in additional share repurchases.
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 November 2024

• Why a community in Memphis is fighting a supercomputer facility that will make Elon Musk richer and the community poorer [as usual]. Resident say that Musk's data center for artificial intelligence is compounding their pollution burden and adding stress on the local electrical grid. While waiting for a decision of the TVA to obtain electric, Musk bypassed the electric grid by installing the mobile natural gas plants that cause a lot of pollution. Those living nearby -- a predominantly African American community with little wealth -- say it all happened with no warning, no public review and no opportunity to understand how the community would benefit, [KM: as opposed to the rich white Musk who doesn't have to live in this polluted environment].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 November 2024

• Wayfair increases promotions without taking a big financial loss. Bruised by a sluggish housing market, the home-furnishings retailer has been offering more deals this year -- largely without hurting its margins.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 November 2024

• The e-commerce 'gold rush' in Southeast Asia attracts the giant e-commerce companies of Zhōngguó. The e-commerce market in the region is predicted to double by 2030.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 07 November 2024

• Voters in Massachusetts approved a new law giving ride-hailing serf drivers the ability to form unions. The votes clear the way for drivers to bargain with transportation network companies, like the serf-masters Uber and Lyft, over wages, benefits and work conditions.
  - WBUR News, 06 November 2024

• New data centers in Malaysia create thousands of jobs, though ultimately destroying tens of thousands of jobs, and also create worries about power shortages and water shortages for people. Data centers for companies like Google, Amazon, and Nvidia are transforming Johor state, with locals bracing for higher real estate costs and resource shortages.
  - REst of World, 06 November 2024

• The European Commission has opened a formal investigation into Corning to determine whether it has broken antitrust rules with its dominant Gorilla Glass product. Corning's alkali-aluminosilicate glass is used to protect most of the top phones and tablets, with both Samsung and Apple using it extensively across their range of devices. The EU is concerned that Corning has used a variety of exclusivity contracts to exclude rival glass makers from the phone market.
  - The Verge, 06 November 2024

• AMC Entertainment on Wednesday reported a fall in third-quarter revenue and saw a decline in attendance at its theater chain, hurt by fewer blockbuster releases from Hollywood studios
  - Thomson's Reuters, 06 November 2024

• Children in Australia under the age of 16 will be banned from social media as part of a push to protect the mental health of young people, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, with firms involved required to enforce the new regulations or face potential fines.
  - Bloomberg, 06 November 2024

• Children in Australia under the age of 16 will be banned from social media as part of a push to protect the mental health of young people, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, with firms involved required to enforce the new regulations or face potential fines.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 November 2024

• Children in Australia under the age of 16 will be banned from social media as part of a push to protect the mental health of young people, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, with firms involved required to enforce the new regulations or face potential fines.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 06 November 2024

• Shares of Vestas drop 11% after profit guidance trimmed. The Danish wind-turbine maker said higher costs and warranty provisions would push its profit margin to the lower end of its guidance range this year.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 November 2024

• Shares of Trump Media surge more than 30% as Trump wins the presidential election
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 November 2024

• Vote counting in Nevada has been thrown into chaos because young people cannot sign their own names, too addicted to their cellphones where everything is electronic signatures
  - Barclay's The Telegraph, 05 November 2024

• Why companies are migating away from cloud services: the rise of cloud repatriation to private owned/managed cloud servers. Major organizations like 37signals and GEICO highlight the economic and strategic reasons to reconsider cloud infrastructure.
  - The New Stack, 05 November 2024

• A top Republican lawmaker has accused the Biden administration of not doing enough to prevent Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, based inZhōngguó, from strengthening the semiconductor chipmaking industry and military-industrial complex of Zhōngguó.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 November 2024

• $15,000,000 - South Korea fines Facebook $15 million for illegally collecting information on users of Facebook
  - Associated Press, 05 November 2024

• For well more than two decades, Intel has been the undisputed leader in the market for datacenter CPUs. Intel's Xeon processors powered the vast majority of servers, whereas AMD's processors commanded a single-digit market share just some seven or eight years ago. However, the situation has changed drastically. While Intel's Xeon CPUs still power the majority of servers, the most expensive machines now use AMD's EPYC processors. This is why AMD's datacenter business unit now outsells Intel's datacenter and AI business group.
  - Tom's Hardware, 05 November 2024

• Shares of Super Micro fall 10% after-market, after rising 6.4% during the day, after it announced that cannot predict when it would file its annual report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 November 2024

• Shares of Palantir jump 23% to record high on uplifting guidance
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 November 2024

• Sales growth for Foxconn slows amid underwhelming AI-enabled iPhone upgrade supercycle
  - Zero Hedge, 05 November 2024

• Profits at Nintendo plunge 69% as it reduces prediction for sales of ageing Switch console
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 November 2024

• Semiconductor toolmakers in the USA are moving to eliminate Zhōngguó from supply chains. Applied Materials and Lam Research are telling vendors to follow new restrictions, spurred by pressure from the government of the USA.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 November 2024

• Is the high cost of nuclear power justified as a clean energy solution?
  - Cato Institute, 05 November 2024

• Socialist subsidies and deals with Big Tech do not change the unprofitable economics of nuclear power. Nuclear energy remains expensive, and its costs likely outweigh its benefits as a zero-carbon energy source.
  - Cato Institute, 04 November 2024

• Google's subsidiary, Waymo, has had a huge increase in the number of non-human, driverless rides it offers, from 12,000 to over 312,000 per month, though Waymo still loses money for Amazon, and humans lost out on income from providing the 312,000 rides a month. [KM: These humans are not (yet) Solyent Green.]
  - Sherwood News, 04 November 2024

• The richly-paid executives at AI search company Perplexity offer to help the New York Times replace striking piad-human tech workers with non-human, non-paid AI systems.
  - TechCrunch, 04 November 2024

• The richly-paid executives at Netflix are bullish on non-human, non-paid generative AI for developing video games after firing 35 human game developers
  - 404 Media, 04 November 2024

• A consortium of financial technology and cryptocurrency companies including Robinhood, Kraken and Galaxy Digital, on Monday introduced a joint stablecoin pegged to the USA dollar
  - Thomson's Reuters, 04 November 2024

• Tech partnerships with power companies for AI in doubt after government rejects important agreement between Amazon and Talen Energy. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected a request to increase the amount of power the Susquehanna nuclear plant can dispatch to an Amazon data center campus. The FERC was concerned about such a deal to make tech companies more profitable would be paid for by higher electricity costs to consumers. Shares of Talen fall 9%, shares of Constellation Energy fall 8% and shares of Vistra fall 3%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 November 2024

• Nuclear-power companies hury by the rejection of the FERC of a deal between Amazon and Talen. Talen said it believed FERC had erred and was evaluating its options. The company can still restructure its expanded deal with Amazon, according to Oppenheimer analysts.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 November 2024

• Shares of SK Hybix rise 6..5% after Nvidia boss Jensen Huang asks the company to expedite the supply of high-bandwith memory chips called HBM4 forward by six months
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 November 2024

• Companies in Zhōngguó used the climate subsidies under the Biden administration to expand their dominance of the solar industry. For example, a year go, the Biden administration accused one of the largest solar manufacturers in Zhōngguó of evading American taxes/tariffs. Now the company is building a massive panel factory in Texas -- and it could receive more than $1 billion in tax subsidies under President Biden's signature climate law.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 November 2024

• Two leading newspapers in New Jersey, the Star-Ledger (the largest newspaper in the state) and the Jersey Journal, will end print editions, and the the Jersey Journal will be killed after 157 years in business. [KM: The relentless destruction of print media by Google and other Big Tech companies continues undermine democracy.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 November 2024

• Robinhood's earnings showed investors' love affair with options is growing, with $200 million in options traded at Robinhood in Q3 of 2024, versus about $35 million for stocks
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 02 November 2024

• Sales for the iPhone maker were up 6 percent to to $94.93 billion. But a $14.4 billion tax bill in Europe cut profits that would have topped expectations.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 November 2024

• $500,000 - Semiconductor chipmaker GlobalFoundries is fined $500,000 for banned shipments to Zhōngguó. The Biden administration said it had reached a settlement after the USA chipmaker voluntarily disclosed that it had shipped products to a firm linked with military industrial complex of Zhōngguó.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 November 2024

• Alibaba's stock has soared, though it is still cheap enough to buy. The shares have sprung back to life thanks to new economic stimulus in Zhōngguó -- and Alibaba's AI ventures. The shares stand to gain as much as 48%.
  - Barron's, 02 November 2024

• Nvidia to replace Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average
  - Zero Hedge, 01 November 2024

• The extremely profitable inner workings of digital addiction
  - Of Two Minds, 01 November 2024

• Nvidia to replace Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 November 2024

• Netflix has 'won' the streaming wars - here is how other streaming companies will compete
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 01 November 2024

• As data centers for AI strain the power grid, electric power bills rise for everyday customers
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 01 November 2024

• $2,100,000 - Lyft is paying $2.1 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the ride-hailing service of exaggerating how much money drivers could make while the company was trying to recover from a steep downturn in demand during the pandemic
  - Associated Press, 01 November 2024

• A year on, Intel's touted AI-chip deals have fallen short
  - Thomson's Reuters, 01 November 2024

• Shares of Globalstart soar 45% after the company disclosed in a filing that it will expand its partnership with Apple to support Emergency SOS via satellite for new iPhones
  - Zero Hedge, 01 November 2024

• Samsung reported better-than-expected net profit but earnings in its core semiconductor business shrank sharply. Samsung sees progress in memory chips for AI after delays.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 November 2024

• STMicroelectronics slashed its annual guidance for the third time this year after posting a slump in net profit and sales, as demand for chips in cars and industrial equipment remained weak
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 November 2024

• Skydio, the largest drone company in the USA, and supplier of unmanned aircraft to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, has been thrown into a supply chain crisis after Beijing imposed sanctions, barring it from sourcing drone parts (especially batteries) from suppliers in Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 31 October 2024

• Semiconductor chip output in South Korea drops 3% for the first time in 14 months amid a slowdown at Samsung. This intensifies concerns over the stability of the artificial intelligence bubble intensified this week.
  - Zero Hedge, 31 October 2024

• Trading of shares of Trump Media was halted after a big plunge. The rally in the stock falters as Kamala Harris gains in election poll.
  - Barron's, 31 October 2024

• Intel admits AI uptake slower than expected, but shares jump 9% on upbeat gudance
  - Zero Hedge, 31 October 2024

• Amazon jumps on record AWS profit margin, and solid holiday quarter guidance
  - Zero Hedge, 31 October 2024

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT search, competing with Google and Microsoft
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 October 2024

• The European Union to investigate Temu, the online marketplace based in Zhōngguó, over suspected illegal products and exploiting an "addictive" platform. If found guilty, Temu could face fines amounting to 6 percent of annual global revenue.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 31 October 2024

• 300 percent price hikes are pushing disgruntled customers of VMware twoards rivals of VMware's owner, Broadcom (which bought VMware one year ago for $69 billion). "As on-premises virtualization projects move from [enterprise license agreements] and perpetual licenses to new bundling, socket-to-core ratios, and consumption models, the costs and pricing can increase two or three times." Some suspect that Broadcom is trying to get rid of smaller and mid-sized corporate customers.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 31 October 2024

• "A lot of demoralized people": 'ghost' jobs (ads for positions that are not acutally open) are wreaking havoc on tech workers. Recruiters and career coaches say they serve multiple insidious purposes. These ads are used to commit psychological warfare: 25% said ghost jobs helped companies gauge how replaceable their employees were, while 23% said it helped make the company appear more stable during a hiring freeze. Another damning 2024 report from Resume Builder said that 62% companies posted them specifically to make their employees feel replaceable.
  - SF Gate, 31 October 2024

• Voting rights groups in the USA worry that AI models controlled by [authoritarian] Big Tech companies are generating inaccurate and misleading responses in Spanish
  - Associated Press, 31 October 2024

• Shares of Trump's tech company, Trump Media, decline 15% today after declining 22% the day before. The stock is a bet on the elections - if he wins, it goes up, if he loses, it drops to $0.
  - Zero Hedge, 31 October 2024

• Shares of Aurora crash 17% after the startup that manufactures non-human-driverless trucks delays its commercial launch. Investors invested $500 million into the company in August.
  - Zero Hedge, 31 October 2024

• Shares of Uber decline 7% after reporting third-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street's expectations for revenue but missed on analysts' projections for gross bookings
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 October 2024

• Shares of Microsoft slipped lower during the earnings call, then plunged 3%, after releasing their guidance for the Intelligent Cloud and Azure business segments - which showed slowing growth
  - Zero Hedge, 30 October 2024

• Facebook beats on revenue, misses on ad impressions, raises capex forecast; stock falls as much as $40 before gaining back $20 as everyone is already long
  - Zero Hedge, 30 October 2024

• Amazon-owned AV company Zoox will start rolling out dozens of its purpose-built autonomous vehicle in San Francisco and in Las Vegas in the coming weeks. [KM: These custom non-human robotaxis will allow more human taxis drivers to lose their jobs, while the rich Amazon gets richer].
  - TechCrunch, 30 October 2024

• The new electric Atlas humanoid robot manufactured by Boston Dynamics can autonomously move automobile parts between storage bins. With success, Boston Dyanmic will help many companies fire paid human workers and replace them with robots.
  - Tech Crunch, 30 October 2024

• Why the white authoritarian billionaires of Silicon Valley are embracing the racist Republican party. Silicon Valley CEOs are overwhelmingly white and male, who have long opposed DEI and affirmative action policies of the left.
  - The Hill, 30 October 2024

• As countries such as the USA force companies to stop selling products to other countries, such as Zhōngguó (such as semiconductor technology), will this justify these companies nullifying patents of foreign companies (such as ASML patents in Zhōngguó)? If it is national security for the USA to force ASML not to sell to Zhōngguó, is it national security for Zhōngguó to appropriate ASML's patents? Will these sanctions and appropriations undermine the global patent system, and thus innovation?
  - The Next American Century, 30 October 2024

• The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) in the United States is adding significant strain to already stressed water supplies in the USA, according to a new report by JPMorgan Chase and consultancy ERM, which calls for urgent action to better manage this vital resource from being exploited [KM: to make rich tech companies richer].
  - Zero Hedge, 30 October 2024

• Electric air taxis are already suffering economic problems. German startup Lilium is the first listed eVTOL maker to be at risk of collapse, but may not be the last, as it principal German subsidiaries will apply for self-administration (bankruptcy) proceedings.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 October 2024

• Roar of Shenzhen economic engine reflects upgrade ambitions, and sets a "good example for Zhōngguó". Zhōngguó's s tech hub saw its GDP growth outpace major economic regions in the first three quarters of the year.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 30 October 2024

• Cites in Zhōngguó dominate Amazon seller network, outnumbering hubs in the USA. More than half of Amazon's top 20 seller bases are in Zhōngguó, including top-ranked Shenzhen.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 30 October 2024

• MicroStrategy, a prominent advocate for Bitcoin, saw its shares fall by nearly 5% in after-hours trading following news that the business intelligence firm intends to continue expanding its Bitcoin holdings despite a downturn in overall revenue.
  - Quartz, 30 October 2024

• Shares of Super Micro Computer plummet 30% after its accountants, Ernst & Young, end their relationship because E&Y no longer trusts financial reports of management
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 30 October 2024

• Shares of Super Micro Computer plummet 30% after its accountants, Ernst & Young, end their relationship following months of disagreement with the firm over its governance and board independence
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 October 2024

• Shares of Qorvo decline 19% after beating earnings estimates, but issued disappointing guidance
  - Barron's, 30 October 2024

• Shares of Garmin rise 22%, a maker of devices for outdoor recreation, fitness and navigation, on Wednesday after Garmin handily beat analyst estimates for the third quarter and raised its outlook for the full year. Garmin stock surged in early trading, signaling a possible breakout.
  - Investors Business Daily, 30 October 2024

• Shares of Reddit soar 22% on earnings beat and better-than-expected forecast
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 October 2024

• Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users
  - The Verge, 30 October 2024

• Shares of AMD fall 7% as forecast fails to impress despite strong AI growth. AMD reported third-quarter results on Tuesday, with earnings in line with forecasts and revenue that slightly beat expectations.
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 October 2024

• Generative AI could generate millions of tons of e-waste by decade's end, study finds. Another social cost (for waste disposal, since recycling is still much a joke) passed to taxpayers [KM: while rich companies get richer].
  - Phys.org, 29 October 2024

• Mismanagement at Samsung has caused the stock to drop 32% in four months, a loss of $122 billion in market value, its AI bubble popped
  - Bloomberg, 29 October 2024

• LinkedIn launches its first non-human AI agent to take work away from human job recruiters. The non-human Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to take on a wide array of recruitment tasks done by paid humans, from ingesting scrappy notes and thoughts to turn into longer job descriptions to sourcing candidates and engaging with them. LinkedIn claims this will free-up humans to do more 'intelligent' recruiting tasks, until those are automated as well.
  - TechCrunch, 29 October 2024

• Google's stock surged 6% in after-hours trading Tuesday as the company reported fiscal third quarter earnings that beat analysts' estimates on the top and bottom lines, helped by strong growth in its cloud business.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 October 2024

• People familiar with trade data say Apple exported $6 billion worth of iPhones made in Bharat in the six months through September. That figure is expected to jump to $10 billion by the end of the year. Apple is in the early stages of a multi-decade transition away from reliance on factories in Zhōngguó, actively "friend-shoring" production capacity to countries in Southeast Asia.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 October 2024

• Apple predicted to have the biggest revenue jump in two years on increased iPhone demand in Zhōngguó
  - Thomson's Reuters, 29 October 2024

• Intel predicted to have a big drop in quarterly revenue as chipmaker struggles to bounce back, the decline potentially signaling more erosion of data center and personal computer market share for Intel
  - Thomson's Reuters, 29 October 2024

• Shares of PayPal fall 7% after it reported better-than-expected third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, but revenue came in slightly below expectations. Revenue increased about 6% year-over-year to $7.85 billion, but analysts were expecting the company to report revenue of $7.89 billion for the quarter.
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 October 2024

• An investor into AI pretends to be concerned about how to prevent AI from further widening the racial wealth gap. Black Americans are 10% more likely to be working jobs slated for AI automation. In addition, the same study anticipates that AI will disrupt 4.5 million jobs for Black workers. This disruption has the potential to impact billions of dollars in Black economic potential and growth. If current trends hold, the new wealth created by GenAI alone will increase the racial wealth gap by $43 billion annually, according to McKinsey.
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 October 2024

• Missile strikes by Israel against Iran also damaged the once strong reputation of the weapons industry of Rossiya. Air missile defense systems made in Rossiya and used by Iran stopped few if any of the missiles that Israel launched from 100 jet fighters.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 October 2024

• Philips reduces sales target due to weak demand in Zhōngguó. The health-technology company cut its full-year sales target after third-quarter sales unexpectedly fell due to weak demand in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 October 2024

• A new analysis of public trade data suggests that Brussels and Washington's efforts to entirely block Moscow from accessing cutting-edge Western technology may have encountered a critical stumbling block. An apparent loophole has emerged in Bharat: a biotech firm, possibly acting as a front company, has purchased servers with advanced US chips, which are then rerouted and shipped to Rossiya. The company, exported 1,111 units of PowerEdge XE9680 Rack Servers produced by Dell Technologies to Rossiya.
  - Zero Hedge, 28 October 2024

• Robinhood admits that it is just a gambling app. Back in 2021, Bloomberg argued: "Robinhood is the brokerage for fun gambling on meme stocks and meme cryptocurrencies". Now Robinhood is allowing gmabling on democratic elections.
  - The Verge, 28 October 2024

• Researchers at MIT develop a faster, better way to train robots to handle general-purpose tasks and new skills, helping to more quickly eliminate more paid human jobs
  - MIT News, 28 October 2024

• Facebook reportedly building an AI search engine to reduce its reliance on Google and Microsoft's Bing
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 28 October 2024

• Garbage content generated by AI is flooding Medium.
  - Wired, 28 October 2024

• Shares of Trump Media rise as much as 20%, after Trump sponsors an inflammatory event in New York City. Hate can be quite profitable.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 28 October 2024

• Short sellers of shares of Tesla lose more than $4 billion on EV-maker's post-earnings stock rally
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 28 October 2024

• MicroStrategy's current premium relative to its bitcoin stack is unlikely to last: Steno Research. The launch of options on spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the USA will reduce the incentives for investors to hold MicroStrategy stock over these ETFs, the report said.
  - CoinDesk, 28 October 2024

• A majority of people surveyed state that generative AI will further deepen economic equality - the rich get richer, the poor lose their jobs to AI. Unchecked growth and development of ever more capable large language AI models will might be a net negative for society.
  - Zero Hedge, 28 October 2024

• The Biden Administration made a big investment in Intel. But will it be a failed investment? A plan to revive USA chip manufacturing rests partly on Intel, a company that is firing lots of people and delaying factories, even as the government pushes for the opposite.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 October 2024

• An alarming production drop spurs Governor Gavin Newsom to propose doubling socialist tax credits to Hollywood
  - Hollywood Reporter, 27 October 2024

• Governor Gavin Newsom of California wants to more than double the amount of tax credits to $750 million that the state offers in socialist incentives to Hollywood, which would make its program one of the most generous in the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 October 2024

• Swiggy, a food delivery giant in Bharat, has slashed its IPO valuation again, to $11.3 billion, 25% below the initial goal of $15 billion as market volatility and the lacklustre debut of Hyundai Bharat weigh on sentiment
  - Thomson's Reuters, 27 October 2024

• AI, [KM: while making rich companies richer], "can stunt the skills necessary for independent self-creation". Relying on algorithms could reshape your entire identity without you realizing.
  - Live Science, 27 October 2024

• Big Tech companies [KM: lie when they] say that AI can help solve climate change [KM: one of many social problems that Big Tech has done nothing for, or made worse], even as AI is driving up their emissions and raising doubts about their climate goals.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 October 2024

• How tech billionaires such as Musk and Thiel because the new big donors of the authoritarian Republican party
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 October 2024

• Researchers say an AI audio transcription tool from $150 billion valued OpenAI, used in hospitals, invents things no one ever said. Some of the text can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments, putting patients lives at risk due to misdiagnoses. While most developers assume that transcription tools misspell words or make other errors, engineers and researchers said they had never seen another AI-powered transcription tool hallucinate as much as Whisper.
  - Associated Press, 26 October 2024

• BeiDou, the satellite navigation system championed by Zhōngguó, secures $1.78 billion in investments as the reach of its system widens around the world
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 October 2024

• Kroger and Walmart deby 'surge pricing' after adopting digital price tags. Some members of Congress have expressed concerns that stores will monitor customers and raise prices. Business experts say the technology has not raised the grocery bills of consumers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 October 2024

• The EU and USA are taking very different approaches to the introduction of liability for software products. While the USA ignores the issue due to tech companies bribing lobbying politicians, the European Union is 'throwing a hand grenade down' to see what happens. Under the status quo, the software industry is extensively protected from liability for defects or issues, and this results in systemic underinvestment in product security. Authorities believe that by making software companies liable for damages when they peddle crapware, those companies will be motivated to improve product security. [While this has earned trillions for tech companies, it is stolen from customers who have to spend their money to resolve defects and security failures.]
  - Lawfare News, 25 October 2024

• The CEO of Intel is "frustrated" with progress of socialist subsidies given out under the CHIPS Act -- Intel has received $0 from the $8.5 billion of socialist subsidies that the US government promised.
  - Tom's Hardware, 25 October 2024

• An AI chatbot pushed a teen to kill himself, a lawsuit against its creator (Character Technologies) alleges
  - Associated Press, 25 October 2024

• Struggling with mental health, many humans rely on non-human AI such as ChatGPT for therapy, because non-AI (incompetent) therapists are cheaper than paid-human therapists
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 25 October 2024

• So-called "benevolent" AI company, OpenAI, seeking more billions in its valuations, will sell its software to the USA military, in this case, to the USA Africa Command which states that OpenAI's technology is "essential" to its mission of killing of enemies
  - The Intercept, 25 October 2024

• The fastest-part part of Tesla's business is not selling cars, but rather its energy generation and storage business
  - Sherwood News, 25 October 2024

• Non-human-driving startup WeRide raised a combined $440.5 million in its USA initial public offering and a private placement on Friday, the latest firm from Zhōngguó to capitalize on improving investor sentiment and easing regulatory roadblocks. [KM: A lot of humans are going to have to lose their jobs for investors to obtain good returns.]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 25 October 2024

• Google's non-human-driving unit, Waymo, closes $5.6 billion funding round as the non-paid robotaxi race heats up in the USA. [KM: A lot of humans are going to have to lose their jobs for investors to obtain good returns.]
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 October 2024

• $334,000,000 - The data-protection watchdog of Irelan fined LinkedIn 310 million euros ($334.3 million), saying the Microsoft-owned career platform's personal-data processing breached strict European Union data-privacy and security legislation.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 October 2024

• A more profitable Tesla is still a pricey ride. A surprise lift in automotive margins reversed the damage from the Robotaxi fallout, but the valuation of Tesla is now far above even AI stars.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 October 2024

• Non-human generative AI is replacing paid humans to handle the task of onboarding new employees, with the non-human AI processing hundreds of employees better (i.e., cheaper) and faster.
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 October 2024

• Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity are promoting scientific racism in search results. The web's biggest AI-powered search engines are featuring the widely debunked idea that white people are genetically superior to other races.
  - Wired, 24 October 2024

• Sotheby's agrees to sell its first work credited to a humanoid robot using artificial intelligence, which could be sold for more than $120,000 at auction. The robot is owned/built by art gallery owner Aidan Mellor, an attempt to solve one financial drain for art galleries - having to pay human artists.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 24 October 2024

• A radio station in Poland, Radio Krakow, has fired its human journalists and is relaunching the station by replacing the paid humans with non-human AI-generated "presenters" who don't have to be paid.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 24 October 2024

• [mis]Anthropic's 'Claude' chatbot can now write and run JavaScript code. Today, Anthropic launched a new analysis tool that helps Claude respond with what the company describes as "mathematically precise and reproducible answers". With the tool enabled - it is currently in preview -- Claude can perform calculations and analyze data from files like spreadsheets and PDFs, rendering the results as interactive visualizations. [KM: Just think of all the human financial analysts who can be fired so that Anthropic can profit from its AI investments.]
  - TechCrunch, 24 October 2024

• Central Asia emerges as epicenter of rare earth mineral rush. Securing reliable and strategic supply chains for rare earth minerals has become a geopolitical battleground for world superpowers.
  - Zero Hedge, 24 October 2024

• More AI nonsense from Google. A 2021 paper in Nature by Mirhoseini, Goldie, and others about the use of reinforcement learning (RL) in the physical design of silicon chips raised eyebrows, drew critical media coverage, and stirred up controversy due to poorly documented claims. The paper, authored by Google researchers, withheld critical methodological steps, and most inputs needed to reproduce its results. Our meta-analysis shows how two separate evaluations filled in the gaps and demonstrated that Google RL lags behind human chip designers, a well-known algorithm (simulated annealing), and generally available commercial software, while also being slower.
  - Communications of the ACM, 23 October 2024

• A former worker at OpenAI says the company is breaking copyright law and destroying the Internet
  - GizModo, 23 October 2024

• Schools across the USA are being forced to develop emergency response plans in case sexually explicit images of students or teachers generated by artificial intelligence (AI) pop up on social media, [KM: as the AI companies seeking billion-dollar valuations in part on creating such misery]
  - Zero Hedge, 23 October 2024

• Heat pumps were supposed to transform the world. But that is not going as planned. Heat pump sales, critical to the transition to clean energy, have slowed in the USA and stalled in Europe.
  - Boston.com, 23 October 2024

• Shares of Apple drop about 2% after an analyst warns iPhone 16 orders reduced by 10 million units for 45h quarter of 2024 and first half of 2025
  - Zero Hedge, 23 October 2024

• $89,800,000 - Apple and Goldman Sachs ordered to pay $89 million after Apple Card failures
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 23 October 2024

• UK-based chip architecture giant Arm Holdings (controlled by SoftBank) has given Qualcomm 60 days to end their so-called architectural license agreement. This agreement has allowed longtime partner Qualcomm to produce chips based on standards owned by the UK company. The license cancellation will mean Qualcomm will have to stop selling products based on Arm designs by the end of the year. Bloomberg noted that this could "roil the smartphone and personal computer markets, as well as disrupt the finances and operations of two of the most influential companies in the semiconductor industry". The legal feud began when Qualcomm bought Nuvia in 2021 to boost its Arm-based CPU designs. Arm was furious that it had no say in the deal and canceled Nuvia's licenses in 2023. Both sides are headed to court in December.
  - Zero Hedge, 23 October 2024

• SAP gains over $17 billion in market value after guidance upgrade. Shares of German business-software company climbed more than 5% after it raised its revenue and earnings forecasts for the year on strong demand for AI.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 October 2024

• A schhol district in Silicon Valley that includes wealthiest US ZIP code, and the headquarters of the hugely rich Facebook, denies teachers a 10% raise. Teachers said their salaries have not kept up with inflation costs, forcing them to relocate out of the area, where starter homes sell for millions of dollars, according to a presentation from the union. A fact-finding report in the pay dispute found that Las Lomitas teachers are paid "significantly less" than neighboring districts.
  - SF Gate, 23 October 2024

• Streaming subscription fees have been rising while content quality is dropping. Surveys show decline in customer satisfaction with what is available to stream. As treaming services struggle to reach or maintain profitability, 2024 saw a drop in the number of new scripted shows for the first time in at least 10 years, FX Research found.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 22 October 2024

• Peter Schiff, a prominent cryptocurrency critic, has once again targeted Michael Saylor's firm, MicroStrategy. In a recent post, Schiff issued a stark warning about Microstrategy's stock (MSTR), which has recently reached an all-time high following the company's ambitious plan to transform it into a trillion-dollar bitcoin bank. This marks another instance of Schiff's ongoing skepticism toward firms deeply invested in cryptocurrency, especially bitcoin. Schiff is a long-term advocate of gold.
  - AMB Crypto, 22 October 2024

• The value of deals by 'angel' investors in the USA fell 64% from 2015 to $400 million in 2023.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 October 2024

• Attention is the basis of our free will, allowing us to direct our minds as we choose. Technology poses a threat to this individual agency, writes Carolyn Dicey Jennings, but may also yield new rewards. Social media harnesses our attention for incentives that are not our own - sublimating it into the interests of the group. We are trading our individual power for collective power, and we need to understand the risks and benefits of doing this.
  - IAI News, 21 October 2024

• The Biden administration said Monday that it would provide up to $325 million in subsidies to Hemlock Semiconductor for a new factory, a move that could help give Democrats a political edge in the swing state of Michigan ahead of election day.
  - Associated Press, 21 October 2024

• 10-year Treasury Bond yields will rise to near or above 5% in the next six months, according to a prediction of T. Rowe Price
  - Bloomberg, 21 October 2024

• Santander launches digital bank in US to gain cheaper funding through new deposits to further fund its $30 billion line of business in auto loans
  - Thomson's Reuters, 21 October 2024

• Cargo on-time rates are dismal. Two shipowners have a plan to fix that. In a new alliance, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd are aiming to cut docking costs and improve on-time performance.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 October 2024

• Nicolas Cage took to the stage at the 25th Newport Beach Film Festival on Sunday to urge up-and-coming actors from giving into pressure from employers opting to use artificial intelligence to change or otherwise manipulate their performance. "They want to take your instruments." [KM: so they do not have to pay humans money.]
  - Deadline, 20 October 2024

• The consulate of Zhōngguó in Mandaly, Myanmar, is bombed, and rebels in Myanmar seize control of a hub of production of rare earth minerals in the state of Kachin
  - Zero Hedge, 20 October 2024

• The "best bromance in tech", between Microsoft and OpenAI, has had a reality check as OpenAI has tried to change its deal with Microsoft and the software maker has tried to hedge its bet on the start-up.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 October 2024

• The defect of political gambling web sites - people betting and not minding to lose their money. A mystery $30 million wave of pro-Trump bets has moved a popular prediction market. Four Polymarket accounts have systematically placed frequent bets on a Trump election victory.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 October 2024

• Electric motors are about to get a major upgrade thanks to Benjamin Franklin. Electrostatic motors are in testing and have massive potential.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 October 2024

• Nokia announced a shake-up of its leadership team that includes putting more focus on geopolitics and government relations, while the head of its technologies business is stepping down
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 October 2024

• The federal district court judge overseeing betting market Kalshi's lawsuitsuit against the United States Commodities Futures Trading Commission "erred at every turn" when it allowed the platform to list and trade election odds, the regulator says. The CFTC said the court had "ignored or disregarded" simple definitions of what constitutes "gaming" or "event-focused" contracts or transactions when allowing Kalshi to list election odds on its platform.
  - Zero Hedge, 18 October 2024

• Bharat is expected to limit imports of laptops, tablets and personal computers after January, two government sources with direct knowledge of the matter said, a move to push companies such as Apple, in order to to increase domestic manufacturing. This plan, if implemented, could disrupt an industry worth $8 billion to $10 billion and reshape the dynamics of the IT hardware market in Bharat, which is heavily reliant on imports.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 18 October 2024

• Shares of Elevance Health fell more than 10% after earnings fell short of Wall Street projections in the latest sign of how medical expenses are squeezing insurers' government businesses. The company says rates it is paid under government program for low-income Americans fall short of what it needs.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 October 2024

• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's largest contract chipmaker, said it's ready to "take prompt action to ensure compliance" after a report claimed the U.S. is probing whether the Taiwanese chipmaker is working with Chinese tech giant Huawei in spite of Washington's sanctions.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 18 October 2024

• $100,000,000,000 - NASA is so far spent nearly $100 billion, much on private (defense) contractors, on its Aremis moon mission without anyone getting off the ground, yet its complexity and outrageous waste are still spiraling upward.
  - Bloomberg, 17 October 2024

• Stripe is in talks to acquire stablecoin platform Bridge for a whopping $1 billion. Bridge has built an API that helps companies accept stablecoins.
  - TechCrunch, 17 October 2024

• Intel is looking to sell at least a minority stake in its Altera unit in a transaction that would raise several billion dollars in cash for the struggling chipmaker. Intel is looking for a deal that values Altera at around $17 billion, its purchase price in 2015.
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 October 2024

• Shares of Netflix fall, rise and settle little changed, after beating earnings estimates and adding 5 million new subscriptions. Most analysts believe the boost from the password crackdown is temporary, and that Netflix will soon need to find another way to grow. The company has yet to see material financial returns from its investment in advertising or video games, and some on Wall Street now worry the stock is overvalued.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 October 2024

• The goal of Netflix to boost earnings pays off. The streaming giant delivered its most profitable quarter ever despite slowing subscriber growth, as the company gave priority to profitability over adding customers.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 October 2024

• Can surging investment into AI eventually cause power prices to rise to a degree to force much tighter interest rates policy from central bankers?
  - Zero Hedge, 17 October 2024

• Why drivers in the world's largest food delivery market, Zhōngguó, are having explosive confrontations with customers. Drivers are working longer hours, and being squeezed financially. A sluggish economy means people are ordering cheaper meals. That cuts into workers' earnings because most work on commission, which forces them to work longer hours to maintain their earnings. In addition, the dominance of two major food delivery platforms (Meituan and Alibaba's Ele.me) enables them to dictate contractual terms, leaving little room for workers to push back on deteriorating work conditions, labor rights watchers say.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 October 2024

• Shares of Lucid Group drop 15% after the electric vehicle maker announced a public offering of nearly 262.5 million shares of its common stock
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 October 2024

• Shares of Nvidia rise to a new record high as the AI bubble is re-inflated. Nvidia's intraday record comes after TSMC beat third-quarter earnings estimates and posted a 54% increase in profit.
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 October 2024

• Shares of Uber drop 3% and Expedia rise 6%, on reports that Uber is interested in buying Expedia
  - Zero Hedge, 17 October 2024

• Shares of TSMC jump 8% after it beats earnings forecasts on "insane" AI demand
  - Zero Hedge, 17 October 2024

• Facebook partners with Blumhouse Productions, the Hollywood company that produces popular horror films, to put its new generative AI video model Movie Gen to the test. If successful, Hollywood companies will be able to fire more people and use AI to generate movies/videos.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 17 October 2024

• Why is Apple so bad at marketing its TV shows? The shows on Apple TV+ boast some of the top stars working today on both sides of the camera. Imagine how popular those shows would be if more people actually knew about them.
  - Fast Company, 16 October 2024

• Apple faces potential Google income loss amid antitrust action, says Jefferies
  - Guru Focus, 16 October 2024

• Can central bankers save semiconductor stocks from uncertainty? This is supportive for the time being, but we may be nearing the limits of central banks' tolerance for aggressive easing.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 October 2024

• Shares of ASML were falling for the second day in a row today. After the chip equipment maker accidentally reported results yesterday, investors seemed to give a thumbs-down to its earnings call this morning that added some color to its downbeat guidance for 2025
  - The Motley Fool, 16 October 2024

• Qualcomm is likely to wait until after the US presidential election in November before deciding whether to pursue an offer to buy Intel, due to concerns about antitrust issues and relations with Zhōngguó
  - Bloomberg, 16 October 2024

• The biggest problem for Nvidia might about to get even worse, if the government of the USA restricts sales to countries such as Zhōngguó
  - The Street, 16 October 2024

• General Motors has agreed to establish a joint venture with Lithium Americas Corp. that includes the automaker supplying $625 million in cash and credit to the Canadian mining business, the companies announced Wednesday. The deal is centered on the development, construction and operation of a lithium carbonate mining operation called Thacker Pass in Humboldt County, Nevada. Lithium is a key component for batteries that power electric vehicles.
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 October 2024

• Babcock Ranch, a climate resistant community passed two hurricane tests. On the west coast of Florida, a town built to weather hurricanes hosted more than 2,000 people during Hurricane Milton.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 October 2024

• More children are depressed and anxious. Is social media, [KM: making Silicon Valley and its investors richer], really causing the depression? Lawmakers have proposed restrictions, but some scientists say it is hard to tell if they will help.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 October 2024

• Millions of people are creating nude images of pretty much anyone in minutes using AI bots in a "nightmarish scenario". "It is really concerning that these tools [KM: which help create billion dollar valuations for rich tech companies] - which are really ruining lives and creating a very nightmarish scenario primarily for young girls and for women -- are still so easy to access and to find on the surface web, on one of the biggest apps in the world".
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 15 October 2024

• Computer processor equipment maker ASML's deep cuts to its 2025 sales forecast sparked a sell-off in chip stocks on Tuesday over worries that global chip demand may be faltering. The weaker outlook could, instead, reflect some overcapacity at chip factories that had already stocked up on ASML's pricey tools during the pandemic and have become better at using them to produce a larger numbers of chips, analysts said.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 15 October 2024

• Shares of semiconductor chip maker ASML plunge 15% after warning of weaker sales in Zhōngguó. ASML's CFO warned that Zhōngguó is expected to account for around 20% of ASML's total revenue for the next year. The Dutch company has previously said that 49% of its sales come from Zhōngguó. The plummet pulled other chip stocks lower, with Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom all falling at least 4% after the news.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 October 2024

• Shares of Ericsson jump 10% on third-quarter beat, growth in North America sales
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 October 2024

• Ericsson said its key networks unit saw an 80% surge in North America sales in the third quarter after winning contracts and as some large customers made selective network investments.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 October 2024

• The Biden administration announced plans to provide up to $750 million in socialist subsidies to Wolfspeed - a manufacturer of advanced computer processors, with the money supporting its new silicon carbide factory in North Carolina that makes the wafers used in advanced computer chips and its factory in Marcy, New York.
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 October 2024

• After selling his last AI startup to Meta, Awais Shafique, Beyond Presence's founder obtains $3.1 million to build lifelike avatars. So far, some 300 companies are on the waitlist for the product, which will likely have early applications in areas like customer service and support, recruitment, sales, and e-learning. All of these are areas in which companies are looking to scale up interactions with users without having to hire and train more people, [KM: and better, fire existing, paid, people].
  - TechCrunch, 14 October 2024

• Google agrees to buy nuclear power from small modular reactors to be built by Kairos Power
  - Zero Hedge, 14 October 2024

• Adobe said it has started publicly distributing an AI model that can generate video from text prompts, joining the growing field of companies trying to upend film and television production using generative artificial intelligence [KM: to eliminate as many human workers as possible]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 October 2024

• Norway, of the most cashless economies in the world, just made it a lot easier to pay with cash
  - Zero Hedge, 14 October 2024

• Some of the Internet's most criminally dubious websites share a physical address in Iceland. An office building in the capital, Reykjavik, has a reputation as a virtual offshore haven for some of the world's worst perpetrators of identity theft, ransomware, disinformation, fraud and other wrongdoing.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 October 2024

• Nu-metal band, Limp Bizkit, is suing the Universal Music Group, alleging that Universal owes the band more than $200 million in unpaid royalties.
  - The Guardian, 13 October 2024

• The government of Indonesia asks Apple and Google to block the Temu app from its app stores, in an effort to protect small businesses in Indonesia from the small-business crushing online retailer Temu
  - Zero Hedge, 13 October 2024

• More misanthropy due to AI - talking with an AI agent, increasingly popular at companies to be able to fire more humans, makes the humans talking to the AI agents feel more lonely
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 October 2024

• How everyone got lost in the endless movie library of Netflix. Ten years after Silicon Valley remade television, it is become clear how the streaming revolution distorted our collective viewing habits -- and important sense of the culture, [KM: to make more billions for rich people].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 October 2024

• AMD's second AI processor faces a tougher marketplace. Strong sales of the AMD's first GPU chips still barely make a dent in the market share of Nvidia.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 October 2024

• The CEO of AI company [mis]Anthropic goes delusional (or is trying to manipulate the AI stock bubble) by saying the latest AI systems will solve all of the world's intractable social problems - in just a few decades. Yet he and everyone else in the bubble still cannot define 'intelligence', which so far does little more than find new ways to fire humans.
  - TechCrunch, 11 October 2024

• How OnlyFan's addictive porn-heavy website has ruin the finances of people, caused divorces and family trauma and extreme unacceptable social behavior
  - Thomson's Reuters, 11 October 2024

• How authoritarian 'founder mode' (the [white male] founder of a company should control everything) attitudes in authoritarian Silicon Valley explain the popularity of the authoritarian Trump in Silicon Valley
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 October 2024

• Silicon Valley and their AI technology is threatening the social safety net of the USA, if not the world
  - American Prospect, 11 October 2024

• Silicon Valley and its AI companies are trying to build 'god'. Shouldn't they get our permission first? The public did not consent to artificial general intelligence.
  - Vox, 11 October 2024

• Sociopaths in Silicon Valley are debating if AI weapons should be allowed to decide to kill
  - Tech Crunch, 11 October 2024

• The International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), the union representing 85,000 dock and maritime workers. ILA officials reached a tentative wage agreement with the United States Maritime Alliance on October 3. This move effectively suspended the three-day job action and extended the existing Master Contract until January 15. The new deal allows both sides about 100 days to negotiate a new agreement, with replacing humans with automation being the primary sticking point.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 October 2024

• Discount shopping giant Temu enters Vietnam and Brunei as app faces ban in Indonesia. The latest expansion initiatives of Temu reflect its efforts to grow in Southeast Asia, home to nearly 700 million people.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 October 2024

• Scientists in Zhōngguó have achieved the world's first effective attack on a widely used encryption method, AES-256, using a quantum computer from D-Wave.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 11 October 2024

• The PC market is not showing many signs of a rebound, despite the hype around AI PCs, with market watchers split over whether unit shipments are up or down slightly.
  - The Register, 10 October 2024

• [KM: To truly earn billions replacing human beings,] OpenAI needs another $25 billion of investments. An IPO? Is the public markets willing to tolerate a massively money-losing company?
  - Spyglass, 10 October 2024

• Sahres of E2open stock price plunge 18% after a second-quarter earnings report were negative enough that investors heavily sold off stock Thursday after management tried to put a positive spin on the company's outlook. The company's forward guidance caused much of the decline.
  - Freight Waves, 10 October 2024

• AMD launched a new artificial-intelligence chip on Thursday that is taking direct aim at the data center graphics processors sold by Nvidia. If AMD's AI chips are seen by developers and cloud giants as a close substitute for Nvidia's products, it could put pricing pressure on Nvidia.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 October 2024

• Companies had fun experimenting with AI. Now they have to show the returns. As tech leaders face business and budgetary pressues, "the window for experimenting is mostly behind us now", said one at WSJ's CIO Summit.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 October 2024

• Baidu seeks to profit from taking jobs from humans, by launching its robotaxi service outside of Zhōngguó. The internet company Baidu has been seeking new growth engines in fields such as non-human-driving technology as its core advertising business has slowed in recent years. [KM: New profits to be found taking jobs from humans.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 October 2024

• Amazon's costly space race is grounding profit margin hopes. Satellite launch costs and a focus on household goods are likely to weigh on Amazon's impressive margin growth.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 October 2024

• The rich former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, says AI firms should build data centers because "we are not organized" to hit ambitious climate goals [true]: "I would rather bet on AI solving the problem [false] than constraining [our profits] and having the problem."
  - Windows Central, 09 October 2024

• Form Energy, a company that is beginning to produce a longer-lasting alternative to lithium batteries, hit a milestone Wednesday with an announcement of $405 million in private, non-socialist, funding. Investment company T. Rowe Price led the funding. GE Vernova, a spin-off of General Electric's energy businesses, and several venture capital firms were also involved, since they have a potentially lucrative busniess model that doesn't need a government socialist subsidy.
  - Associated Press, 09 October 2024

• Crude oil prices minimizes losses after a large build in crude oil supplies, and after a huge drawdown in gasoline supplies
  - Zero Hedge, 09 October 2024

• Nvidia stock aims for new record high as AI boom shows no sign of slowing
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 09 October 2024

• $52,000,000 - Marriott agrees to pay a $52 million penalty to 49 states and the District of Columbia to resolve the harm to its customers from three large data breaches, which took place from 2014 to 2020, affected more than 344 million customers worldwide
  - Thomson's Reuters, 09 October 2024

• Predicted supply deficits for key energy transition metals. The demand for clean energy metals will grow by more than 400% by 2030, according to the ETC... Supply, however, is not on track to keep up with this surging demand.
  - Zero Hedge, 09 October 2024

• What actually drives the breakneck innovative culture of Zhōngguó, and it is not socialist subsidies (as done in the USAM). Zhōngguó's success lies in its user-centric focus and ability to micro-innovate quickly and scale up in a vast, fiercely competitive market - a capitalist market.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 09 October 2024

• I am a doctor. ChatGPT's bedside manner is better than mine. I see my job security "going out the window". These programs are good on the technical side of medicine (symptoms and diseases), but are developing a good bedside manner with patients.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 October 2024

• The battle over robots and automation at ports in the USA is on. Striking dockworkers are back to work -- but disagreement over automation stands in the way of lasting peace.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 October 2024

• The management of Samsung apologizes for falling behind competitors in the AI processor chip race. Samsung's rivals seize ground in memory and contract manufacturing.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 October 2024

• At a warehouse in Brooklyn, robots are reshaping the grocery-delivery business. A pilot program at Save A Lot, a discount grocer, at their fulfillment center, is using robots to help complete orders - eliminating the need for paid humans, and according to the company behind the tech, keep grocery bills down (or corporate profits up).
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 October 2024

• Paltry IPO proceeds spell more trouble for venture capital investors. The reluctance of tech startups to go public led to a weak third quarter for venture capital-backed listings, adding pressure on venture funds that can't exit their investments.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 October 2024

• TikTok is "digital nicotine" meant to get kids addicted, Attorney Generals fume in new suits. A dozen states and the District of Columbia sued TikTok on Tuesday, accusing the social media giant of preying on children's and teens' vulnerabilities for profit.
  - Courthouse News Service, 08 October 2024

• Thirteen states and the District of Columbia sued TikTok on Tuesday, accusing the company of creating an intentionally addictive app that harmed children and teenagers while making false claims to the public about its commitment to safety. They said that TikTok, which is owned by the Zhōngguó-based ByteDance, had relentlessly designed features to prompt heavy, compulsive use of TikTok and that many children were using the app late at night when they would otherwise have been asleep.
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 October 2024

• Thirteen states and the District of Columbia sued TikTok on Tuesday, accusing the company of creating an intentionally addictive app that harmed children and teenagers while making false claims to the public about its commitment to safety. They said that TikTok, which is owned by the Zhōngguó-based ByteDance, had relentlessly designed features to prompt heavy, compulsive use of TikTok and that many children were using the app late at night when they would otherwise have been asleep.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 October 2024

• Researchers at Bit AI have developed Linear-Complexity Multiplication, a method that replaces energy-intensive floating-point multiplications with simpler integer additions in AI computations. They claim that it can reduce have developed Linear-Complexity Multiplication (L-Mul), a method that replaces energy-intensive floating-point multiplications with simpler integer additions in AI computations. It requires a special type of hardware, so the current hardware isn't optimized to take full advantage of it.
  - Emerge, 08 October 2024

• Shares of the unprofitable Roblox fall over 4% after shortseller Hindenburg Research alleges inflated daily active user numbers, and rampant child pornography
  - Zero Hedge, 08 October 2024

• Coltan, a 'conflict' mineral from which tantalum is produced, from militia-controlled mines in Congo is increasingly flowing into global supply chains for smartphones and computers, despite efforts of the USA to stop the use of so-called conflict minerals.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 October 2024

• Sam's Club (a subsidiary of Walmart), one of CostCo's biggest rivals, is determined to dethrone Costco. It could succeed. Sam's Club will be launching an all-digital, store in Texas in mid-October, where ustomers can purchase items without having to wait in line by scanning purchases on their cellphones.
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 August 2024

• Shares of Super Micro surge 25% as the AI bubble causes 100,000 shipments of GPUs in the recent quarter
  - Thomson's Reuters, 07 October 2024

• Did Apple just kill social apps? Some app makers worry that a subtle change to the iPhone's contact-sharing permissions could make it hard for them to get the fast growth they need to compete.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 October 2024

• Google's grip on search slips as TikTok and AI startup mount challenge. As new offerings for advertisers arrive, Google's share of the USA search ad market is projected by one research firm to drop below 50% next year.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 October 2024

• Is the biggest battery maker in Europe about to 'run out of juice'? Northvolt, based in Sweden, is in trouble as technical difficulties, slowing demand for electric vehicles and a dominant Zhōngguó threaten to upend the industry.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 October 2024

• The AI investment plans of Microsoft are getting complicated. Blowout capital spending, financial reporting changes and the relationship with OpenAI are making investors think twice.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 October 2024

• Overdependence on cellphone networks: cellphone service has been restored in some areas after Hurricane Helene, but many people are still unable to communicate by phone, which has hampered relief efforts, worried loved ones and complicated daily life.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 October 2024

• Hedge fund positioning in the Big 7 Tech companies is now the lowest since May 2023
  - Zero Hedge, 05 October 2024

• Meta unveils instant AI video generator that adds sounds. The tech giant is among the many companies building technology that could remake Hollywood (by allowing entertainment companies to fire more human video producers) -- and help spread disinformation.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 October 2024

• This will be your new favorite podcast. The hosts are not human. With this Google tool, you can now listen to a show about any topic you could possibly imagine.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 October 2024

• Kamala Harris's brother-in-law forges business ties -- but makes left nervous. Tony West, a top Uber executive and campaign adviser, is drawing scrutiny as he courts Wall Street and donors.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 October 2024

• Robotaxi day at Tesla is a make or break moment for Elon Musk. Musk will need to convince investors that Tesla is still more than an auto maker, [KM: but instead a company that can profit from replacing paid humans with robots, making the rich (such as Musk) richer].
  - Barron's, 05 October 2024

• Waymo and Hyundai team up [KM: to help people lose their jobs], as the Waymo chooses the Hyundai Ioniq 5 vehicle for its new fleet of non-paid robotaxis, taxis that don't need paid human drivers
  - Carscoops, 05 October 2024

• Amazon has shut down three more stores featuring its Just Walk Out technology, but the company says it remains committed to building out that technology as an offering for third-party merchants [KM: to help them eliminate more human workers].
  - TechCrunch, 04 October 2024

• The investment crisis plaguing venture capital funds. A 'go-go' decade morphs with oppourtunity and danger, as valuations for start-ups are too high relative to their potential for a payoff, and the era of massive socialist government subsidies ends zero-interest rate conditions disappear
  - Spyglass, 04 October 2024

• We have entered the AI grift era. Buoyed by big valuations, companies like PearAI are trying to capitalize on the massive hype around artificial intelligence -- sometimes in a dishonest way.
  - Fast Company, 04 October 2024

• Facebook's new "Movie Gen" AI system can create a video from a single photo. MovieGen is a new suite of AI models designed to create and manipulate video, audio, and images, including creating a realistic video from a single photo of a person. The company claims the models outperform other video-synthesis models when evaluated by humans, pushing us closer to a future where anyone can synthesize a full video of any subject on demand. [KM: One of Facebook's efforts to make rich people richer by eliminating the need to pay humans.]
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 04 October 2024

• The more sophisticated AI models get, the more likely they are to lie. [KM: Do these AI companies need to profit from replacing lying humans with lying computers?]
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 04 October 2024

• $40,000,000 - Officials cast doubt on a dementia drug being tested by Cassava Sciences, but human trials continue. Why? The SEC alleged that the company had made misleading statements about the results of clinical trial data, and its Cassava Sciences agreed to a $40 million settlement. Some experts wonder why clinical trials have not been stopped.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 October 2024

• OpenAI adds $4 billion credit line on top of $6.6 billion investment round [KM: a lot of people are going to have to be fired to provide a return on that investment]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 October 2024

• SEC sends a message to startups about the 'Fake It' culture - it could be criminal. The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a series of recent enforcement actions, is driving home a message to the startup world: fake it till you make it can be fraud.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 October 2024

• Shares of Rivian Automotive fell about 8% during premarket trading Friday after the electric vehicle startup lowered its annual production forecast for 2024
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 October 2024

• Banks to join SWIFT Digital Asset trials in 2025. SWIFT said it is uniquely positioned to interlink the fragmented digital asset landscape with its forthcoming digital currency trials in 2025.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 October 2024

• Zhōngguó to restore the Tanzania-Zambia railway back to full speed with US$1 billion investment. Beijing will refurbish the 50-year-old African line as the USA and Europe bankroll their own rail project in the race for critical minerals
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 03 October 2024

• How OpenAI spends billions of dollars (much spent on services from Microsoft which host's OpenAI's infrastructure), but profits to repay investors "are still somewhere over the horizon".
  - Axios, 03 October 2024

• On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration announced that the supply shortages of Eli Lilly's popular weight-loss and diabetes drugs have been resolved. These drugs have been in short supply since the anti-obesity drug craze erupted several years ago. Now, an ample supply of GLP-1 drugs could signal that the 'fat bubble' in equity markets has popped. Shares of telehealth firm Hims & Hers Health plunged nearly 12% in premarket trading in New York.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 October 2024

• Eli Lilly's weight-loss and diabetes drug shortages are over, FDA says. The removal of Zepbound and Mounjaro from the FDA's shortage list could lead to restrictions on pharmacies making custom-made versions.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 October 2024

• Top Executices exit Trump Media amid allegations of the CEO's mismanagement and retaliation. Several people involved with Trump's company, operator of Truth Social, believe the departures were retaliation following internal complaints about CEO Devin Nunes to the company board.
  - ProPublica, 03 October 2024

• Shares of EVgo rise over 50% after the Biden administration offered a conditional loan guarantee of up to $1.05 billion to expand public electric vehicle-charging infrastructure across the country
  - Thomson's Reuters, 03 October 2024

• The CEO of Google envisions atomic power for AI data centers as Big Tech seeks nuclear revival to achieve net zero impact on the environment
  - Zero Hedge, 03 October 2024

• 5 days with Elon Musk on Twitter/X: deepfakes, falsehoods and lots of memes. Almost a third of 171 posts last week from the X owner were false, misleading or missing vital context.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 October 2024

• A venture capital firm does something rare: give money back. CRV, based in Silicon Valley, plans to return to investors $275 million because the market for mature start-ups has soured.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 October 2024

• A married New Jersey couple who were severely injured in an accident during an Uber ride cannot sue Uber because they and their daughter agreed to arbitration when they accepted the terms of service for a separate Uber Eats order. Profits for Uber, social costs paid by someone else - authoritarian socialism.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 02 October 2024

• Shares of Tesla decline a bit, after report 462,903 deliveries in Q3, missing analyst estimates
  - Zero Hedge, 02 October 2024

• Shares of Tesla decline a bit, after report 462,903 deliveries in Q3, missing analyst estimates
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 02 October 2024

• Daron Acemoglu, an economist and professor at MIT, argues that AI can only replace 5% of humans at work, which he predicts will cause a stock market crash as corporate earnings don't increase for overzealous companies that have invested billions into the technology. "A lot of money is being wasted. You are not going o get an economic revolution out of that 5%."
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 02 October 2024

• Chowdeck is 'hungry' for the food delivery market in Nigeria. One day, it wants to be a 'super-app for Africa'.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 02 October 2024

• Since Elon Musk bought Twitter/X for $44 billion in two years ago, it has lost 80% of its valuation, a loss of over $30 billion, due to the mismanagement of Elon Musk, a supporter of Trump
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 02 October 2024

• Coldplay tickets for $11,000? Uproar in Bharat after tickets sold out in minutes and resold for outrageously high prices.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 01 October 2024

• The downturn in the diamond market is nothing short of breathtaking. It is driven mostly by a surge in low-cost lab-grown diamond supply, which is capturing a larger market share of the gem industry as cash-strapped consumers gravitate to artificial stones. Lab-grown diamonds emerged victorious so far in 2024, accounting for 56.8% of diamonds sold, while natural diamonds trailed with 43.2%. Natural diamond prices have plunged to the lowest on record, with data going back to early 2002. The Diamond Standard index has lost 45% of its value since March 2022.
  - Zero Hedge, 01 October 2024

• Meat substitutes are still a tiny fraction of the meat market in the USA
  - Zero Hedge, 01 October 2024

• Verizon outage reports are surging on Downdetector, with issues being reported nationwide. Additionally, X users complain that their smartphones using the mobile carrier are stuck on 'SOS' mode.
  - Zero Hedge, 30 September 2024

• One negative threat of global heating to the technology industry: "The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two mines that are the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers." There are no alternative sources known. "A fire in 2008 at one of the main quartz facilities in Spruce Pine for a time all but shut off the supply of high-purity quartz to the world market, sending shivers through the industry."
  - Zero Hedge, 30 September 2024

• When Hurricane Helene hit, this disaster-proof neighborhood in Cortez, Florida, kept their lights on. Housing designed for strong hurricanes, and secure solar panels on the roof, proved themselves during the hurricane.
  - Fast Company, 30 September 2024

• Lithium-ion batteries just keep getting cheaper, from $290 per kilowatt-hour of storage in 2014 to $78 in 2024
  - Zero Hedge, 30 September 2024

• Apple's stock closes in on record high after upbeat call on iPhone availability. JPMorgan says longer initial lead times for iPhone Pro models appear to be am 'aberration'.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 30 September 2024

• Silicon Valley criminals renegades pollute the sky to save the planet. Some restless entrepreneurs are releasing pollutants in the sky to try to cool the planet. Universities are pouring millions of dollars into scientific research, which is needed first. Experts say that broader efforts to disrupt the delicate interactions between the Earth's atmosphere, ocean, land and sea ice could result in catastrophic unintended consequences. For example, blocking sunlight could interfere with the monsoon season, which is critical for agriculture, income and food supply in Bharat. But animated by Silicon Valley's "move fast and break things' [such as society and the environment], entrepreneurs are rushing ahead to profit now.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 September 2024

• Across the USA, electric utilities are worried about expanding the overburdened power grid, citing high costs and concerns about commitment from AI data center projects that still don't seem to be too productive.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 September 2024

• How Telegram became a hunting ground for criminals - and cops. Even murder and terrorist plots are often discussed publicly on the app, giving authorities critical leads.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 September 2024

• Shares of NIO are up as high as 12%, after it secures a $1.9 billion investment
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 September 2024

• [KM: Get ready for the firing of more humans:] ING's new AI model is "definitely" outperforming humans in pricing currencies. "... it has freed up [allows us to fire] basically a whole person. This model completely takes care of that and has performed way beyond our expectations, it has definitely outperformed a human."
  - Bloomberg, 29 September 2024

• The International Longshoreman's association is demanding higher wages and total ban automation, as it plans to strike at all East Coast ports. The union is demanding higher wages and a total ban on the automation at ports regarding cranes, gates and moving containers in the loading and unloading of freight. Critics argue such as prohibition will make the USA globally uncompetitive. The union complains that port operators, collectively the United States Maritime Alliance, "refuses to address a half-century of wage subjugation where Ocean Carriers profits skyrocketed from millions to mega-billion dollars, while ILA longshore wages remained flat" .
  - Fox News, 29 September 2024

• Nuclear power is the new trade in the AI bubble. What could possibly go wrong? Widespread use of AI by consumers is burning up energy -- and using other precious environmental resources, like water to cool the power plants and data centers -- that would be difficult to justify if people just thought about itcenters energy. "This is a problem that is getting bigger and bigger", the recipe of bubbles.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 September 2024

• After years of showing touch screens down the throats of consumers, electronic products now have more buttons. Product designers are embracing how users actually feel after years of pushing flat and sleek.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 September 2024

• Intel has a great new processor chip for the first time in years, the Lunar Lake, designed for mobile devices and laptops
  - Barron's, 28 September 2024

• Uber and Lyft are spending nearly $1 million to oppose a proposed law which calls for a new tax on the gross receipts of ride-hailing companies to help fund the city's Muni public transportation system.
  - SF Gate, 27 September 2024

• AI avatars are now doing job interviews - [KM: allowing more humans to be fired for human resource departments]
  - 404 Media, 27 September 2024

• The European Union seeks to halt the business of Zhōngguó's fast fashion online retail giants, Shein and Temu. The European Commission considers punitive actions to curb explosive market growth of fashion merchants from Zhōngguó deemed a "direct threat" to fashion companies in Europe.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 27 September 2024

• $102,000,000 - Facebook hits with a $102 million privacy fine from the European Union over 2019 password security lapse. It stupidly stored over half a billion user passwords in plain text for years, with some engineers having access to this data for over a decade.
  - Associated Press, 27 September 2024

• Intel's semiconductor foundry shake-up does not go far enough. Putting Intel's business of making semiconductor chips for other companies into a subsidiary feels like a hedge. It is better for Intel to get out of the business.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 September 2024

• $1,500,000 - General Motor's Cruise division to pay a penalty of $1.5 million, after failing to fully report a crash invoving a pedestrian and one of its automated driving vehicles
  - Associated Press, 27 September 2024

• [KM: To hasten the elimination of humans in the film industry], AI startup Runway (one investor is Nvidia) says that it is giving filmmakers up to $1 million if they use AI to make their movies
  - Variety, 26 September 2024

• Software developers gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants
  - CIO, 26 September 2024

• Shares of Super Micro plummet 15% after DOJ reportedly opens probe into company
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 September 2024

• Global semiconductor chip stocks rallied on Thursday after memory semiconductor maker Micron posted revenue guidance that topped expectations and boosted its share price 15%. Samsung closed more than 4% higher while SK Hynix closed up more than 9%. Sahres of Tokyo Electron jumped 8%. Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML rose more than 4% in early trade in Europe.
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 September 2024

• Google files an antitrust complaint in the European Union against Microsoft. Google argues that Microsoft is abusing its market power in enterprise software to push customers to use its cloud-computing service.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 September 2024

• $30,000,000 - A New York federal court has ordered the operators of shadow library LibGen to pay $30 million in copyright infringement damages. Library Genesis, often shortened to LibGen, is one of the longest-running shadow libraries online. It provides free access to a vast collection of millions of books and academic papers that typically require payment.
  - Torrent Freak, 25 September 2024

• $193,000 - DoNotPay has to pay $193,000 for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC rules. You can't "sue anyone with a click of a button" without testing it first. The FTC announced that it took action to stop DoNotPay from making bogus claims after learning that the AI startup conducted no testing "to determine whether its AI s output was equal to the level of a human lawyer." DoNotPay also did not "hire or retain any attorneys" to help verify AI outputs or validate DoNotPay's legal claims.
  - Zero Hedge, 25 September 2024

• A homeowner in Florida was dropped by his insurer over drone images of his roof, with no in-person human inspection. "Policyholders in Florida have no protection from any predatory, arbitrary or capricious decisions of insurance companies."
  - MoneyWise, 25 September 2024

• Elon Musk was right - OpenAI eliminates control by a non-profit board, as it transforms into a $150 billion for-profit corporation, despite "thou shalt not" lies in the past that it would remain non-profit. "Altman assured Musk that the non-profit structure guaranteed neutrality and a focus on safety. But as it turns out, this was all hot-air philanthropy, i.e., "thou shalt not" lies - the hook for Altman's long con/scam."
  - Zero Hedge, 25 September 2024

• Leaks show Rossiya has secret project to develop advanced drones in Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 25 September 2024

• The recent rapid approval by the Federal Communications Commission of billionaire activist George Soros' acquisition of more than 200 Audacy radio stations has ignited controversy, happening just weeks before the US election in November. The deal, which saw Soros funnel $400 million into the bankrupt Audacy network, has raised concerns because it involves foreign capital that exceeds the typical FCC cap on foreign ownership of radio stations in the USA.
  - Zero Hedge, 25 September 2024

• Shares of SK Hynix jumped 8.4% on Thursday morning after it said it began mass production of a 12-layer version of the latest generation of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, to meet demand from the current artificial intelligence boom
  - Thomson's Reuters, 25 September 2024

• Microsoft's nuclear deal sparks a meltup for uranium miners
  - Zero Hedge, 25 September 2024

• A London newspaper, the Evening Standard, plans to use AI to revive a dead art critic (Brian Sewell), while firing people at the same time. Given the lousy art generated by AI, how much more lousy will be art critiques generated by AI? Newspapers should be reporting on the AI industry, not partnering with it.
  - Gizmodo, 25 September 2024

• BlackRock predicts that technology giants will demand a 50% increase in energy supplies in Asia to power their much useless AI systems, obtaining more billions they don't need while worsening the environment
  - Zero Hedge, 25 September 2024

• Rossiya signs satellite deal with three military juntas in three West Africa countries. The partnership between Rossiya's space agency and the governments of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger deepens these countries' turn toward the Kremlin in their effort to fight off Islamist insurgencies.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 September 2024

• Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation on Monday giving California school districts two years to begin banning or restricting cellphone use during school hours, an initiative that is intended to address rising concerns over social media and children's mental health.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 September 2024

• After years of warnings, Telegram founder cedes to police requests about users. Following the arrest of founder Pavel Durov in France, the messaging and social-media app has reversed course and is regularly turning over phone numbers and other information about users suspected of illegal activity.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 September 2024

• TikTok to shut down short-lived music-streaming service. The service is set to close in November, ending a yearlong attempt to compete against Spotify and Apple.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 September 2024

• As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing poeple. IBM's plan to replace thousands of people with AI presently looks more like outsourcing jobs to Bharat, at the expense of organizational competency.
  - The Register, 24 September 2024

• Mysterious magma in extinct volcanoes may be filled with rare earth metal ores needed by the technology industry
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 24 September 2024

• Electronic warfare worries airlines, pilots and air-safety officials. Hundreds of daily flights around the world are running into GPS spoofing, a hazard that poses new risks for pilots and passengers.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 September 2024

• Micron needs a new memory boost. Worries about PC and smartphone demand have pushed down the memory-chip maker's stock, offsetting an AI lift.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 September 2024

• The economic scam behind Shein's rise comes under threat: tax-free, duty-free shipping. Proposed regulations from around the world would squeeze the Zhōngguó-founded bargain site founded in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 September 2024

• Just days after a Wall Street Journal report suggested that chip giant Qualcomm floated a takeover of struggling chipmaker Intel, a new report says Apollo Global Management has proposed a multibillion-dollar investment to support Intel's turnaround efforts
  - Zero Hedge, 23 September 2024

• The future of finance? Fintech startup launches AI ETF that emulates Buffet, Druckenmiller, and Tepper. The Intelligent Livermore ETF (LIVR) is built around portfolio decisions generated by three prominent large language models (LLMs); ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude - dubbed the fund's "investment committee". AI returns are not great - of the 16 AI-focused ETFs tracked by Bloomberg Intelligence in the U.S., only one, the Franklin Intelligent Machines ETF (IQM), is currently outperforming the S&P 500 in 2024, with a 19% return compared to the stock index's 18%.
  - Zero Hedge, 23 September 2024

• Why app-based jobs (such as Uber and Lyft) don't pay like they used to. Things are not going to get better for workers/serfs as gig economy companies face pressure to cut costs and increase revenue, said one analyst. An analyst described pursuing gig work as a career as "the biggest mistake of your life". Most workers whose gig involves driving are probably actually losing money due to fuel expenses and the deterioration of their vehicles. [KM: But the shareholders and executives of these billion-dollar companies are doing quite well.]
  - Zero Hedge, 23 September 2024

• Using the oceans to fight global heating by helping the oceans absorb more carbon. One solution, costs are still high, is known as alkalinity enhancement, which involves adding limestone, magnesium oxide or another alkaline substance to rivers and oceans, changing their chemistry in a way that makes them soak up more carbon dioxide.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 September 2024

• Semiconductors giants in Asia, TSMC in Taiwan and Samsung in South Korea, discuss building megafactories in the Middle East. Potential projects in the United Arab Emirates could be worth more than $100 billion, though major hurdles remain.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 September 2024

• Severin Schwan, chairman of the board of Roche, criticized the socialist industrial subsidies that the USA and European governments are using to boost their manufacturing industries against competition from Zhōngguó and other nations -- as a "waste of money"
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 September 2024

• Are consumers ready for laboratory-grown meat? Will such meat be better for the environment while economically viable? Worldwide, 80 billion animals are slaughtered every year for meat. Raising all those animals has already claimed most of the farmland in the world. It has led to zoonotic diseases and vast deforestation. It has polluted air and water and spewed planet-heating gasses into the atmosphere.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 September 2024

• Shares of Intel rise 6% on a report of interest by Qualcomm to acquire Intel
  - Zero Hedge, 20 September 2024

• The business failure of 23andMe, which sells DNA testing kits, has never made a profit, and hasn't found something to sell to customers beyond the initial genetic testing
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 20 September 2024

• Shares of nuclear energy companies rise after the owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear energy plant announces it is investing $1.6 billion to revive the plant and has agreed to sell all of its output to Microsoft, which is seeking power for its data centers. Nuclear startup company Oklo, backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, is surging pre-market, up over 10% as investors get their first taste of what will likely be the primary source of power for AI in the decades to come.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 September 2024

• A study by the FTC finds "vast surveillance" of social media users by billion-dollar corporations. Facebook, Google'YouTube and other sites collected more data than most users realized, a new report by the Federal Trade Commission finds. The companies earn more billions they don't need from the surveillance data by feeding it into advertising that targets specific users by demographics, according to the report. The companies also failed to protect users, especially children and teens.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 September 2024

• A study by the FTC finds "vast surveillance" of social media users by billion-dollar corporations. Facebook, Google'YouTube and other sites collected more data than most users realized, a new report by the Federal Trade Commission finds. The companies earn more billions they don't need from the surveillance data by feeding it into advertising that targets specific users by demographics, according to the report. The companies also failed to protect users, especially children and teens.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 September 2024

• Jobs at technology companies are disappearing and are not returning soon. Employment for software engineers has cooled as resources shift toward developing artificial intelligence, AI developed in part by the non-unemployed software engineers. AI companies need profits from getting engineers fired to justify their [KM: socially criminal] valuations.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 September 2024

• Facebook and other tech companies whine to the European Union, a whine that is a "thou shalt not" lie, by lying that regulations on AI risk hampering innovation and economic growth.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 September 2024

• A filmmaker in Bharat, Ram Gopal Varma, announces he is abandoning the use of human musicians for AI-generated music. He welcomes a future with no musicians who are human, [KM: the goal of billion dollar AI corporations]. But with no jobs, who are going to buy their AI products?
  - TechCrunch, 19 September 2024

• Youtube ads can now harass people by playing ads even when their screens are paused
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 19 September 2024

• Amazon Ads announces a new [KM: kill-more-human-jobs] feature that uses generative AI technology to make it easier for advertisers to create, without paying humans, more interesting and relevant video ads for customers. The new feature, Video Generator, creates visually rich video content in a matter of minutes and at no additional cost - such as for paying human video producers. Using a single product image, Video generator curates custom AI-generated videos tailored to a product's distinct selling proposition and features.
  - Amazon, 19 September 2024

• Will Intel become yet another cautionary tale of the unseen costs of socialist state subsidies?
  - Cato Institute, 19 September 2024

• Elon Musk's X and Starlink face nearly $1 million in daily fines for alleged ban evasion in Brazil
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 September 2024

• Olive Garden-owner Darden Restaurants said on Thursday it has entered into a delivery deal with Uber Technologies, sending its shares up about 7% in premarket trading
  - Zero Hedge, 19 September 2024

• SMIC - the semiconductor chipmaker in Zhōngguó at the heart of the USA-Zhōngguó technology war. Efforts by the Beijing-backed Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC, to break through innovation barriers have landed it in a geopolitical tech battle.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 September 2024

• $985,320 - GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen has settled an alleged antitrust-law violation with the Federal Trade Commission in connection with the acquisition of a chunk of Wells Fargo voting securities. After acquiring the shares, Cohen had periodic communications with Wells Fargo's leadership regarding ways to improve the bank's business and to advocate for a potential board seat, the FTC said.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 September 2024

• Wordfreq, a project for analyzing the usage of the human language and how it changes in time, is shut down because "generative AI has polluted the data". "I do not think that anyone has reliable data about post-2021 language use by humans."
  - 404 Media, 19 September 2024

• Google's YouTube, not Disney nor Amazon, might be the real competition for Netflix
  - Sherwood News, 18 September 2024

• Lions Gate Entertainment, the entertainment company behind "The Hunger Games" and "Twilight" plans to start using generative AI in the creation of its new movies and TV shows, a sign of the emerging technology's advance in Hollywood that will allow more paid-humans to be replaced by non-paid computers
  - Wall Street Journal, 18 September 2024

• Cisco in August fired 5,600 people, after firing 4,000 people in February
  - TechCrunch, 18 September 2024

• [KM: The misanthropy of mostly useless AI (except for new crimes)]. Noisy, water and power hungry, data centers for AI are becoming a nightmare for the Americans who happen to live near one of the more than 5,000 data centers in the USA. People who live near one Northern Virginia center have complained that the mechanical whir of the fleet of industrial fans needed to cool the sensitive computer equipment inside can sound like a leaf blower that never turns off. Cooling the heavy equipment also diverts great volumes of water even in places where it is scarce. And some of the costs of powering the centers are socialistically shouldered by utility customers, in the form of hundreds of dollars a year added to household energy bills. Residents rarely learn how data centers may affect their lives until it is too late. Big tech operators are aggressively deploying nondisclosure agreements to force local officials, construction workers and others to keep these projects under wraps.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 September 2024

• The FDIC says that banks need to keep a record of their fintech customers. Banks holding customer funds for money management apps should keep track of the identities and balances of their customers, the agency says.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 September 2024

• BlackRock and Microsoft partner on a massive new AI infrastructure fund. The Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership will seek to raise $30 billion to invest in data centers and infrastructure. Where will the profits come to obtain a return on this $30 billion investment, other than through the firing of humans. [KM: And how much socialist subsidies (consumers paying in part for the power) will this partnership of billion dollar companies rely on?]a
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 September 2024

• [KM: Another social harm of the recklessness of AI companies]: Starling Bank, an online-only lender, said fraudsters are capable of using AI to replicate a person's voice from just three seconds of audio found in, for example, a video the person has posted online. Scammers can then identify the person's friends and family members and use the AI-cloned voice to stage a phone call to ask for money. [KM: But voice cloning with AI earns AI companies more money, victims be damned.]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 18 September 2024

• AI datacenters are more than 600 percent worse for the environment that Big Tech companies claimed. If these companies were one country, their actual emissions would rank them as the 33rd biggest emitter in the world.
  - The Byte, 17 September 2024

• $15,000,000 - The Pokémon Company wins a $15 million copyright lawsuit in Zhōngguó against a gaming company in Zhōngguó that appeared to blatantly use Pokémon characters in its game.
  - IGN News, 17 September 2024

• The new AI strategy for Salesforce acknowledges that AI will take jobs away from paid-humans. The software giant will charge $2 per conversation held by its new non-human agents -- generative AI built to handle tasks like customer service or scheduling sales meetings without the need for paid-human supervision.
  - Bloomberg, 17 September 2024

• The USA and Nihon nearing "breakthrough" deal to restrict exports of semiconductor technology to Zhōngguó. One of Washington's primary objectives is to make it much more challenging for Chinese firms to acquire critical chipmaking tools, such as those from ASML in the Netherlands and Tokyo Electron in Nihon. One of the top concerns, while the Biden administration shines the beacon of democracy that continues to authoritarianily bully its allies, is the real possibility that Beijing unleashes severe economic retaliation against Nihon.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 September 2024

• Google on Tuesday said it would halt plans to develop a major $200 million data center in Chile to address environmental concerns, a decision reflecting growing worries about the impact of power-thirsty projects around the world that water from humans and gives it to computers.
  - Associated Press, 17 September 2024

• Online returns fraud finds a home on Telegram, costing retailers billions of dollars. Efforts to exploit retailers' product return programs are growing more organized through websites and messaging apps.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 September 2024

• Big Brother Larry: billionaire authoritarian Larry Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it will keep everyone scared into behaving according to authorities ... such as Ellison. From police to citizens, all will be "on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting". Which won't work without having a police state, controlled by billionaires such as .. Ellison.
  - The Register, 16 September 2024

• $45,000,000 - IBM wins $45 million from Zynga in a patent lawsuit involving interactive games technology
  - Law360, 16 September 2024

• New algorithm helps enhance AI LLM models to collaborate for smarter, more efficient solutions, [KM: creating more opportunities to fire paid-humans from their decision-making jobs]
  - TechXplore, 16 September 2024

• Bitcoin and Big Tech (Apple, Nvidia) are battered down, while bond yields and oil rise, as expectations for an interest rate reduction by the Fed of 0.5% soar
  - Zero Hedge, 16 September 2024

• Shares of Apple are down 6% in two weeks, on an analysis of pre-orders for iPhone 16 that are showing weak demand for iPhone 16 Pros
  - Zero Hedge, 16 September 2024

• Shares of Intel are up 6% post-market, after the CEO reveals a new deal with Amazon Web Services, plant delays in Poland and Germany, and firing 15,000 people by year-end
  - Zero Hedge, 16 September 2024

• Shares of Intel are up 6% post-market, after the CEO reveals a new deal with Amazon Web Services, plant delays in Poland and Germany, and firing 15,000 people by year-end
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 September 2024

• Intel lost out (AMD won) on a contract to design and fabricate Sony's PlayStation 6 chip in 2022, which dealt a significant blow to its effort to build its fledgling contract manufacturing business.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 16 September 2024

• Zhōngguó increases its reserves of rare earth metals with the discovery of 5 million tons of key metals in the southwestern province of Sichuan.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 September 2024

• The valuation of Google has fallen as analysts are less optimistic that dual antitrust cases will leave the company unscathed.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 September 2024

• Nvidia holds the key to the stock market. But is it worth this much?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 September 2024

• Online dating caused a rise in income inequality in the USA, research paper shows. People marry more like themselves, including economically.
  - Bloomberg, 14 September 2024

• Major American retailers including Amazon and Walmart have been quietly exploring shifting toward a business model that would ship more goods directly to consumers from factories in Zhōngguó and and allow them to fire more paid-humans working in their retail stores and logistics centers. The plans have been driven by the rocketing popularity of e-commerce platforms like Shein and Temu, which have won over consumers with their low prices. But that trend toward changing business models may have been disrupted on Friday, when the Biden administration abruptly moved to close off de minimis eligibility for many imports from Zhōngguó, including most clothing items. But retailers have been increasingly bypassing that process by individually packaging and shipping items directly from Zhōngguó to consumers under the de minimis law. With that method, the shopper is the official importer, rather than the retailer or e-commerce platform, and the value of the shipments largely stays under an $800 threshold.
  - Bloomberg, 14 September 2024

• Nihon tries to reclaim its clout as a global technology leader. Semiconductor chip companies in Nihon are relying on billions of dollars of socialist subsidies, and collaborating with foreign firms as part of new government policies that look outward.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 September 2024

• Truck maker Volvo delays construction of battery plant in Sweden. Weakening appetite for EVs, especially in Europe, has seen battery demand wane just as investments have increased.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 September 2024

• How Oracle and its database became a powerhouse in AI
  - Barron's, 14 September 2024

• NextNav's authoritarian and callous land-grab to privatize the sprectrum around 900 MHz. NextNav wants the FCC to reconfigure the 902-928 MHz band to grant them exclusive rights to the majority of the spectrum for its PNT network. But NextNav itself admits there is also little commercial demand for PNT. GPS works, is free, and is widely supported by manufacturers. If Nextnav has a grand plan to implement a new and improved standard, it was left out of their FCC proposal. What NextNav did include however is its intent to resell their exclusive bandwidth access to mobile 5G networks. This isn't about national security or innovation; it's about a rent-seeker monopolizing access to a public resource. If NextNav truly believes in their GPS backup vision, they should look to parts of the spectrum already allocated for 5G.
  - EFF, 13 September 2024

• OpenAI, maybe worth over $100 billion, acknowledges that its new AI models increase the risk of terrorists using the models to create bioweapons [KM: obvious to prevent from the outset, but wasn't prevented in the love of obtaining billions of more money]
  - Financial Times, 13 September 2024

• $23,000,000 - DNA testing giant 23andMe has agreed to pay $30 million to settle a lawsuit over a data breach that exposed the personal information of 6.4 million customers in 2023
  - Bleeping Computer, 13 September 2024

• As Microsoft (and other megarich tech companies) attempts to buoy its reputation as an AI leader in climate innovation, the company is also, and hypocritically, selling its AI to fossil-fuel companies. These deals also show how Microsoft can use the vagaries of AI to talk out of both sides of its mouth, courting the fossil-fuel industry while asserting its environmental bona fides. Microsoft has continued to seek business from the fossil-fuel industry; documents related to its overall pitch strategy show that it has sought energy-industry business in part by marketing the abilities to optimize and automate drilling and to maximize oil and gas production.
  - The Atlantic, 13 September 2024

• Shares of Trump Media soared 19% after Trump announced that he is not selling shares in his controversial social media company
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 13 September 2024

• Shares of MicroStrategy rise 8% after the company increases its bitcoin holdings to $14.6 billion
  - Zero Hedge, 13 September 2024

• In a first, researchers scale up cultured chicken -- and dramatically curb its cost. Researchers grew chicken meat cells at four times the density they are grown in regular bioreactor systems -- bringing it down to the price of organic meat.
  - Anthropocene Magazine, 13 September 2024

• The stunning economic success of OnlyFans. And because it doesn't use the AppStore of Apple for sales, OnlyFans can give its content providers 80% of revenues, while still being quite profitable for the owners of OnlyFans.
  - MatthewBall.co, 13 September 2024

• Satellite television is in trouble. DirecTV'ss dispute with Disney shows why. While the cable TV business is declining quickly, satellite TV is decaying even faster. Unlike cable TV, basic satellite TV technology does not allow viewers to watch content on demand. Instead it offers a large menu of shows and movies, with the option to record with a DVR. But satellite TV still resembles a traditional broadcaster and is out-of-step with the current era of streaming video.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 September 2024

• OpenAI's fund-raising talks could value company at $150 billion. The San Francisco start-up hopes to raise $6.5 billion as part of an aggressive push for more investment. [KM: How many humans will have to lose their jobs to create the earnings needed to justify this bubble valuation?]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 September 2024

• Verizon Communications will book a third-quarter severance charge of up to $1.4 billion after roughly 4,800 employees accepted a buyout offer
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 September 2024

• Cybersecurity giant Fortinet has confirmed it suffered a data breach after a threat actor claimed to steal 440GB of files from the company's Microsoft Sharepoint server. Fortinet is one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the world, selling secure networking products like firewalls, routers, and VPN devices. [Apparently, it doesn't use its own equipment].
  - Bleeping Computer, 12 September 2024

• Australia plans to fine social media companies that spread misinformation up to 5% of global revenue. Social media companies will have to establish codes of conduct, but if they fail to do so, they will be fined.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 12 September 2024

• FoodTech companies are making progress with beanless coffee. On the plus side, coffee cultivation is currently the sixth largest cause of deforestation, and will get worse as consumption rises in Bharat and Zhōngguó. On the misanthropic side, coffee growing provides livelihoods and income to many smallholder farming families globally, he further notes. The conundrum is if they move away from growing coffee, they will likely instead turn to growing more coca - which has similar deforestation issues.
  - BBC, 12 September 2024

• Interactive Brokers said today it will launch wagering on US election outcomes on Monday, Sept. 16 after a federal court ruled in favor of Kalshi, a prediction market operator that sought to offer event contracts on US elections.
  - Casino.org, 12 September 2024

• More criminal incompetence from richly-paid executives: credit card processing service Slim CD, popular in the U.S. and Canada, has revealed a massive data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 1.7 million customers. The hack, which went undetected for almost a year, has raised serious concerns about data security in the financial sector.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 September 2024

• Shares of Moderna plunge 15% on plans to reduce costs by $1.1 billion by 2027 as it charts a path forward after the rapid decline of its Covid business. Moderna is also deprioritizing certain parts of its pipeline, which involves pausing work on some products and scrapping others.
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 September 2024

• Shares of Moderna plunge 11% after the company revealed new plans to slash $1.1 billion in expenses by 2027 to steer toward profitability. This comes a little over a month after investors were left disappointed following management's outlook cut on slumping vaccine sales amid a sliding Covid business.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 September 2024

• Time for the AI laggard? Copper breaking above the 200 day moving average as it trades above the negative trend line that has been in place since the "euphoria" top we saw earlier this year.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 September 2024

• Will automation replace jobs? Port workers may strike over it. A contract covering longshore workers on the East and Gulf Coasts will expire at the end of September, but talks have been stalled over the use of equipment that can function without paid-human operators.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 September 2024

• PwC is firing 1,800 people in first formal cuts since 2009. The Big Four accounting firm is in the process of cutting employees primarily in its U.S. advisory and products and technology operations.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 September 2024

• Rogue WHOIS server gives researcher superpowers no one should ever have The ".mobi" top-level-domain managers changed the location of its WHOIS server. No one got the memo.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 11 September 2024

• Crazy day in the markets: first the SP500 declines after Core CPI data comes in higher than expected pushing down odds of an interest rate reduction; then Nvidia CEO Jensen speaks at a conference and states that there is "great demand for AI chips", sending the SP500 up sharply, and sending up Nvidia's stock by 9%
  - Zero Hedge, 11 September 2024

• Two virtual AI avatars named 'James' and 'Rose' have taken my old job. A local newspaper in Hawaii has turned to AI-generated presenters to draw in new audiences. A company, Caledo, creates AI software to replace humans with AI reporters and broadcasters.
  - Wired, 11 September 2024

• McDonald's rolls out self-serve cash kiosks that could make eliminate the need for paid-human cashiers. Existing kiosks can handle credit cards, not cash. The new kiosks can handle cash, eliminating the need for people to be paid. Taco Bell and Panera have used similar self-order screens at their restaurants. [KM: Anything to make the rich richer.]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 11 September 2024

• Samsung is firing up to 30% of its people working overseas in some divisions. Samsung, based in South Korea, has instructed subsidiaries worldwide to fire about to 15% of their people in sales and marketing, and fire up to 30% of their people in the administrative staff, two of the sources said.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 11 September 2024

• Shares of solar companies rise as Wall Street says that Harris won the debate against Trump. First Solar jumped 8%, SolarEdge soared 9.7%, Sunnova was ahead 5%, and Sunrun gained 8.5%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 September 2024

• The stock price of Trump Media plunged 17% at the opening bell to its lowest level since the company began publicly trading as DJT on the Nasdaq. DJT shares dropped a day after former President Donald Trump faced Vice President Kamala Harris in a presidential debate hosted by ABC News.
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 September 2024

• Apple is at a disadvantage against phone makers in Zhōngguó that are offering artificial-intelligence services in Zhōngguó, where sales of iPhones have declined for four consecutive quarters.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 September 2024

• Shares of Alibaba rise on hopes for higher demand from mainland investors. The e-commerce giant's shares surged in Hong Kong on expectations that easier access for investors in mainland Zhōngguó may boost demand for shares.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 September 2024

• You can buy a diamond-making machine for $200,000 on Alibaba. Making diamonds is cheaper than ever, creating a weird problem: too many diamonds.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 10 September 2024

• Oracle is designing a data center that would be powered by three small nuclear reactors
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 September 2024

• Human-driverless semi-trailer trucks could be a reality soon. Two startups working to bring driverless technology to long-haul trucking, [KM: and thus two dedicated startups working to destroy some jobs for humans].
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 10 September 2024

• Shares of AstraZeneca fall 5% on disappointing lung cancer drug trial results
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 September 2024

• Shares of Hewlett Packard drop 7% on news of a $1.35 billion convertible stock offering for Juniper buyout
  - Thomson's Reuters, 10 September 2024

• Northvolt, a battery manufacturer in Sweden, said it would eliminate jobs and seek partnerships as it grappled with competition from Zhōngguó, as demand for electric vehicles declines in Europe.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 September 2024

• The boom in zero-day options is coming for Tesla and Nvidia. Brokers and exchanges discuss expanding #0dte to options on individual stocks.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 September 2024

• Can venture capital keep itself afloat? Parched returns have left investors leery of replenishing the venture ecosystem with more capital. "The money is not making the round trip.", says one observer.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 September 2024

• Australia will ban children from using social media with a minimum age limit as high as 16. "Every day of delay leaves young kids vulnerable to the harms of social media and the time for relying on tech companies to enforce age limits".
  - Yahoo News, 09 September 2024

• The corporate management at Ford Motor seek a patent for technology that allows automobiles to listen to the conversations of passengers to serve ads [KM: for useless shit].
  - The Record, 09 September 2024

• A proposed law in Maryland seeks to protect farms from threats of eminent domain seizure to satisfy the needs for land for new power lines to power AI data centers
  - Zero Hedge, 09 September 2024

• Trump Media shares climb over 7% after presidential campaign poll seen as good news for Trump
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 September 2024

• Shares of Palantir soar 13% on the software vendor's inclusion in the SP500 index
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 September 2024

• Misanthropic internet influencers keep endangering rare wildlife at the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The landscape is ecologically fragile and home to threatened species.
  - SFGate.com, 09 September 2024

• Mario Draghi argues that Europe is in existential danger without massive new spending and joint debt; Deutschland immediately says "nein"
  - Zero Hedge, 09 September 2024

• Mario Draghi, former head of the ECB, calls for 800 billion euros to be spent to ensure that the European Union competes with the USA and Zhōngguó. The spending will including significant joint funding, and an embrace of subsidies and tactical protectionist trade measures.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 09 September 2024

• Elon Musk's xAI has discussed a deal to steal a share of future revenues of Tesla. Under a proposed arrangement, the startup would give Tesla access to its artificial-intelligence technology (Telsa can't develop its own AI software) in exchange for a slice of the software revenue of Tesla.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 September 2024

• IT unemployment rises to 6% amid overall jobs growth in the USA. AI and general streamlining efforts leave tech workers in a tough labor market. Joblessness for IT workers is at its worst since the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 September 2024

• The air begins to leak out of the the overflated AI bubble - companies that plunged into the AI market for fear of missing out on useful new applications for their businesses have discovered that usefulness is elusive.
  - Los Angeles Times, 08 September 2024

• Is artificial intelligence the next easy-money bust? AI can be broken down into seven broad categories. Most of the seven are, at best, hypothetical and do not exist. The whole AI experiment is ludicrously expensive and the cost accelerates well beyond the advancements in utility.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 September 2024

• The "Trap", the first movie about pop music to nail its mediocrity. Very few films are bold enough to let their fictional pop sound as hollow and bland as the real thing can. With its gleeful satire of the corporate music world, "Josie and the Pussycats" took this manipulation as its subject, envisioning pop music circa 2001 as a mind-control conspiracy.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 September 2024

• How the secure messaging service, Telegram, became the favorite marketplace of criminals - "the premier internet platform to buy everything from hacked data and weapons to illicit drugs and child sexual abuse material".
  - Zero Hedge, 07 September 2024

• Elon Musk's Twitter/X is a poison. We do not need to keep taking it. It is not enough for some journalists and influencers to boycott the social media site formerly known as Twitter. Everyone needs to bail on it at once.
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 07 September 2024

• The government of the Netherlands said it would expand export control rules that will require ASML Holding to seek licenses from Amsterdam rather from the USA to ship some chip-making machinery outside the European Union.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 September 2024

• Pandemic darling Moderna needs a reality check. Moderna is spending aggressively to broaden the uses of its mRNA technology. Investors are losing patience.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 September 2024

• Why you might not be able to watch your favorite sport -- or reality show -- on television right now. For DirectTV, it is existential. For Disney, it is just business as usual crushing others - with DirectTV and Disney fighting over ESPN.
  - Slate, 07 September 2024

• Europe wants to be the 'cyber cop' of the world. Big Tech will pay the price for their authoritarism. There is a trend toward Europe as the world's social media and artificial intelligence police. With a market of 450 million customers at stake, the titans of global tech will have to take notice.
  - Barron's, 07 September 2024

• Legalization of marijuana is very popular. Here is why the stocks of marijuana companies are not popular. MSOS, one of the biggest cannabis ETFs, is down 80% over three years. For now, many state-approved cannabis companies cannot secure ordinary stock listings or do business across state lines. Even though they are operating illegally in the view of the federal government, they must pay taxes. But despite the taxes, special rules for Schedule 1 drug businesses disallow many ordinary business deductions. So some businesses, especially retailers, get hit with tax rates over 70%.
  - Barron's, 07 September 2024

• Shares of MobilEye are down 10% in the last two days (and down 73% year-to-date), after a Bloomberg report, citing sources, indicated Intel could be preparing to dump some of its stake in the autonomous-driving software company on the public market or through a sale to a third party.
  - Zero Hedge, 06 September 2024

• Goldman Sachs reveals shocking collapse in visits to chat-GPT website, after one-year of hype. Yet venture capital firm Thrive Capital and a handful of big tech companies, such as Apple and Nvidia, are planning to invest in OpenAI at (or around) a $100 billion valuation.
  - Zero Hedge, 06 September 2024

• Shares of Dell and Palantir both jumped about 7% in extended trading Friday after S&P Global announced that the companies would join the SP500 index
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 September 2024

• Executives of ChatGPT maker OpenAI have discussed new pricing models that cost as much as $2,000 per month for upcoming advanced large language models. "Still, it's a notable detail because it suggests that the paid version of ChatGPT, which was recently on pace to generate $2 billion in revenue annually, largely from $20-per-month subscriptions, may not be growing fast enough to cover the outsize costs of running the service. Those costs include the expenses of a free tier used by hundreds of millions of people per month."
  - Zero Hedge, 06 September 2024

• A human wrote a critical article about chatbots. Other chatbots trained on all of the commentary about the human's article, were allowed by the billion-dollar companies that control chatbots to attack the human for being dishonest or self-righteous. These systems learned to associate my name with the demise of a prominent chatbot. In other words, they saw me as a threat [km: to their rich owners].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 September 2024

• Our dopamine-driven brains drive us to choose cheap distraction (of cellphone apps) over entertainment (non-challenging art) and then at last, art. A 15-second video causes a dopamine release in the brain, which creates a desire for more stimulus, which leads to the habit of more scrolling on your phone, which leads to an addiction to more stimulus. If distraction is swallowing entertainment in our culture, addiction is also swallowing distraction.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 September 2024

• Qualcomm has explored the possibility of acquiring portions of Intel's design business to boost the product portfolio of Qualcomm. The client PC design duvusuib of Intel is of significant interest to Qualcomm executives.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 06 September 2024

• The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Nihon, under the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, will establish a new facility in three to five years equipped with extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) technology. Intel will contribute its expertise in chip manufacturing using EUV. The center, the first of its kind in Japan, will allow equipment and materials manufacturers to pay a fee for prototyping and testing.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 September 2024

• Zhōngguó now leads the USA in 57 out of 64 critical technologies
  - Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 05 September 2024

• Shares of Broadcom drop 7% after guidance was in-line with expectations. Broadcom says it will sell $12 billion in AI parts and custom chips this year
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 September 2024

• Orlando Bravo, the founder of buyout firm Thoma Bravo, said he has learned plenty from his failed investment on crypto exchange FTX. He vows to "never touch" cryptocurrencies again. FTX marked a sideways turn for San Francisco-based Thoma Bravo, which has emerged as a giant investor in technology, orchestrating multibillion-dollar acquisitions in recent years of companies including cybersecurity software vendor Proofpoint, property management software company RealPage, finance and supply chain software developer Anaplan and spend management software company Coupa.
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 September 2024

• Snap sued by New Mexico AG over 'sextortion' of kids by predators. The suit alleges that the design features of the social media app Snapchat create an environment where "predators can easily target children through sextortion schemes."
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 September 2024

• Snap sued by New Mexico AG over 'sextortion' of kids by predators. The suit alleges that the design features of the social media app Snapchat create an environment where "predators can easily target children through sextortion schemes."
  - Zero Hedge, 05 September 2024

• $13 for a video call. $25 for a movie. Tablets connect prisoners -- at an extornist price. Private companies dole out tablets to inmates as FCC imposes limits on how much they can charge for phone calls.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 September 2024

• Lyft to fire people to reduce the size of its bikes and scooters division. Lyft said it is further firing people in a new wave of layoffs as it eliminates dockless bikes and scooters from the business.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 September 2024

• Alibaba will offer payment services from rival Tencent on its biggest online marketplaces, a milestone toward breaking down the walls dividing internet giants in Zhōngguó..
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 September 2024

• Verizon to buy Frontier Communications for $20 billion in major nationwide fiber network expansion
  - Zero Hedge, 05 September 2024

• SPAC is back with the biggest monthly flow of deals and proceeds since 2022
  - Zero Hedge, 04 September 2024

• Trump Media shares erase 2024 gains as key DJT sale date nears. The stock has fallen more than 75% from its intraday peak in its Nasdaq trading debut following a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. The stock has fallen more than 75% from its intraday peak of $79.38 per share.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 September 2024

• Zhōngguó is ramping up spending on chip manufacturing equipment, surpassing the combined expenditure of the U.S., South Korea, Taiwan and Nihon in the first half of the year. Such over-investment ultimately will lead to "inefficient or underutilized capacity in the future". The world could soon be facing the same problem of "over-capacity" with such legacy chips that are manufactured in Zhōngguó.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 September 2024

• Hard-landing panic leads to first bond yield curve disinversion in two years, as nvidia plunge continues
  - Zero Hedge, 04 September 2024

• $10,000,000+- Federal prosecutors allege a North Carolina musician, Michael Smith, used bots and thousands of AI songs to fraudulently earn $10 million in royalties from streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music
  - Rolling Stone, 04 September 2024

• Federal prosecutors allege a North Carolina musician, Michael Smith, used bots and thousands of AI songs to fraudulently earn $10 million in royalties from streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 September 2024

• Intel's contract manufacturing business has suffered a setback after tests with chipmaker Broadcom, dealing a blow to Intel's turnaround efforts. The tests conducted by Broadcom involved sending silicon wafers through Intel's most advanced manufacturing process known as 18A. After engineers and executives at Broadcom studied the results, the company concluded the manufacturing process is not yet viable to move to high-volume production.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 04 September 2024

• Shares of Nvidia in premarket trading after 10% plunge that wiped out $279 billion in market capitalization. Nvidia shares fell in premarket trading after Bloomberg reported that the company received a subpoena from the Department of Justice as part of an antitrust investigation.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 September 2024

• Samsung said to slash 8% of sales team in mainland Zhōngguó amid weak performance. This marks the start of a broader restructuring that would potentially cut up to 30 per cent of the workforce of Samsung in mainland Zhōngguó by next year.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 04 September 2024

• Fears of an economic slowdown spark stock-market selloff. The Dow industrials declines more than 600 points and the Nasdaq Composite declines 3.3%.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 September 2024

• Nvidia is suddenly in trouble. Nvidia (NVDA) had the worst day in the history of the stock market Tuesday, as measured by loss in total market value. Its 9.5% share price decline shaved a stunning $279 billion off the value of the company. Much of the sharp decline was because the USA Justice Department reportedly sent it a subpoena as part of an antitrust probe.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 04 September 2024

• Yesterday, when we observed that the Labor Day holiday had spared US markets from a selloff that spread across the rest of the world on the first trading day of September, we said that we had a bad feeling about today. And boy were we right: traditionally the worst month for stocks, bonds, gold and bitcoin, September started off with a bang - not a whimper - which saw the S&P plunge 2.4%, its biggest drop since the August 5 meltdown and the worst start to a month since May 2020, when the S&P plunged 2.8%. The biggest loser by far was the increasingly fragile Nasdaq, which crashed more than 3%, its biggest drop also since the August 5 collapse, and the 3rd biggest one-day drop in the past year.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 September 2024

• How generative AI could trigger the next CrowdStrike catastrophe. Left unguarded, generative AI can spread misinformation and enable attackers to commit new crimes.
  - Knowledge at Wharton, 03 September 2024

• Oprah Winfrey agrees to [whore] her ethics by hosting a TV special that touts how great are AI and mega-rich AI executives. "Sure is nice of Oprah to host this extended sales pitch for the generative AI industry at a moment when its fortunes are flagging and the AI bubble is threatening to burst." The special will feature some of the richest people in AI [KM: whose record of misanthropy is decades-long].
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 03 September 2024

• Brazil has not just banned X (formerly Twitter) from the entire country, but citizens will now be fined $9000 a day (more than the average salary in the country) for using VPNs to access the platform.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 September 2024

• Enerpoly, based in Sweden, has flung open the doors to its zinc-ion battery megafactory in the north of Stockholm -- making it the first manufacturing facility to use this battery technology at a large scale in the world. Zinc has many benefits in batteries over lithium.
  - New Atlas, 03 September 2024

• $33,700,000 - Clearview AI is fined $33.7 million by the privacy protection regulations in the Netherlands for maintaining an "illegal database" of faces of humans
  - Associated Press, 03 September 2024

• The stock of Nvidia is a magnet for gamblers, becoming the defining meme stock of the year
  - Axios, 03 September 2024

• Adding insult to margin calls, Nvidia receives a DoJ subpoena making record price drop even worse
  - Zero Hedge, 03 September 2024

• Nvidia gets DoJ subpoena in escalating antitrust probe. Department also sent subpoenas to third parties in case.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 September 2024

• A leaked pitch deck presentation from Cox Media Group (CMG) - a major player in the digital advertising space, appears to detail how its "Active Listening" software uses artificial intelligence to capture and analyze "real-time intent data" from the conversations of cellphone users. The slideshow goes further, showcasing authoritarian tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon as clients of CMG, suggesting they may use this controversial technology. These companies have long denied listening to user conversations through device microphones, but this leaked document raises new questions.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 September 2024

• Marvell seen as possible buyer of Intel's Altera unit
  - Investor's Business Daily, 03 September 2024

• Intel's CEO cost-cutting pitch to incldue Altera spin-out and retreat from a German plant
  - Thomson's Reuters, 03 September 2024

• Intel's Dow status under threat as struggling chipmaker's shares plunge
  - Thomson's Reuters, 03 September 2024

• Critiquing the politics of Bharat with absurdist games. Studio Oleomingus's video games, often inspired by literature and architecture, are colorful and playful examinations of some of the darkest chapters in the history of Bharat.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 September 2024

• Nvidia takes an added role amid AI craze: data-center designer. Beyond its chips, the company is playing a growing role in shaping the server farms where AI is produced and deployed.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 September 2024

• How to lose money on the most popular investment theme in the world - AI. Pity the investors in the three artificial-intelligence-themed exchange-traded funds that managed to lose money this year.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 September 2024

• As the number of fees rise for booking lodging using Airbnb, more and more consumers are questioning whether or not it just makes sense to book a hotel. After all, at a hotel, you are guaranteed customer service, housekeeping and amenities. With Airbnb, those add-ons can be exactly that ... costly add-ons. Travelers have noticed a shift with Airbnb becoming more expensive than hotels and offering less value, leading to frustration over high fees and uncooperative hosts, according to travel experts.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 September 2024

• As the number of fees rise for booking lodging using Airbnb, more and more consumers are questioning whether or not it just makes sense to book a hotel. After all, at a hotel, you are guaranteed customer service, housekeeping and amenities. With Airbnb, those add-ons can be exactly that ... costly add-ons. Travelers have noticed a shift with Airbnb becoming more expensive than hotels and offering less value, leading to frustration over high fees and uncooperative hosts, according to travel experts.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 September 2024

• Zhōngguó has warned of severe economic retaliation against Nihon if it further restricts sales and servicing of semiconductor chipmaking equipment to companies in Zhōngguó
  - Thomson's Reuters, 02 September 2024

• Some companies are researching other ways to grow cocoa or develop cocoa substitutes, as global heating stresses rainforests where the highly sensitive cocoa bean grows. One company puts cocoa bean cells in a vat with sugar water so they reproduce quickly and reach maturity in a week rather than the six to eight months a traditional harvest takes. The process also no longer requires as much water or arduous labor.
  - Associated Press, 01 September 2024

• Peter Thiel defends calling Warren Buffett a "sociopathic grandpa from Omaha" for being an opponent of bitcoin
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 31 August 2024

• Rise of legal gambling helping fuel the ugly behavior of fans toward athletes. Charles Barkley, an admitted big-problems gambler who compiled staggering casino debt, yet still took the cash to star in commercials encouraging young male adult suckers to gamble.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 31 August 2024

• Nvidia's $50 billion share buyback is an epically bad decision that sends the wrong message to Wall Street and investors
  - The Motley Fool, 31 August 2024

• Google has destroyed local news . But in San Francisco, local news is seeing a resurgence thanks to a willingness to experiment. Half-century-old neighborhood news organizations are becoming nonprofits. Others are banking on the help of deep-pocketed supporters. And as local news driven by advertising revenue declines, news sites are relying on subscriptions to fill in the gaps.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 August 2024

• Rossiya fears for its military secrets after the arrest of the founder of Telegram. The social-media platform has become a critical communications tool for the military of Rossiya during the war in Ukraine.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 August 2024

• For two-job workers, there is not enough hours in a day to stay afloat. The job market is softening, but more Americans are holding down multiple jobs. That speaks to both rising living costs and a bountiful market for gig-economy work.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 August 2024

• A short-seller tanks the stock of Super Micro. The AI highflier has bigger problems.
  - Barron's, 31 August 2024

• Solar cell/panel manufacturers in Zhōngguó have just been through a bloodbath of an earnings season, but there are tentative signs the massive glut that is plaguing the industry could be starting to ease. The financial pain looks to be planting the seeds for a turnaround, although a meaningful rebound is unlikely until next year.
  - Bloomberg, 30 August 2024

• Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds. Beating nature took decades of hard graft and millions of pounds of pressure.
  - Works in Progress, 30 August 2024

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says Microsoft Copilot has disappointed many customers
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 30 August 2024

• We have to stopp and think about what LLMs actually model? Claims about much-hyped tech show flawed understanding of language and cognition, research argues.
  - The Register, 30 August 2024

• Nearly half of the FDA-approved AI devices not based on real patient data
  - Zero Hedge, 30 August 2024

• As newspapers close in the USA, [KM: thanks to Silicon Valley destroying local newspapers], local corruption thrives. For a cash-strapped news organisation, the expense of investigative journalism is often first on the chopping block. Even worse, in many communities, newspapers have completely disappeared: since 2004, 2,100 newspapers have closed, leaving two-thirds of US counties without a daily newspaper. This has already been shown to have damaging consequences, including negative effects on public sector financing and decreased prosecution of pollution.
  - London School of Economics, 30 August 2024

• [KM: The sociopaths of] Silicon Valley are maximizing their profits and riches at the expense of everyone else. [KM: The sociopaths of] Silicon Valley, a longtime engine of human achievement, has become a significant source of human harm. Aware of the gathering backlash, its leaders have dived into the political fray to protect their wealth and riches and authoritarian power. Two Silicon Valley obsessions threaten the most damage: creating human-addictive products to increase profits and eliminating paid-human jobs altogether to decrease costs.
  - Zero Hedge, 30 August 2024

• Shares of Alibaba rise 4% in pre-market trading after it completes a three-year regulatory overhaul
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 August 2024

• Shares of Intel jumped by as much as 10 percent this afternoon, after a report that the struggling chipmaker is exploring options that could involve splitting the company in two.
  - Barclay's The Telegraph, 30 August 2024

• The troubled Intel considers splitting off its foundry operations, and other options, as its stock price plummets
  - Zero Hedge, 30 August 2024

• Wall Street may be getting a little bored of AI. As the thrill of the initial AI buzz starts to fade, Wall Street is (finally) getting a little more clear-eyed about the actual value of the technology and, more importantly, how it is going to actually generate revenue for the companies promoting it [KM: other than by getting people fired and replaced with AI - or selling to each other].
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 30 August 2024

• Legislature in California approves a new law proposing sweeping AI restrictions. Governot Gavin Newsom must now decide whether to sign into law the fiercely debated legislation. The State Assembly approved the measure, known as S.B. 1047, which would require big A.I. companies to test their systems for safety before releasing them to the public. The bill would also give the state's attorney general the power to sue A.I. makers for serious harms caused by their technologies, like death or property damage.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 August 2024

• Profits in the first-half of 2024 for Huawei increased on strong smartphone sales, and its car business. Huawei's profit increased 18% while revenue jumped 34%.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 August 2024

• Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said that in the wake of a massive computer outage it caused last month it will give customers about $60 million in credits to remain with the company, possibly a mere fraction of the damages those clients say they incurred. The company also cut its guidance for full-year earnings by about $86 million to $109 million. But that still leaves CrowdStrike expecting to make $3.9 billion on the year [so it could easily afford to offer more credits to companies with damages if it had any ethics or sense of responsibility, ].
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 29 August 2024

• $400,000,000 - A federal district court judge in the USA rules that thousands of people in Tennessee were illegally denied Medicaid and other benefits due to programming and data errors in an algorithmic system the state uses to determine eligibility for low-income residents and people with disabilities. The TennCare Connect system -- built by Deloitte and other contractors for more than $400 million -- has major problems. The system often does not load the appropriate data, assigns beneficiaries to the wrong households, and makes incorrect eligibility determinations.
  - GizModo, 29 August 2024

• The government of the Netherlands orders ASML to stop servicing semiconductor wafer tools in Zhōngguó
  - Tom's Hardware, 29 August 2024

• Shares of MongoDB surge 13% on guidance boost for the fiscal year ending in 2025
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 August 2024

• More lawsuits have been filed against background check company National Public Data (NPD) after it confirmed that a major data breach exposed the personal records, including Social Security numbers, of millions of people in the USA
  - Zero Hedge, 29 August 2024

• Shares of an AI SPAC, iLearningEngines, plunges 55% after Hindenburg alleges "artificial partners and artificial revenue"
  - Zero Hedge, 29 August 2024

• An "agri-fintech" company in Nigeria - Tingo Mobile - targeted by short seller Hindenburg Research barely a year ago, in June 2023 - has been found liable by a federal judge after failing to even respond to the SEC's lawsuit against them, accusing them of demonstrable financial fraud.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 August 2024

• The founder of Telegram is charged in France with wide range of crimes for failing to prevent illicit activity on the app. Pavel Durov, who was arrested near Paris over the weekend as part of a broad investigation into criminal activity on the platform, was also barred from leaving the country. He was also charged with complicity in crimes such as enabling the distribution of child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and fraud, and refusing to cooperate with law enforcement.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 August 2024

• Can technology executives be held responsible for what happens on their platforms? The indictment of Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, as part of an investigation into illicit activities on the messaging app set off worries about the personal liability of tech executives.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 August 2024

• Republican Senator Rick Scott on Wednesday asked Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger for more details on Intel's plans to fire more than 15,000 people despite being set to receive nearly $20 billion in socialist grants and loans to boost chip production.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 29 August 2024

• In the quest for electric planes, hybrid may be the answer. Batteries alone cannot get planes far enough for most flights. But airplane manufacturers are hoping a hybrid plane could be the best way to go.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 August 2024

• Yelp sues Google, alleging abuse of position to dominate local search. The lawsuit accuses Google of spending years impeding its ability to reach consumers through Google's general search platform.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 August 2024

• How to best prepare for the AI jobs apocalypse. Right now, unemployment is rising, while corporate profits are also soaring. That is unusual - unless. It tells us that companies are using non-paid AI to fire people -- to boost profits [KM: to make executives and rich shareholders richer].
  - Investor Place, 29 August 2024

• Nvidia beat earnings expectations again, and plans to buy $50 billion of its shares back. Investors are not impressed, and sent the stock down as much as 5% in after-market trading. But major questions have started to emerge about the sustainability of the AI hype cycle, in large part because of uncertainty about whether -- and how soon -- anyone will make money from AI (other than by getting people fired).
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 August 2024

• Is Tesla at risk from Senator Marco Rubio's push to 'blacklist' battery company CATL based in Zhōngguó?
  - Zero Hedge, 28 August 2024

• $3,000,000 - Michael Lacey, a founder of the lucrative classified site Backpage.com, was sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison and fined $3 million for a single money laundering count in a sprawling case involving allegations of a yearslong scheme to promote and profit from prostitution through classified ads.
  - Associated Press, 28 August 2024

• Elon Musk offers free cellular Starlink for emergencies worldwide as space race with legacy mobile carriers heats up
  - Zero Hedge, 28 August 2024

• Marylanders to protest AI data center power lines as eminent domain threatens small farms
  - Zero Hedge, 28 August 2024

• Shares of Affirm (buy now pay later) surge 16% after better-than-expected results, strong guidance
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 August 2024

• Trump Media, the company majority-owned by former President Donald Trump, fell below $20 per share for the first time since the Truth Social maker started publicly trading
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 28 August 2024

• Trump will soon be allowed to see his 114 million shares in Trump Media (DJT). If he sells too much, the stock plummets. And Trump is too selfish to care about anyone else, so he will want to sell as much as possible as soon as possible.
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 28 August 2024

• The executives at former president Trump's Truth Social venture are officially starting to cash out of its meme stock. According to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) CFO and treasurer Juhan Phillip has already sold a whopping $1.9 million worth of company shares.
  - Futurism, 28 August 2024

• Share of AeroVironment, a drone maker, are up over 10% on news of a near-$1 billion contract with the USA Army
  - Investors, 28 August 2024

• Super Micro shares plunge 15% after company delays 10-K, one day after Hindenburg alleges accounting manipulation
  - Zero Hedge, 28 August 2024

• Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea received a notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it intends to pursue an enforcement action, the company disclosed on Wednesday. CEO Devin Finzer said his company will fight the notice and pledged $5 million to help cover legal fees for any NFT creators and developers that may also get such notice.
  - CoinDesk, 28 August 2024

• The hottest sectors in climate technology? Follow the venture capital money. Startups developing technologies to make the power grid more reliable and efficient are among those getting attention from venture capitalists.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 August 2024

• A high-level Russian analyst makes the case that Pavel Durov's arrest (the CEO of Telegram) is connected with "anti-French protests in its former colonies, withdrawal from its traditional 'sphere of influence' where Telegram infrastructure was used to push anti-colonial and anti-Macronist narratives". French authorities must be rather desperate in trying to keep their heads in the game of global politics. So here we have Brussels, via Paris, trying to acquire at least some control over Telegram.
  - Zero Hedge, 27 August 2024

• Without guardrails, generative AI can harm children while they learn. Students who rely on generative AI to help them learn may be missing out on basic skills. The results suggest that the Base group using the AI depended too much on the software to solve the problems and t learn the underlying mathematical concepts deeply enough to do well on the exam. In contrast, the performance by the Tutor group shows that these harms are mitigated when AI is deployed with teacher-guided conditions and limits.
  - Knowledge at Wharton, 27 August 2024

• The world's call center capital is gripped by AI fever -- and fear, as call center executive rush to replace paid-humans with non-paid AI bots. The experiences of people in the outsourcing industry in the Philippines are a preview of the challenges and choices coming soon to white-collar workers around the globe.
  - Bloomberg, 27 August 2024

• Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later service company, plans to fire half of its people by using AI
  - Sifted, 27 August 2024

• Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later service company, plans to fire half of its people by using AI
  - Zero Hedge, 27 August 2024

• Shares of Super Micro Computer plunge 8% after Hinderburg Research shorts the stock, claiming "fresh evidence" of accounting manipulation, alleging that the semiconductor/server company, which has seen its stock skyrocket over the last few years during the AI bubble, could be engaged in accounting manipulation and self dealing among family members
  - Zero Hedge, 27 August 2024

• One of the last remaining bright spots for consumption in Zhōngguó is rapidly fading, as the economic malaise in Zhōngguó takes a toll on demand for even the most accessible of goods. PDD's warning about consumers in Zhōngguó stunned investors because the company was long viewed as the main beneficiary of a "consumer downgrade" in buying in Zhōngguó -- its low-pricing strategy on Pinduoduo domestically and Temu abroad was intended to appeal to cost-conscious shoppers at a time of unprecedented economic volatility.
  - Bloomberg, 27 August 2024

• $324,000,000 - Uber is fined $324 million by a government regulator in the Netherlands over driver data protection. The authorities in the Netherlands said the ride-hailing company had violated European data protection laws when it sent sensitive information to the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 August 2024

• The electric grid in the USA adds batteries at 10-times the rate of natural gas in the first half of 2014. By the end of 2024, 96 percent of the grid additions in the USA will not add carbon to the atmosphere.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 26 August 2024

• California colludes with Big-Tech to wield control over local newsrooms, while incorporating AI. California has announced the first-ever socialist partnership with extremely-rich Google and Facebook to fund local newsrooms and launch a government artificial intelligence program. California will waste $175 million of taxpayers' dollar, while Google will spend $55 million. The money will be managed by one of Silicon Valley's puppets - UCal Berkeley. Everyone who isn't rich is criticizing the deal. "With a tiny portion of its annual revenue, Google is going to use every reporter and news outlet to remake society in its own warped image."
  - Zero Hedge, 26 August 2024

• $8,500,000 - The Federal Trade Commission said Monday that Care.com had agreed to a proposed $8.5 million settlement to address what the FTC called "unlawful practices", which include misleading both the job seekers (caregivers) and job posters (families) who use the site.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 26 August 2024

• $950,000 - AT&T has agreed to pay $950,000 to resolve a Federal Communications Commission investigation into an August 2023 outage of 911 calls in four states
  - Thomson's Reuters, 26 August 2024

• AI engineers in Zhōngguó are secretly accessing banned Nvidia processors. Brokers are making overseas computing power available with a high degree of anonymity.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 August 2024

• The prospects for consumer firms in Zhōngguó are looking increasingly bleak after PDD Holdings cautioned that its revenue growth will slow as competition continues to heat up.
  - Bloomberg, 26 August 2024

• Shares of PDD Holdings, the parent company of Pinduoduo and Temu, plummet over 25%, after a profit warning despite record revenue in the June quarter
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 August 2024

• Shares of PDD Holdings, the parent company of Pinduoduo and Temu, plummet over 25%, after a profit warning despite record revenue in the June quarter
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 August 2024

• The detention of Pavel Durov, the billionaire founder of Telegram, a messaging app known for its unfiltered content, has sparked debate about freedom of speech and illegal content on the internet. Durov was arrested at the Bourget airport in Paris on a warrant related to the lack of moderation on Telegram, which has led to money laundering, drug trafficking and the spread of pedophilic content on the platform which has about 900 million users.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 26 August 2024

• Telegram becomes a free speech flashpoint after the arrest of its founder, Pavel Durov. Telegram, founded in 2013, has grown into one of the world's largest online communication tools and is central to everyday life in countries like Russia, Ukraine and Bharat for messaging, getting independent news and exchanging views. Telegram's light oversight of what people say or do on the platform has helped people living under authoritarian governments communicate and organize. But it has also made the app a haven for disinformation, far-right extremism and other harmful content.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 August 2024

• A non-paid robot - not a paid human - in downtown Boston can paint your nails in 10 minutes for $10. Clockwork's fully autonomous manicure machine is one sign of the [misanthropic] wave of automation coming for many parts of working society
  - Boston Globe, 25 August 2024

• USA stocks are overvalued because of unrealistic expectations for AI-powered economic growth, Vanguard says. Firms would need to growth profit by 40% annually for the next three years to match valuations.
  - Business Insider, 23 August 2024

• Reddit battles Facebook and Google using ads based on topics - not your personal data
  - Bloomberg, 23 August 2024

• The rich CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, proudly brags that Amazon's AI assistant has allowed Amazon to eliminate the need of 4,500 hours of human-paid work that would have cost $260,000,000. "It hass been a game changer for us", if the game is how quickly can you eliminate the need for paid humans working for your company. [KM: by the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 23 August 2024

• Paid software engineers may have to develop other skills soon as non-paid AI takes over many coding tasks. That is according to Amazon Web Services' CEO, Matt Garman, who shared his thoughts on the topic during an internal fireside chat held in June, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider.
  - Zero Hedge, 23 August 2024

• The Justice Department has filed a civil lawsuit against the real estate company RealPage, alleging the software sold by RealPage uses landlord data to artificially inflate the price of rent across the United States by quelling competition in the market. Americans should not have to pay more in rent because a company has found a new way to scheme with landlords to break the law." The software, according to the complaint, uses non-public data provided by landlords to see what competitors are charging or offering to maximize the amount landlords can charge as well as other ways they can make more money from renters.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 23 August 2024

• The Justice Department has filed a civil lawsuit against the real estate company RealPage, alleging the software sold by RealPage uses landlord data to artificially inflate the price of rent across the United States by quelling competition in the market. Americans should not have to pay more in rent because a company has found a new way to scheme with landlords to break the law." The software, according to the complaint, uses non-public data provided by landlords to see what competitors are charging or offering to maximize the amount landlords can charge as well as other ways they can make more money from renters.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 August 2024

• The Justice Department has filed a civil lawsuit against the real estate company RealPage, alleging the software sold by RealPage uses landlord data to artificially inflate the price of rent across the United States by quelling competition in the market. Americans should not have to pay more in rent because a company has found a new way to scheme with landlords to break the law." The software, according to the complaint, uses non-public data provided by landlords to see what competitors are charging or offering to maximize the amount landlords can charge as well as other ways they can make more money from renters.
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 August 2024

• Trump could dump his DJT stock within weeks - here is what happens if he sells
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 August 2024

• Here is how one retailer is finding profits in borrowed clothing. Urban Outfitters and its Nuuly brand are finding that automation is among the most important accessories when it comes to renting apparel.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 August 2024

• $4,000,000,000 - Private credit lenders have agreed to take ownership of Pluralsight, three years after Vista Equity Partners bought the educational-software company, in a markedly swift unraveling of a private equity investment. This deal means Vista and its co-investors are losing around $4 billion on their original equity investment.
  - Bloomberg, 22 August 2024

• Many founders and venture capitalists who want the next president to extend current climate initiatives are banding together to form Climate for Kamala in support of the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 August 2024

• Shares of JD.com fall 10% in two days, as Walmart plans to sell up to $3.7 billion of the shares it owns of JD.com. Walmart confirmed it is seeking to sell its entire holding in the company based in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 August 2024

• Target still has one item way cheaper than Walmart - its stock. The retailer's return to comparable-sales growth and margin recovery are early but encouraging signs of a turnaround.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 August 2024

• A dovish Fed on interest rates, and a dismal job-revisions (adjusted down 800,000) send bonds, big-tech, bitcoin, and gold bullion higher
  - Zero Hedge, 21 August 2024

• Minutes of the Fed FOMC show the "vast majority" can agree with an interest rate reduction in September
  - Zero Hedge, 21 August 2024

• Minutes of the Fed FOMC show the "vast majority" can agree with an interest rate reduction in September
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 August 2024

• Revision of USA jobs data, down 818,000 jobs, is the second worst revision in USA history, and an election year shocker
  - Zero Hedge, 21 August 2024

• The growing support for autonomous driving in Zhōngguó is giving robotaxi pioneers a leg up in some of the biggest cities in Zhōngguó. Soon, these companies in Zhōngguó could be global leaders in a market potentially worth more than $100 billion, throwing millions of people out of work in a world where unemployment is a huge problem for the non-rich.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 August 2024

• Shein has sued Temu for copyright infringement as it fends off similar allegations from a host of brands and independent artists. In a civil complaint, the fast-fashion giant based in Zhōngguó accused Temu of routinely stealing its designs and alleged an employee stole confidential trade secrets. Shein alleged that Temu loses money on each sale it makes and uses trademark infringement to make up for the losses.
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 August 2024

• State Street is partnering with Swiss crypto company Taurus to offer new digital asset services, including turning real-world assets into tradeable tokens, to tap growing institutional demand for such investments, the financial services provider told Reuters.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 20 August 2024

• Shares of Trump Media fell to their lowest price since Trump's social media company completed a merger nearly five months ago. Trump Media, which owns TRUMP'S social messaging platform Truth Social, ended the trading day at $22.24 per share, a drop of more than 3.5%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 August 2024

• Your television set has become a digital billboard. And it is only getting worse. TV software is getting loaded with ads, changing what it means to own a TV set.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 19 August 2024

• The panic sale of shares of Apple by Warren Buffett cost him $6.2 billion. Shares of Apple jumped 7.5% from June 30, the end of Berkshire Hathaway's most recent trade disclosure window. That translates into missing out on a staggering gain of $6.2 billion since that time.
  - Investors, 19 August 2024

• The Worldcoin of the authoritarian Sam Altman is battling with governments over your eyes. The OpenAI CEI's authoritarian Worldcoin project involves an attempt to scan the irises of every person on Earth and pay them with his own cryptocurrency. Authorities are opposed to the 'Big Brother' idea.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 August 2024

• Advanced Micro Devices on Monday said it plans to acquire server maker ZT Systems for $4.9 billion as the company seeks to expand its portfolio of artificial intelligence chips and hardware and battle Nvidia.
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 August 2024

• Are venture capitalists now better at podcasting and bio-hacking than at producing returns? Over 40% of 2018-vintage venture capital funds have not made a single distribution.
  - Zero Hedge, 18 August 2024

• Apple is spending billions of dollars playing the 'long game' with switch from cellular modem processors from Qualcomm.
  - Bloomberg, 18 August 2024

• More than 90% of 2021 venture funds have had zero distributions thus far, report shows. Data from Carta shows that 2021 and 2022 venture-fund vintages significantly underperformed prior-year vintages.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 August 2024

• More than 17,000 AT&T workers across the Southeast are on strike after accusing company management of "unfair labor practices" during recent contract negotiations. They said that AT&T did not bargain in good faith and sent negotiators who did not have any authority to make decisions.
  - NPR, 17 August 2024

• The Biden administration will award up to $1.6 billion in socialist subsidies to Texas Instruments to help the company build three new manufacturing plants, the latest in a slew of awards intended to ramp up the production of semiconductors in the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 August 2024

• Shares of Multiplan are down 70% since April. The company, and the insurance companies it serves with software for billing Medicare, often collect larger fees when payments to medical providers are far lower than the amount billed. Its general counsel and chief financial officer have left their jobs. Its revenues have declined. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, in April asked the heads of the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department's antitrust division to investigate whether MultiPlan was colluding with insurers to fix prices.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 August 2024

• MindBloom, a startup that sends ketamine by mail to people in their hoems, has added injectable doses to its product line, making a risky practice even riskier, doctors say. Mindbloom provides ketamine, an anesthetic, off-label to treat conditions including depression and anxiety. Legal drug trafficking. The actor Matthew Perry died from home use of ketamine.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 August 2024

• Gambling ads are all over Facebook, Google and Amazon. The ads for gambling are putting minors at risk,
  - Barron's, 17 August 2024

• Chipotle is first in line on drive-throughs. Why its lanes are smarter and faster. Chipotle and other quick-service restaurants are adopting new technologies to usher in a new generation of drive-throughs.
  - Barron's, 17 August 2024

• Polymarket and Nate Silver want to reshape political forecasting. Welcome to the new, degenerate age of prediction markets. It is hardly surprising that the era of meme stocks, cryptocurrency speculation, and legalized sports betting has fueled enthusiasm over the prospect of making a buck on the future of our democracy. What is more remarkable is how legitimized the practice has become in the rarefied world of election-casting -- and how powerful an indicator it has become in modern-day politics.
  - Slate, 16 August 2024

• AMEC, a semiconductor tool manufacturer in Zhōngguó, sues the USA Department of Defense for designating AMEC as a "military company" in 2021, adding AMEC to a blacklist in January 2024.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 August 2024

• Streaming is getting more expensive for consumers. Legacy media companies including Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global and Comcast entered the streaming market with a focus on gaining subscribers but are now looking for a return on their investments. Their strategies include cheaper, ad-supported models, platform bundles and a crackdown on password sharing, though price hikes have shown more immediate results toward profitability. That means consumers are facing higher subscription costs with increasingly frequent price hikes.
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 August 2024

• Big Tech companies such as Google and Microsoft waste more energy on useless AI than entire countries such as Jordan and Ghana use electricity for their people
  - Zero Hedge, 16 August 2024

• Canceling memberships is a pain for consumers. New rules from the Biden administration aim to make it easier. A new set of rules could also require businesses to make it easier to reach customer-service agents.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 August 2024

• Alibaba delivered weaker-than-expected profit and revenue in the latest quarter amid fierce domestic competition in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 August 2024

• E-commerce giant JD.com, based in Zhōngguó, reported that its second quarter net profit rose 92%, while revenue grew slightly amid fierce competition from Alibaba Group and PDD Holdings
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 August 2024

• Natron Energy announces plans for $1.4 billion giga-scale sodium-ion battery manufacturing factory in North Carolina. Sodium-ion batteries outperform lithium-ion batteries in power density and recharging speed, do not require lithium, cobalt, copper, or nickel, and are non-flammable.
  - BUsiness Wire, 15 August 2024

• The financial woes of Elon Musk at Twitter/X have owners of Tesla stock fearing that he will liquidate more stock, pushing the stock price down more
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 15 August 2024

• Coming soon to San Francisco? A viral video shows 'sub-lethal' remote-controlled paintball gun protecting a commercial building.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 August 2024

• Prices of stocks soar, while bitcoin and bond prices are battered down, on 'fake' data (supposedly retail sales soared in August thanks to massive historical revisions), as the VIX plunges at a record pace
  - Zero Hedge, 15 August 2024

• The late-night honking (now fixed) of Waymo's Robotaxis sparks outrage among residents of San Francisco.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 August 2024

• Zhōngguó to restrict key antimony exports as geopolitical tensions target weapons. Antimony ore production in Zhōngguó accounted for nearly half of the world's total last year, and the USA has been a big buyer in recent years.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 15 August 2024

• Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer, reported higher quarterly net profit as its revenue rose to a record on robust demand for artificial-intelligence servers
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 August 2024

• Technology giant Tencent Holdings reported a surge in second-quarter profit as a blockbuster game release led a turnaround in the key domestic gaming division
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 August 2024

• The artificial intelligence bubble was still the main source of profit growth for the S&P 500 this earnings season. But AI-driven firms are largely boosting each other's profits - a classic bubble.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 August 2024

• FTC argues that the antitrust ruling against Google goes beyond Epic Games, and hints that the technology "monopolist" should be broken up. Google "... should not be allowed to use their enormous size to dominate a whole new field, and that means blocking them from operating large language models".
  - Zero Hedge, 14 August 2024

• $60,000,000 - A powerful U.S. committee that scrutinizes foreign investment for national security risks fined T-Mobile $60 million, its largest penalty ever, for failing to prevent and report unauthorized access to sensitive data, senior U.S. officials said on Wednesday. The penalty imposed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the USA (CFIUS) is tied to violations of a mitigation agreement that German-controlled T-Mobile inked with the panel as part of its $23 billion acquisition of U.S.-based Sprint Corp in 2020.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 August 2024

• Some hedge funds thought AI would help them beat the market. Then things got real. The Eurekahedge AI Hedge Fund Index has lagged the S&P 500, proving that the machines are not learning from their investing mistakes. From 2010 to 2024, the SP500 has done slightly better than the AI fund, with zero calculations.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 14 August 2024

• Shein,Temu and AliExpress products made in Zhōngguó found to contain high levels of toxic chemicals. Authorities in South Korea found that some items of Shein clothing contained carcinogenic substances hundreds of times over the legal limit.
  - Le Monde, 14 August 2024

• In a world where companies are trading the work of talented artists for generative AI, many players have started to wonder if and when such a change will happen for "Magic: The Gathering".
  - Slate, 14 August 2024

• AI may already use more power than bitcoin -- and it threatens bitcoin mining
  - Coin Telegraph, 14 August 2024

• Cisco will fire 7% of its people, over 5000 people fired, after it eported its third straight quarter of declining revenue - but a yearly profit of $10.3 billion, wrapping up its first full fiscal year drop since 2020.
  - SF Gate, 14 August 2024

• Cisco will fire 7% of its people, over 5000 people fired, after it eported its third straight quarter of declining revenue, wrapping up its first full fiscal year drop since 2020.
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 August 2024

• Business investor and television personality Mark Cuban slammed Silicon Valley's support for Trump on Monday, arguing that the support for the Republican presidential candidate feels like a "takeover thing". Cuban argues that the authoritarian billionaires support Trump so that they can get more power to control the world.
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 14 August 2024

• Intel has sold its 1.18 million share stake in British semiconductor chip company Arm Holdings, a regulatory filing showed. The company is in the midst of restructuring and cost-cutting efforts as it struggles to keep up with competitors in the chip race.
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 August 2024

• A hot summer threatens efficacy of mail-order medications. The temperatures inside delivery trucks (150 Fahrenheit) can reach twice the recommended threshold (68 to 77), but federal rules on drug storage conditions do not apply to the booming world of mail-order delivery, which the FDA says is regulated by the states.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 August 2024

• How Zhōngguó built technology prowess: chemistry classes and research labs. Stressing science education, Zhōngguó is outpacing other countries in research fields like battery chemistry, crucial to its lead in electric vehicles. A once-a-decade meeting of the Communist Party leadership chose scientific training and education as one of the top economic priorities of Zhōngguó.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 August 2024

• Google debuts AI-powered phones in latest attempt to best Apple's iPhone. The internet giant unveiled the next generation of Pixel phones, headphones and watches to stand out in a hardware market that has mostly ignored it.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 August 2024

• Paramount (parent company of CBS, Nickelodeon and MTV), will fire thousands of people, 15% of its employees in the USA, ahead of its merger next year with the Hollywood studio Skydance.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 August 2024

• The largest telephone companies in Canada, led by BCE and Telus, must provide smaller rivals with wholesale access to their fiber-optic networks in a bid to foster affordable access to high-quality internet services.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 August 2024

• Gemini is replacing Google Assistant on Pixel phones, and it is a 'train wreck'. Google is throwing out a perfectly good voice assistant for one that frequently fails at basic tasks.
  - Fast Company, 13 August 2024

• $172,000,000 - SF tech company Tally - with a product for helping people manage credit card debt, once worth $855 million, shuts down amid wave of complaints. It wasted $172 million in investors' funding.
  - SF Gate, 13 August 2024

• Huawei prepares a new AI processor chip to challenge Nvidia's market share in Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 13 August 2024

• Huawei prepares a new AI processor chip to challenge Nvidia's market share in Zhōngguó
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 August 2024

• $4,500,000 - Enzo Biochem will pay $4.5 million to settle claims it failed to adequately safeguard personal and private health information of its patients, New York Attorney General Letitia James said on Tuedsay.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 13 August 2024

• One week after shares of SunPower drop over 20%, the solar panel company declares bankruptcy. Factors include higher interest rates, and higher taxes/tariffs on imports of solar panels from Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 13 August 2024

• Why schools are racing to ban student phones. As the new school year starts, a wave of new laws that aim to curb distracted learning is taking effect in Indiana, Louisiana and other states.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 August 2024

• Andrew Forrest, the billionaire who is suing Facebook to remove his face from AI scams that circulate easily on Facebook. The lawsuit filed by the mining executive is one of first to threaten tech immunity protections, and alleges that Facebook's profit-seeking AI-powered ad systems amplify scams.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 August 2024

• Intel, which is cutting thousands of jobs as it struggles to stay relevant in the chip industry, sold its 1.18 million share stake in British chip firm Arm Holdings in the second quarter, a regulatory filing showed on Tuesday. Intel would have raised about $146.7 million from the sale, based on the average price of Arm's stock between April and June, according to Reuters calculations.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 13 August 2024

• AI's demand for electricity is about to increase consumer bill's for electricity, but who will be responsible for this theft? High prices are a windfall for power plant owners but are starting to raise difficult questions, as the 'poor' pay more for electricity .
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 August 2024

• AI's growing power demands could trigger a global energy crisis
  - The Street, 13 August 2024

• More hatred of humanity for profits: the CEO of Replika says it is okay if we end up marrying AI chatbots (such as the chatbots producted by his company)
  - The Verge, 12 August 2024

• AMD records its highest server market share in decades, while Intel fights back in client PCs
  - Tom's Hardware, 12 August 2024

• The six economic one-offs that drove growth and pulled the global economy out of bubble-bust recessions for the past 30 years have all reversed or dissipated. They are: 1) industrialization in Zhōngguó, 2) growth-positive demographics, 3) low interest rates, 4) low debt levels, 5) low inflation, and 6) technology productivity boom.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 August 2024

• Artificial intelligence could render many paid-human jobs such as cashiers and drivers obsolete -- leading to widespread social unrest, according to Armen Panossian, a co-CEO of the Los Angeles-based investment firm Oaktree Capital Management. "Millions of people could be out of jobs. So who is going to retrain these people?". Yeah, and for what jobs? [KM: the rich must get richer]
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 12 August 2024

• A growing number of Americans are not just simply out of a job. They are no longer fit for work. Many companies hesitate to hire new college grads because they often lack basic skills, starting with knowing how to communicate and function within a group, and often have unrealistic expectations about pay and benefits. Universities and public schools fail to prepare students for labor-market realities. And many of these people are replaceable with non-paid AI [offered by extremely rich AI companies].
  - City Journal, 12 August 2024

• It is one of the "biggest data breaches ever" and you might be exposed as a result. Background check company Jerico Pictures, which does business under the name National Public Data was breached back hackers earlier this year, a new lawsuit alleges. The suit says that as a result, 2.9 billion people have had confidential data exposed and stolen, according to a new report from Mashable. The worst part is that those impacted by this cyberattack may be unaware of their involvement since National Public Data allegedly collects data from non-public sources without consent.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 August 2024

• The USA vies with allies and industry to tighten technology export controls for Zhōngguó. The Biden administration must navigate the interests of USA companies and allied governments as it impotently tries to close off Zhōngguó's access to advanced semiconductor processors.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 August 2024

• How Elon Musk is financially abusing his empore to kickstart his xAI. The billionaire is mobilizing resources around artificial intelligence. Some Tesla shareholders are suing to make him stop.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 August 2024

• $15,000,000 - Cash App (owned by Block) users may claim up to $2,500 in data breach settlement. A proposed $15 million settlement stipulates that account holders can file for losses related to breaches disclosed in 2022 and 2023.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 August 2024

• Maybe the 3% market crash on Friday wasn't caused by the unwinding of the yen carry trade (since the interest rate differential didn't change much), not by the popping of the AI bubble (which has been popping), or recession fears, Maybe, for many different reasons, a lot of investors were afraid of losing money, and sold. Sometimes, shit happens.
  - Alhambra Partners, 11 August 2024

• Locking up merchandise at drugstores and retailers, to deter shoplifting (which is only partially successful), is pushing shoppers online
  - Axios, 11 August 2024

• We are entering an AI price-fixing dystopia. Algorithmic collusion appears to be spreading to more and more industries. And existing laws may not be equipped to stop it. [KM: but the rich AI companies must get richer]
  - The Atlantic, 10 August 2024

• What works in Taiwan does not always work in Arizona, a chipmaking giant learns - which is learning to combine cultures. TSMC modeled its facility in Phoenix on one at home. But bringing its complex manufacturing process to America has been a bigger challenge than it expected.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 August 2024

• A study published in the Journal of "Hospitality Marketing & Management" in June found that describing a product as using the term "AI" lowers the intention of a customer to buy the product. Consumers have trust issues with AI, and don't understand the technology.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 10 August 2024

• Politicians in the USA act to restrict a trade provision, de minimis - few restrictions/taxes on shipments worth less than $800, favored by the e-commerce giants of Zhōngguó. A bipartisan group of USA lawmakers have proposed a new law to restrict a trade provision, favored by retailers such as Temu and Shein, that lets goods flow in from Zhōngguó with little scrutiny and no taxes/duties.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 August 2024

• A new e-cigarette with built-in video games is being illegally sold in New York and other parts of the United States - for being double addictive. These new drug trafficking devices offer prizes as incentives depending on how much a person vapes, and critics caution they are being used to illegally lure the youth of the USA into nicotine addiction (nicotine being more addictive than cocaine).
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 10 August 2024

• In Malaysia, anger over the USA's support for Israel in its attacks on people in Gaza -- creates more political opportunities for Zhōngguó. The relationship between the USA and Malaysia - a key country in the semiconductor supply chain - has grown more troubled.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 August 2024

• Why Nvidia is still the undisputed king of AI. Nvidia, like Apple, shows that if you want to become a giant, you have got to be as good at software as you are at hardware.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 August 2024

• How Elon Musk is disrupting the elections in the USA to support Trump. State investigators and watchdogs are closely monitoring whether the world's wealthiest authoritarian man is potentially defrauding voters while "thou shalt not" lies/disinformation floods his social media platform, Twitter/X.
  - Independent, 09 August 2024

• Software innovation just is not what it used to be, and Moxie Marlinspike blames 'agile' development. Layers of abstraction and speedy software development have left engineers unable to understand what lies beneath.
  - The Register, 09 August 2024

• Cisco plans to fire thousands of people in a second round of layoffs. These cuts could be similar in scale to the 4,000 people fired in February and may be announced as early as next Wednesday.
  - Zero Hedge, 09 August 2024

• Delta to CrowdStrike: do not blame us for your technology failures. Delta says the cybersecurity company is shirking blame for the July outage, which led the carrier to cancel about 7,000 flights.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 August 2024

• Investors withdraw $2.2 billion from ARKK in 2024, as Cathie Wood underperforms the Nasdaq by -30% year-to-date
  - Zero Hedge, 08 August 2024

• Nasdaq is taking steps to purge itself of dubious companies whose shares trade below $1 each, following criticism that the exchange has become home to hundreds of risky penny stocks.
  - Wall Street Journal, 08 August 2024

• CNN is effectively worthless after parent Warner Brothers takes $9.1 billion writedown of the value of its traditional TV networks, such as CNN and TNT.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 August 2024

• Warner Brothers writes off $9 billion of value in its cable networks
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 August 2024

• Hedge funds are quietly flooding back into tech stocks, according to Goldman Sachs Prime. Gross trading activity in US Tech stocks has increased in each of the past 5 trading sessions on the Prime book.
  - Zero Hedge, 08 August 2024

• Will the latest AI systems kill meaningless jobs? And is that so bad? A quarter of the work force in rich countries sees their jobs as potentially pointless, according to a study by two Dutch economists. A recent estimate by Goldman Sachs found that generative A.I. could eventually automate activities that amount to the equivalent of some 300 million full-time jobs globally - many of these in office roles like administrators and middle managers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 August 2024

• How bitcoin traders and miners got around the cryptocurrency ban in Zhōngguó. Investors in Zhōngguó are circumventing cryptocurrency bans with P2P trading, VPNs, apps and other innovative strategies.
  - Coin Telegraph, 07 August 2024

• Shares of Warner Brothers Discovery plummet 10% after it reported a $9.1 billion write-down on its TV networks and missed analyst estimates on revenue
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 August 2024

• Shares of Airbnb plunge 15% on slowing demand in the USA as the consumer downturn worsens
  - Zero Hedge, 07 August 2024

• SoftBank unveils $3.4 billion buyback amid pressure from investors. Its market capitalisation is far less than the value of its portfolio assets.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 07 August 2024

• I have reviewed restaurants for 12 years. They have changed, and not for the better. Pete Wells reflects on a dining world of touch screens and reservation apps, where it is getting hard to find the human touch [KM: the human touch that eats into profits].
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 August 2024

• Tech billionaires love Trump now - because he is one of them. Silicon Valley's right-wing history goes back over 100 years; Donald Trump is a perfect avatar for their power play. Though the industry leaders like to portray themselves as a bunch of science geniuses, they are just as likely to be Trump-style flimflams. alley golden boy Sam Altman has been trying to raise no-typo trillions of dollars in Gulf oil money for his newest project off the hype from billions-losing OpenAI -- a Trumpy plan if ever there were one.
  - The Intercept, 07 August 2024

• As regulators close in, Nvidia scrambles for a response. With a 90 percent share of the AI processor chip market, the company is facing antitrust investigations into the possibility that it could lock in customers or hurt competitors.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 August 2024

• Intel was sued on Wednesday by shareholders who said the Silicon Valley chipmaker fraudulently concealed problems that led it to post weak results, slash jobs and suspend its dividend, and caused its market value to sink more than $32 billion in a single day.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 07 August 2024

• After another catastrophic earnings report, supporters of Intel are increasingly few and far between on Wall Street. Intel shares have shed nearly a third of their value since the firm gave a grim growth forecast, announced plans to slash 15,000 jobs, and suspended a dividend that has been in place since 1992. The report was the latest in a series of discouraging updates, and underlined the myriad headwinds facing the chipmaker as it struggles to execute an ambitious turnaround and compete in the artificial intelligence era. The stock has been downgraded at multiple firms in the wake of the earnings -- making it the least-liked semiconductor company among analysts.
  - Bloomberg, 07 August 2024

• How chip giant Intel spurned OpenAI and fell behind the times. Over several months in 2017 and 2018, executives at the two companies discussed various options, including Intel buying a 15% stake for $1 billion in cash, three of the people said. They also discussed Intel taking an additional 15% stake in OpenAI if it made hardware for the startup at cost price, two people said. Intel ultimately decided against a deal, partly because then-CEO Bob Swan did not think generative AI models would make it to market in the near future and thus repay the chipmaker's investment, according to three of the sources, who all requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 07 August 2024

• Axios announced on Tuesday that it would lay off about 50 employees, or roughly 10 percent of the company
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 August 2024

• CNET to be sold to Ziff Davis in sign of possible media deals to come. Ziff Davis is acquiring CNET for more than $100 million. Its chief executive thinks more acquisitions are on the horizon.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 August 2024

• The loss in a historic antitrust trial for Google is reverberating across Silicon Valley. The ruling is likely to affect the search giant and its largest collaborators and competitors in the mobile computing industry.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 August 2024

• Google and Apple can afford to play long game after antitrust ruling. They have a strong common cause to protect the billions of dollars Google pays Apple every year to keep its search engine on the iPhone, though the arrangement is looking a little more uncertain.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 August 2024

• Artificial intelligence is upending the tech outsourcing industry in Bharat. While the sector is adapting, the changes might result in the loss of many coveted paid-jobs.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 August 2024

• My insurance company spied on my house with a drone. Then the real nightmare began, after they cancelled my home insurnance policy. When homeowners are threatened with cancellation, they pick up the bill for repairs, even if repairs are unnecessary. If the Boston homeowner throws out a slate roof with 70 years of life left in it, the insurance company never knows it was wrong to remove it. It never updates the model to be less aggressive for similar homes.
  - Business Insider, 07 August 2024

• The top 100 companies in the world of insurance technology
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 August 2024

• Peter Kyle, the technology minister of the UK, argues that Elon Musk is "accountable to no one", amid disinformation spread on Twitter/X during riots in the UK. Kyle's comments add to other criticisms from U.K. government officials of Musk, who on Sunday made unjustified comments associating riots taking place in the UK with "civil war".
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 August 2024

• Disney beats earnings estimates as combined streaming services turn a profit. The combined streaming businesses, comprised of Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, turned a profit for the first time, and beat Disney's earlier guidance that this would happen in its fourth quarter. Disney's parks and experiences segment felt pressure due to lower consumer demand and inflation. Shares rose about 3% on the news.
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 August 2024

• Disney beats earnings estimates as combined streaming services turn a profit. The combined streaming businesses, comprised of Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, turned a profit for the first time, and beat Disney's earlier guidance that this would happen in its fourth quarter. Disney's parks and experiences segment felt pressure due to lower consumer demand and inflation. Shares rose about 3% on the news.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 August 2024

• Dell overlaods its Human Resources department by firing 12,000 people in a single day. President of global sales and customer operations Bill Scannell and global channels president John Byrne explained in a memo that the company is attempting to grow faster in the market by concentrating its efforts on the development of "modern IT and AI" and that it can seemingly achieve that without 10% of it workforce, or approximately 12,500 employees. The layoffs are part of Dell's overall push to reduce its workforce to under 100,000 people.
  - TweakTown, 06 August 2024

• California resident Christopher Hofmann filed the potential class-action complaint against Jerico Pictures, doing business as National Public Data, a Coral Springs-based firm that provides APIs so that companies can perform things like background checks on people and look up folks' criminal records. As such National Public Data holds a lot of highly personal information, which ended up being stolen in a cyberattack. According to the lawsuit, filed in a southern Florida federal district court, Hofmann is one of the individuals whose sensitive information was pilfered by crooks and then put up for sale for $3.5 million on an underworld forum in April.
  - The Register, 05 August 2024

• SpaceX's new direct-tocell Starlink satellites are way brighter than the originals. Their increased brightness poses challenges for astronomical observations, .
  - Space.com, 06 August 2024

• Shares of Super Micro rise 16% and then crash 25% after an earnings report. Not even the company's blowout outlook, which has 2025 full-year revenue between $26 and $30BN on Wall Street estimates of $23.6BN, nor the company's announcement of a 10-for-1 stock split after Oct 1, did anything to inspire buying, but judging by the afterhours action, certainly inspired selling as investors are suddenly worried about the longer-term profitability of AI-optimized servers sold by companies like Super Micro, Dell Technologies, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise if the company's margins are already cratering this fast.
  - Zero Hedge, 06 August 2024

• The government of the USA will spend $2.2 billion to upgrade the electric power grid. The funding from the DOE will add to private sector financing to support eight grid upgrade projects across 18 states.
  - Zero Hedge, 06 August 2024

• Zhōngguó begins work to create a vast network of LEO Internet satellites. The launch of the first 18 satellites in the Qianfan Constellation sees the start of race to challenge the likes of the Starlink project of SpaceX. By the end of 2025, it aims to have 648 satellites in orbit to provide regional network coverage, then make its coverage global by 2027. Finally, by 2030, it hopes to operate more than 14,000 satellites to provide multi-service integration directly to mobile devices.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 06 August 2024

• Share of rooftop solar installer SunPower fall 32%, as the company has filed for bankruptcy, after struggling for months in the face of high interest rates and allegations of misconduct in its reporting practices. SunPower stock fell 32% to 55 cents per share Tuesday. Its shares have collapsed nearly 90% this year.
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 August 2024

• Microsoft blamed Delta Air Lines on Tuesday for its dayslong struggle to recover from a global cyber outage caused by CrowdStrike updating Microsoft Windows software, that led Delta to cancel more than 6,000 flights. Microsoft said its employees repeatedly offered to help Delta following the outage, but Delta turned them down.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 06 August 2024

• Elon Musk's social media platform Twitter/X has sued a group of advertisers, alleging that a "massive advertiser boycott" deprived the company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust laws. Twitter/X filed the lawsuit Tuesday in a federal court in Texas against the World Federation of Advertisers and member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted. It accused the advertising group's initiative, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, of helping to coordinate a pause in advertising after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 and overhauled its staff and policies.
  - Associated Press, 06 August 2024

• Massive insider selling by Nvidia executives occurred at and after the peak price for Nvidia
  - Zero Hedge, 06 August 2024

• Employees at Samsung return to work after strike fails to win concessions. The indefinite strike, the first in the electronics company's history, comprised only a sliver of its labor force and lasted less than a month.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 August 2024

• Infineon lowered its sales forecasts for the third time this year as the inventory glut that is pervading the semiconductor industry continues to translate into fewer orders for chips in smartphones, cars and industrial machinery
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 August 2024

• Excessive Internet use disrupts key parts of the teenage brain. Internet addiction alters teenage brains in ways that encourage other addictive behaviors.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 August 2024

• Actors have once again picked up their picket signs. But this time, members of the Screen Actors Guild are striking against the video game industry after negotiations for a new contract governing interactive media and video games fell through. The guild began striking on Friday, July 26th, preventing over 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members from taking new video game projects and impeding games already in development from the biggest publishers to the smallest indie studios. Negotiations broke down due to disagreements over worker protections around AI, in particular, about which type of paid performer should be eligible for protections from non-paid AI.
  - The Verge, 05 August 2024

• Shares of Google decline, after a federal judge ruled Monday that Google's payments to make its search engine the default on smartphone web browsers violates US antitrust law. Judge Amit Mehta in Washington said that Google's $26 billion in payments effectively blocked any other competitor from succeeding in the market.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 August 2024

• Shares of Google decline, after a federal judge ruled Monday that Google's payments to make its search engine the default on smartphone web browsers violates US antitrust law. Judge Amit Mehta in Washington said that Google's $26 billion in payments effectively blocked any other competitor from succeeding in the market.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 August 2024

• Shares of Apple drop 7% after Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway slashes stake by half
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 August 2024

• Nvidia and Super Micro Computer lead AI trade carnage with both stocks down more than 12%
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 August 2024

• Nvidia reportedly delays the launch of its next AI processor, as shares of Nvidia plummet on a global selloff. Nvidia has informed Microsoft and other cloud providers that its most advanced AI chip models in the Blackwell series (B200 AI chip) face three months of delays following the discovery of a design flaw "unusually late in the production process". The production delay sparked turmoil in shares on Monday morning, down as much as 10% in premarket trading to the $96 handle. From the $140 peak in mid-June, shares have slid nearly 31%. Now, we must add that a global selloff is also underway this AM.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 August 2024

• Share of Softbank plummet nearly 19%, causing a loss of $4.6 billion in the fortune of its founder, Masayoshi Son
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 August 2024

• Scientists develop new compound that kills flesh-eating and other drug-resistant Gram-positive bacteria
  - Zero Hedge, 05 August 2024

• With smugglers and front companies, Zhōngguó is bypassing American bans on shipments of AI processors to Zhōngguó. The USA is trying to stop Zhōngguó from getting Nvidia processors to advance its military. The private sector is fighting back. In one case, corporate executives in Zhōngguó bypassed USA restrictions when they created a new company that is now one of the largest makers of AI servers in Zhōngguó and a partner of Nvidia, Intel and Microsoft. Companies in the USA have found workarounds to keep selling some products in Zhōngguó. And an underground marketplace of smugglers, backroom deals and fraudulent shipping labels is funneling AI processors into Zhōngguó, which does not consider such sales illegal.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 August 2024

• Zhōngguó is closing the AI gap with the USA. In recent weeks, technology companies in Zhōngguó have unveiled technologies that rival systems from the USA - they are already in the hands of consumers and software developers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 August 2024

• How YouTube took over our television screens. The platform first known for viral videos now attracts more viewers on TVs than Netflix, Disney+ or Amazon Prime Video.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 August 2024

• Crowdstrike to Delta Airlines: stop blaming us. The cybersecurity company says it isn't [totally] to blame for the airline's multi-day IT systems failure, calling it a "misleading narrative".
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 August 2024

• In search of a healthier potato. Companies are scouring and tweaking the DNA of potatoes to produce higher-yielding varieties and beneficial starches.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 August 2024

• Did the Warren Buffett news leak early? Goldman Sachs warns orderly selling turned "panicky" on Friday amid record sales of technology stocks. Did Buffett's historic dump of Apple shares leak to the hedge fund community, which has now dumped tech names for 9 of the past 11 weeks?
  - Zero Hedge, 04 August 2024

• Scientist David Keith wants to wants to spray a pollutant, sulfur dioxide, into the sky to block some sunlight (what happens after volcanoes explode). He says the benefits would outweigh the dangers: altering global weather patterns, encouraging more use of fossil fuel, and cause respiratory problems as the sulfur dioxide drifts down to ground level.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 August 2024

• Residents of Maryland, and in surrounding states, should prepare for rising power bills due to capacity constraints on the regional power grid and the increasing peak load from new AI data centers. This combination creates a perfect storm of continued utility bill inflation, which will only pressure cash-strapped households in the years ahead, .
  - Zero Hedge, 03 August 2024

• Costco Wholesale is a prime candidate for time arbitrage. The stock is down 8.4% since July 10, as investors have grown concerned that consumer spending is coming under pressure. Yet Costco's long-term merits should appeal to anyone who is interested in a company with pricing power and the potential to use technology to increase e-commerce sales, as Walmart and Amazon.com have done.
  - Barron's, 03 August 2024

• This biotech risk-taker created Moderna. Now he is harnessing AI. Noubar Afeyan's Flagship Pioneering has hundreds of scientists working at in-house labs. They are seeking discoveries as valuable as the mRNA vaccines of s best-known spinoff, Moderna.
  - Barron's, 03 August 2024

• As stock prices plummet, Wall Street begs the Federal Reserve to panic and give Wall Street more of its favorite 'drug' - interest rate reductions. Goldman predicts 3 consecutive rate reductions, JPMorgan hopes for a reduction of 05%, and Citi even more
  - Zero Hedge, 02 August 2024

• The Justice Department sued TikTok on Friday, accusing the company of violating children's online privacy law and running afoul of a settlement it had reached with another federal agency, the FTC. The latest lawsuit focuses on allegations that TikTok, a trend-setting platform popular among young users, and its Zhōngguó-based parent company ByteDance violated a federal law that requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parental consent before collecting personal information of children under 13.
  - Associated Press, 02 August 2024

• The Justice Department sued TikTok on Friday, accusing the company of violating children's online privacy law and running afoul of a settlement it had reached with another federal agency, the FTC. The latest lawsuit focuses on allegations that TikTok, a trend-setting platform popular among young users, and its Zhōngguó-based parent company ByteDance violated a federal law that requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parental consent before collecting personal information of children under 13.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 August 2024

• Shares of Intel plummet 27%, as Intel heads for its worst day on Wall Street in 50 years, falling to the lowest price in a decade
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 August 2024

• Shares of Nvidia drop 2% as semiconductor chip stocks decline again
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 02 August 2024

• SAD: will AI cause more people to be fired from paid white-collar jobs? Actors and writers won strict limits on artificial intelligence in last year's negotiations, but editors and artists face a growing challenge. Editors making $125,000 to $200,000 per year will become part-time, electronic gig workers. And "if a 70,000 member union like IATSE cannot protect its workers [from AI], what does it mean for everybody else?". New generative AI programs have enabled someone with almost no training in sound to press a few buttons and largely achieve what the sound editor previously accomplished.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 August 2024

• Wall Street to Big Tech: is AI ever going to make money, [KM: other than by getting people fired]? Big Tech still has relatively little to show for all their billions spent in terms of significant revenue gains from AI or profitable new products, and investors are starting to get antsy.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 02 August 2024

• More hype from Elon Musk: Tesla says that self-driving taxis will power its growth, but the company has not said when such a service would be ready or how much it would increase profits.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 August 2024

• Incompetent use of technology by the Secret Service helped gunman evade detection at Trump rally. Technologies that might have protected the former president failed because they were improperly deployed or because the Secret Service chose not to use them.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 August 2024

• ChatGPT still not very good at dianosing human ailments. In one study, the LLM models gave a correct diagnosis just 49% of the time
  - Medical Xpress, 01 August 2024

• $8,500,000,000 - After receiving $8.5 billion in socialist subsidies, Intel is so criminally managed that it firing 15,000 people to try to re-invent itself, mismanagement private sector investors knew about for not wanting to so subsidize Intel, forcing the taxpayers to lose $8.5 billion.
  - Wired, 01 August 2024

• Google has been blasted for an Olympics commercial touting its Gemini AI tool, with viewers describing the ad as completely "soul crushing". It shows a girl relying AI to help understand running and hurdling techniques, instead of her father doing the research to more interact with his daughter [something Google hates]. "This commercial showing somebody having a child use AI to write a fan letter to her hero SUCKS." The globalist technocrat mindset is that children should not have to think for themselves, and the human authenticity factor of a child's imagination wasn't even a consideration.
  - Modernity, 01 August 2024

• Nonprofit blood bank OneBlood, which serves hundreds of American hospitals based in the Southeast region, has been affected by a ransomware attack that has disrupted its software systems. "The supplier ecosystem is a highly desirable target for ransomware groups. Attackers can infiltrate hundreds of organizations through a single vulnerability without being detected.", yeah, thanks to poorly designed software due to the chase for billions.
  - Zero Hedge, 01 August 2024

• Intel late Thursday badly missed Wall Street's targets for the second quarter and with its guidance for the third quarter. The chip giant also announced a $10 billion cost-reduction plan and suspended its quarterly dividend. Intel stock plunged in extended trading. In after-hours trading on the stock market today, Intel stock plummeted more than 19% to 23.27. During the regular session Thursday, Intel stock tumbled 5.5% to close at 29.05 amid a sell-off of semiconductor chip stocks.
  - Investors Business Daily, 01 August 2024

• Intel will fire over 15,000 people (about 15% of its people) amid (highly-paid) management struggles to make Intel more competitive. The company also announced other restructuring moves and a reduction in capital spending, which are expected to cut costs by $10 billion in 2025. To conserve cash, Intel said, it will suspend its quarterly dividend in the fourth quarter.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 August 2024

• Shares of Apple pump (up $7) and dump (then down $8 dollars) as iPad sales help beat earnings estimates, but with a decline in revenues in Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 01 August 2024

• $3,800,000,000 - Authorities in Bharat may issue notices soon to more major IT services firms in an investigation of alleged tax evasion related to work done by their overseas offices, a government source said on Thursday, a day after Infosys was slapped with a $4 billion tax demand. In serving its highest-ever tax demand on Infosys, the government accused Bharat's second-largest tech services company of evading taxes and sought 320 billion rupees ($3.8 billion), or almost all its revenue for the quarter ended June 30.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 01 August 2024

• "We do not need more concrete": a new village in Tanzania will use a 3D printer and soil to construct buildings for its community
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 01 August 2024

• More than 100 video game performers picketed in front of the Warner Bros. Studios building on Thursday to protest against what they call an unwillingness from top gaming companies to protect paid voice actors and motion capture workers equally against the unregulated use of non-paid AI.
  - Associated Press, 01 August 2024

• Shares of Moderna decline 12% after full-year sales guidance is slashed
  - Zero Hedge, 01 August 2024

• Online shopping site Temu has faced tough questions before about its business practices. Now it has a new problem: a backlash from independent merchants based in Zhōngguó who sell their products on the wildly popular rival to Amazon. Hundreds of them staged a demonstration this week at an office affiliated with Temu in the southern city of Guangzhou. They were protesting what they called "unjust" fines levied by the company or withheld payment on goods already sold, among other complaints.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 01 August 2024

• Zhōngguó could reach chip tool self-sufficiency this summer, industry veteran says. AMEC CEO Gerald Yin said Zhōngguó is on the verge of basic self-sufficiency in chip-making equipment, but is behind 5 to 10 years in quality and reliability.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 01 August 2024

• Shares of Arm Holdings slumped 16% in afternoon trading on Thursday, after the British semiconductor chip firm's tepid revenue forecast sparked concerns it may have to wait longer than some peers to gain from the boom in AI technologies.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 01 August 2024

• Zhōngguó wants to start a national Internet ID system. The government said the proposal would protect online privacy. Critics said it could further concentrate government control over the internet.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 August 2024

• More than 100 venture capitalists in Silicon Valley pledge to support Kamala Harris
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 August 2024

• Competing factions of Democrats are pushing Kamala Harris to adopt their position on cryptocurrency policy, an issue that has taken on outsize political importance because of the industry's massive bribes spending on this elections in 2024.
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 01 August 2024

• Suppliers said that many merchants on Temu, the online shopping platform, have shut down factories and incurred debts after it started imposing hefty penalties over what was deemed to be after-sales issues
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 August 2024

• AI might still be dominating financial headlines, but investors should take heed when too much of the narrative for these stocks is focused on euphoria and explosive growth potential. Pettit says that on both the buy and sell sides, it remains a mystery to most as to what these AI companies will do in the next five years.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 31 July 2024

• More mobile game developers have stepped forward to talk about their strained relationship with Apple, including new complaints about designing for the Apple Vision Pro - an "abusive relationship". In February, game developers began expressing frustration over Apple Arcade. They pointed out that while the service was initially profitable, Apple had begun decreasing upfront payments and the per-play "bonus pool". Additionally, Apple began to axe projects with little to no warning. Apple has delayed payments -- sometimes up to six months -- which has put smaller studios in precarious situations.
  - Apple Insider, 31 July 2024

• Shares of Lumen Technologies gain 18% (up 186% in July) as artificial intelligence deals and short covering sparked a wild run after years of vicious selling.
  - Blomberg, 31 July 2024

• Millions of sports fans and concertgoers are being duped by a deceptive pricing scheme at StubHub that hides the true cost of tickets until the very last moment, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by Washington, DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb. "StubHub uses a classic bait-and-switch scheme", the lawsuit said, describing what is known as 'drip pricing' where only part of the product's price is advertised initially.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 31 July 2024

• Bonds and gold soar in July amid a 'dot-com style' collapse in crowded Big Tech trades
  - Zero Hedge, 31 July 2024

• Laid-off technology workers in California are sick to death of LinkedIn. Tech workers hate the website of LinkedIn. But more than ever, they need it. "LinkedIn has become a cesspool of business-themed shit-posting." Much of the ire focuses on LinkedIn's "Home" feed, an endless and personalized scroll that has just enough job listings to be useful but also a cacophony of viral and not-so-viral clickbait, ads and corporate-speaky announcements.
  - SF Gate, 31 July 2024

• Bumble and Hinge (and other social dating apps) allowed stalkers to pinpoint the locations of users down to 2 meters. The good news is that all the apps that had these issues, and that the researchers reached out to, have now changed how distance filters work and are not vulnerable to the oracle trilateration technique.
  - TechCrunch, 31 July 2024

• CrowdStrike has been sued by shareholders who said the cybersecurity company defrauded them by concealing how its inadequate software testing could cause the July 19 global outage that crashed more than 8 million computers.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 31 July 2024

• The CEO of Delta prepares legal battle against CrowdStrike after IT outage sparked $500 million loss. Shares of CrowdStrike have plunged 40% in recent weeks and have retraced 50% of the move from about $100 handle in early 2023 to nearly $400 at the start of July.
  - Zero Hedge, 31 July 2024

• The CEO of Delta says that the CrowdStrike technology outage cost it $500 million. The airline faced deeper disruption and took days longer than rivals to get back on track after the outage knocked key systems offline.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 July 2024

• Despite receiving billions of dollars of socialist subsidies, Intel plans to fire thousands of people to finance a recovery and cope with an eroding market share
  - Thomson's Reuters, 31 July 2024

• Shares of AMD rise 9% in premarket trading as global chip stocks rally after earnings and geopolitics lift sector. Shares of Nvidia were up 5%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 July 2024

• Shares of ASML rise 7% after a report that the USA will exempt allies (Nihon, Netherlands, South Korea) from new restrictions on shipments of semiconductor equipment to Zhōngguó
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 July 2024

• Shares of Lumen jumped as much as 77% before closing being up 38%, after a good earnings report and fiber optic deal with Corning
  - The Motley Fool, 31 July 2024

• Shares of Ptinterest decline 8% after a muted third-quarter outlook dashed Wall Street's expectations for a stabilization in its revenues amid a rebound in the digital ad market.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 31 July 2024

• Kamala Harris faces a faster, uglier version of the Internet. Politicians have long faced racist and sexist attacks online from mostly racist, sexist Christian Republicans. But Ms. Harris is being attacked on more platforms, with new technologies and in front of bigger audiences than Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 July 2024

• The USA wanted to harm the business of Huawei. Huawei is only getting stronger. The telecom giant in Zhōngguó struggled at first under authoritarian sanctions imposed by the USA. Then Beijing stepped in, showing how hard (and idiotic) it is to contain the technology ambitions if Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 July 2024

• Zhōngguó imposes export controls on drones and parts for potential military use. Zhōngguó says the move will help safeguard Zhōngguó's security and interests, and better serve its obligation regarding non-proliferation of weapons.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 31 July 2024

• $447,000,000 - Spain fines Booking.com $447 million over competition concerns, ruling that since at least early 2019, Booking.com set several unfair conditions that have not been the same for all hotels in Spain using the platform for their bookings.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 July 2024

• Shares of Nvidia fall 7% to a 2-month low, down 25% from its peak price, a decline of $800 billion, well below a 10% correction for the semiconductor chip designer
  - Forbes, 30 July 2024

• Shares of Microsoft drop 6% after results fall short in the latest disappointment in AI bubble world
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 30 July 2024

• Shares of Crowdstrike plummet over 8%, after a report Delta Air Lines will file a lawsuit to seek compensation from the cybersecurity firm over the recent global IT outage that crippled industries including airlines.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 30 July 2024

• $1,400,000,000 - Facebook has agreed to pay $1.4 billion to Texas to resolve the state's lawsuit accusing the Facebook parent of illegally using facial-recognition technology to collect biometric data of millions of Texans without their consent
  - Thomson's Reuters, 30 July 2024

• Many top porn stars on OnlyFans hire 'chatters' to impersonate them online and entice subscribers into splurging on explicit content. These impostors are not formally affiliated with OnlyFans but have brought it riches -- and new legal threats. Some subscribers say the deception amounts to retail fraud.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 30 July 2024

• Amazon paid almost $1 billion for twitch in 2014. It is still losing money. The live-video service has slowing user growth and workers are expecting more layoffs and other changes ahead.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 July 2024

• A BYU professor has figured out a way to shave critical years off the complicated design and licensing processes for modern nuclear reactors: artificial intelligence
  - BYU News, 29 July 2024

• Moxion Power, the Bay Area battery maker that furloughed most of its staff on July 19, is shutting down and firing its remaining 248 people. Moxion had raised $110 million in funding over the past four years and recently began work on a huge factory next to its Richmond headquarters. But the company was not able to raise more money.
  - SF Gate, 29 July 2024

• "Deadpool and Wolverine" isn't just a bad movie - it is worsening the definition of what a 'movie' is. It is a film that is about absolutely nothing -- a film with no discernable purpose or artistic ambitions, beyond the perpetuation of its own corporate myth for Disney's Marvel. Over the past two decades, Marvel has re-shaped Hollywood in its own image, whittling away some of the things that made filmmaking unique as an art form and shifting it towards something more televisual and serialised. The problem with the movie isn't that it tells its story badly -- it is that it has no interest in telling a story at all. The movie's only purpose is the maintenance and consolidation of Marvel's brand, in its viability as both product and advertisement, a snake eating its own tail.
  - The Independent, 29 July 2024

• Casting Robert Downey Jr. as 'Doctor Doom' proves Disney's Marvel is running on fumes. One Marvel fan offers his take on why this cynical casting decision is evident that things are really bad over at Marvel and proof that they have given up entirely.
  - The Daily Beast, 29 July 2024

• Many Americans feel that the country has become unrecognizable due to decades of globalization and a technological revolution that has eroded middle-class livelihoods and deepened social divides
  - Zero Hedge, 29 July 2024

• Intel's crashing CPU crisis deepens as more models are affected than originally thought. The issue extends beyond enthusiast chips, hinting at a more complex root cause. So far, Intel has only grudgingly provided relief to affected customers. It is not planning a recall of the affected processors nor is it halting their sale. It has also failed to provide details on extended warranties or no-questions-asked replacements.
  - TechSpot, 29 July 2024

• Shares of Philips jump 10.5% as second-quarter sales grow despite weakness of sales in Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 July 2024

• How the big bet on electric car gigafactories went badly wrong. Battery manufacturing is becoming less of a gold rush and more of a brutal race to the bottom. Huge investments in factories as well as ultra-low raw material costs, combined with stalling demand for electric cars, have pushed the world into oversupply. Zhōngguó ccounts for 80 percent of all global manufacturing capacity, but that last year there was 315 gigawatt hour (GWh) of excess battery production.
  - Barclay's The Telegraph, 29 July 2024

• Shares of Reckitt Benckiser plunge 10% to the lowest since 2013, after Similac-maker Abbott was ordered by a jury to pay almost $500 million over allegations it hid the risk that its premature infant formula can cause potentially fatal bowel disease. Abbott fell 5.5% in New York premarket trade. Reckitt's Mead Johnson subsidiary faces similar lawsuits.
  - Bloomberg, 29 July 2024

• The sexist Elon Musk shares a manipulated video of Kamala Harris, in seeming violation of his policies of his Twitter/X
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 July 2024

• Investors gobble up bonds that can turn into stocks. Lyft, Snap and others are raising money by issuing convertible bonds.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 July 2024

• JD Vance, Trump's vice presidential candidate, is accused of trying to profit from animal cruelty. An article by Rolling Stone, dated October 25, 2022, has exposed allegations of animal cruelty linked to a company financed by JD Vance's venture capital firm, Narya. The report claims that AmplifyBio, which received funding from Vance's firm, carried out severe experiments on live animals, including monkeys and dogs. Many animals suffered and died due to toxic testing exposures and harsh conditions.
  - Times Now, 28 July 2024

• Wind and solar power generation to surpass 40% of the power capacity of Zhōngguó by year-end. Wind and solar accounted for 38.4 per cent of overall installed capacity in the first half of the year, while coal-fired capacity fell to 38.1 per cent.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 28 July 2024

• For less than $100,000, it may now be possible to use Silicon Valley's artificial intelligence to develop a virus that could kill millions of people. [KM: Silicon Valley is trying to figure out how to make more billions from this.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 July 2024

• In the mineral-rich fringes of Indonesia, whose nickel will feed EV giants like Tesla, the deaths of miners continue to mount. Demand by Zhōngguó for nickel, an important ingredient in EV batteries, has triggered a mining boom in the remote regions of Indonesia. Deaths and injuries from industrial accidents have been increasing. Indonesia has signed over a dozen deals worth more than $15 billion with suppliers for EV giants like Tesla and Hyundai Motor. [MK: yes, but Elon Musk and others must get richer on such misery.]
  - Rest of the World, 27 July 2024

• The illicit flow of technology to Rossiya goes through this address in Hong Kong. Defying sanctions, Rossiya has obtained nearly $4 billion in restricted chips since the war began in Ukraine. Many were shipped through a cluster of shell companies in Hong Kong.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 July 2024

• Billionaire tech oligarchs and cryptocurrency giants want to buy Washington. They are bribing bankrolling Trump to make it happen.
  - Rolling Stone, 27 July 2024

• Bats, the interesting flying mammals had survival problems. Now, add taxidermy listings on Etsy and eBay. Online sales to idiots appear to be compounding threats from climate change and habitat loss, according to new research.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 July 2024

• Investors are suddenly getting very concerned that AI isn't making any serious money. "Despite its expensive price tag, the technology is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be useful.", according to a Goldman Sachs analyst. Earlier this week, Google released its second-quarter earnings, failing to impress investors with razor-thin profit margins and surging costs related to training AI models. With the AI market clogged with products that are still mostly free, the tech costs a lot to run but isn't bringing in much cash.
  - Futurism, 27 July 2024

• Robots sacked, screenings shut down: a new movement of luddites is rising up against AI. Company after company is swallowing the hype, only to be forced into embarrassing walkbacks by anti-AI backlash.
  - The Guardian, 27 July 2024

• Automakers sold driver data for pennies, Senators say. Ron Wyden and Edward Markey urged the F.T.C. to investigate how car companies handled the data from millions of car owners.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 July 2024

• JPMorgan Chase the largest credit card issuer in the USA, will prevent customers from using its credit cards to repay increasingly "buy now, pay later" installment loans. Financial regulators and consumer advocates frown upon using credit cards to pay off installment loans because of the risk that consumers will dig themselves further into debt.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 July 2024

• A few blockbuster podcasts are making all the money. The top shows are adding video, merchandise and live tours and signing megadeals with Spotify, Sirius and Amazon.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 July 2024

• Shares of EssilorLuxottica rise over 7%, after the eyewear giant said Google and other big tech companies showed interest in exploring partnerships, following its tie-up with Facebook to make Ray-Ban smart glasses.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 July 2024

• John Malone is king of Liberty Media. How to invest in his struggling empire. Sirius XM, Charter Communications, and Warner Brothers Discovery have come under pressure.
  - Barron's, 27 July 2024

• AI sparked inflatedbubble. Now we wait for the payoff, if any.
  - Barron's, 27 July 2024

• Apple's new AI iPhone is a hit on Wall Street. If shoppers do not agree, watch out for stock price declines.
  - Barron's, 27 July 2024

• AI processors from Intel are "mostly missing-in-action", with lackluster products
  - Barron's, 26 July 2024

• Intel admits damage to unstable 14th-gen and 13th-gen CPUs is permanent -- incoming patch is a preventative, not a cure
  - TechRadar, 26 July 2024

• Elon Musk wants to use $5 billion of shareholder value from Tesla to bail out xAI and Twitter/X, vaguely promising of 'benefits' from AI to help Tesla. Perhaps that $5 billion could be better spent at Tesla. They could put that money toward making sure the Cybertruck doesn't keep breaking, or they could update its aging lineup of vehicles, or they could even work on that $25,000 car. In a lot of ways, Musk's empire is cannibalizingitself -- even outside of what his interests happen to be day to day. xAI is apparently hiring away a ton of Tesla employees, and AI chips that were once destined for Tesla have been sent to xAI instead.
  - Jalopnik, 26 July 2024

• Shares of Deckers Outdoor jumped as much as 17% on Friday, after multiple brokerages raised their price targets following the company's bet on full-price sales of its hot-selling Hoka running shoes and UGG boots to raise its annual profit forecast.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 26 July 2024

• Crowdstrike should be the last straw. Companies must implement proper cybersecurity. To date, there has been little in the way of repercussions for industry failures. Occasional class actions have not provided a sufficient financial incentive to institute proper security measures. In addition, the lack of regulations mandating security measures with stiff financial penalties have landed us here. Voluntary security measures, as advised by CISA, too often go ignored without sufficient financial incentive to do the right thing.
  - The Hill, 26 July 2024

• Since peaking on July 10th, the market cap of the Magnificent 7 stocks has dropped a mind-numbering $2 trillion
  - Zero Hedge, 26 July 2024

• Shares of Charter Communications rise 16% after it beat Wall Street estimates for quarterly profit and reported fewer-than-expected broadband subscriber losses
  - Thomson's Reuters, 26 July 2024

• Zhōngguó sets a launch date for the world's first nuclear power plant that uses thorium molten salts as the fuel
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 26 July 2024

• Video game producers in Hollywood announced that they will go on strike Thursday, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections. SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the two sides remained split over the regulation of generative AI.
  - Associated Press, 26 July 2024

• Codelco posted a decline in first-half copper production as setbacks at its mines and projects in Chile loosen the state-owned s grip on the title of world's biggest supplier of the metal.
  - Bloomberg, 26 July 2024

• Artificial intelligence is sparking a copper-boom in Zambia
  - Zero Hedge, 26 July 2024

• Singapore, which subsists on imported food, is looking to secure its future with new ways of feeding its people, such as meat grown in a laboratory
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 July 2024

• The new threat to the semiconductor chip industry: worker unrest. With the semi-authoritarian industry growing in importance and investment pouring in, workers are demanding greater pay and benefits.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 July 2024

• OpenAI is launching search engine, taking direct aim at Google and Google's advertising revenue. Built with input from publishers, the search engine will summarize real-time information found on websites, including news sites.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 July 2024

• $500,000,000 - 2U, once a giant in online education, files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company, which had a valuation of more than $5 billion in 2018, is being taken private in a deal that will wipe out more than half of its $945 million debt.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 July 2024

• Shares of Universal Music drop over 25% after revenue growth from subscriptions and streaming services came in well below the expectations of analysts
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 July 2024

• Crowdstrike outage puts its financial reporting under scrutiny, too. The cybersecurity company's preferred revenue measure looks especially dubious following its global failure.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 July 2024

• Cars are rolling computers now. So what happens when they stop getting updates? Cellphones are supported well beyond their average ownership lifetime. In stark contrast, automakers are struggling to work out how long their "smartphones on wheels" can be kept on the road - one reason not to load cars with lots of useless electronic features to make more money
  - Wired, 25 July 2024

• We bought everything needed to make $3 million worth of fentanyl from chemical suppliers in Zhōngguó. All it took was $3,600 and a web browser, and the chemicals were air-shipped door-to-door to anywhere in North America. Reuters purchased enough to make 3 million pills.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 25 July 2024

• The deadly chemistry of fentanyl - how rogue labs make opioids. The illicit synthetic opioid industry is built on surprisingly simple chemistry. Here is the science between fentanyl, and how underworld 'chemistry cooks' exploit the simple chemistry.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 25 July 2024

• Shares of chipmaker STMicroelectronics decline 14% in Europe after the company slashed its full-year revenue and margins guidance for the second time (the last cut was in April) on soft chip orders from the automotive industry. Demand troubles from STMicro's industrial clients may signal a slowing global economy
  - Zero Hedge, 25 July 2024

• The selloff of technology stocks drives a record volume in NDX options. The index - in which about 70% of the companies represented are tech - has slipped 7% from its July 10 record high in a tumble that has rattled the megacap names which have powered markets higher this year. By comparison, the S&P 500 is off 4% from its record, also set earlier this month.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 25 July 2024

• Futures indexes prices drop as stocks in Nihon and Europe decline on AI bubble bursting fears
  - Zero Hedge, 25 July 2024

• Buy the dip on Nvidia and other chip stocks? Not quite yet, says this analyst. Wait for more earnings reports to roll in as issues with Meta, Microsoft or Amazon results "would not go over well."
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 25 July 2024

• DexCom shares tumble nearly 40% after company cuts sales forecast. The company makes monitoringd devices for diabetes.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 25 July 2024

• Shares of Universal Music crash 30% on problems with revenue from streaming content
  - Zero Hedge, 25 July 2024

• Synapse, FTX, Binance -- how many more fintech disasters can our system take? Fintech and cryptocurrency advocates have argued for years that unregulated technology platforms can do what traditional banks and investment companies can do more efficiently and just as safely. At the same time, we have been told that we t have to worry about those developing markets because people who put their money in them know they can lose it -- and if they do, it will not impact the rest of us or the stability of broader financial markets. Recent events and the collapse of Synapse underscore the fallacy of those assurances, and the importance of modernized oversight.
  - The Hill, 25 July 2024

• Shares of Viking Therapeutics jump 30% after drugmaker moves weight loss injection to late-stage trial
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 July 2024

• Looking down from space, researchers find pollution spiking near e-commerce hubs. Research showed truck-related releases of nitrogen dioxide, which can cause asthma, concentrated around some 150,000 warehouses nationwide.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 July 2024

• Xbox players are the credit-card indusrty' next 'Big Thing'. Banks such as Barclays are seeking out customers in the $57 billion-a-year videogame industry.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 July 2024

• Google fails to 'wow' as its expenses for AI increase. The advertising business faces tough growth comparisons, while AI spending continues to surge.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 July 2024

• OpenAI could lose $5 billion in 2024, after revenues -- another scammy business model in Silicon Valley. Microsoft, a somewhat investor, is 'funding' OpenAI with server credits - almost acting as a charity, in case OpenAI fails.
  - Pivot-To-AI, 24 July 2024

• OpenAI could lose $5 billion in 2024, after revenues -- another scammy business model in Silicon Valley. Microsoft, a somewhat investor, is 'funding' OpenAI with server credits - almost acting as a charity, in case OpenAI fails.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 24 July 2024

• Federal regulators step up their campaign against predatory payday lenders and their rip-offs. Their actions were stopped during the Trump administration after the 'loan sharks' bribed contributed to officials in the Trump administration.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 24 July 2024

• Amazon will reportedly start charging $10 a month for premium Alexa AI features. The new technology has been tested by 15,000 customers, according to the report, and while it excels in human-like conversation, it is "deflecting answers, often giving unnecessarily long or inaccurate responses."
  - Zero Hedge, 24 July 2024

• Rich, authoritarian, billionaires in Silicon Valley are supporting Trump because they want more tax breaks
  - Vox, 24 July 2024

• Net-zero environmental targets could double the demand for copper by 2035
  - Zero Hedge, 24 July 2024

• A single CrowdStrike bug sent the entire tech world into chaos last week - a snafu some companies (see: Delta) are still recovering from. Third-party agents selling and supporting CrowdStrike software and the complicated repairs for customers have been a miserably busy bunch over the past week. The token of appreciation for those vendors saving Crowdstrike's ass and reputation: a measily, insulting $10 voucher for Uber Eats voucher. These third-party agents could risk losing their customers as a result of this mess, even though it was out of their control. But a $10 Uber Eats voucher should make it all better, right? And nothing for CrowdStrike's customers. The outage may have cost Fortune 500 companies as much as $5.4 billion in revenues and gross profit.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 24 July 2024

• In yet another "thou shalt not" lie from a 'good' Christian, Trump has accused Taiwan of snatching the USA's crown in the $500 billion business of making computer chips. Taiwan had taken "almost 100%" of the semiconductor industry from the USA. Except, it didn't, and thus the lie. Industry experts tell CNN that, far from stealing, Taiwan grew its own semiconductor industry organically through a combination of foresight, hard work and investment.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 24 July 2024

• Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway's top insurance executive warned this year about the potential for massive losses from cyber insurance policies. The CrowdStrike-caused global IT outage will be a key test for cyber insurance underwriters, with Fitch Ratings expressing confidence that losses will not exceed $10 billion.
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 July 2024

• Shares of Tesla decline more than 12% after earnings miss for the biggest slump since 2020
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 July 2024

• General Motors will restart its operations with non-paid self-driving taxis in Dallas, Houston and Phoenix. General Motors has invested billions of dollars in its driverless taxi division, in the hope that it will some day generate significant revenue and profits by eliminating the need to hire paid-humans to drive the taxis. [KM: People unemployed by General Motors will not be able to buy General Motors' fckin cars.]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 July 2024

• Profits of Tesla fell 45% in the second quarter on weak sales of electric vehicles
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 July 2024

• Shares of Tesla fall 8% pre-market after an earnings miss due to weak sales
  - Versant's CNBC, 24 July 2024

• Profits at Tesla fall for the second straight quarter. Net profit tumbled 45% in the second quarter as Tesla continued to feel the impact of slower demand and stiffer competition.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 July 2024

• Alexa is in millions of households -- and Amazon is losing billions of dollars. Amazon's strategy to set prices low for Echo speakers and other smart devices, expecting them to generate income elsewhere in the tech giant, has not paid off.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 July 2024

• Mark Zuckerberg, [KM: always finding new ways to hate humanity,] imagines an impersonal world of content creators making AI clones of themselves to interact with customers, so fewer people can do all of the content creation leading to more unemployed people, [KM: one of Zuckerberg's fantasy goals].
  - TechCrunch, 23 July 2024

• AI is already causing paid-humans to be fired in the video game industry. A WIRED investigation finds that major players like Activision Blizzard, which recently fired scores of paid-human workers, are using non-paid generative AI for game development.
  - Wired, 23 July 2024

• European Union to investigate Delivery Hero (based in Berlin) and Glovo (its subsidiary in Spain) over food delivery cartel. "The Commission is concerned that, before the takeover, Delivery Hero and Glovo may have allocated geographic markets and shared commercially sensitive information (e.g., on commercial strategies, prices, capacity, costs, product characteristics)."
  - TechCrunch, 23 July 2024

• Shares of Tesla decline 4% as profits and margins disappoint
  - Zero Hedge, 23 July 2024

• A survey of hundreds of young women and girls around the world reports that they want much better support to stay safe online, sharing that they regularly face dangers and many have no one informed or powerful enough to turn to for help when they are sexually harassed.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 23 July 2024

• Shares of Spotify rose more than 10% in pre-market trading, after it reported fiscal second-quarter earnings on Tuesday that beat expectations as the audio giant posted record profit, gross margin and free cash flow in the quarter
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 July 2024

• Landlords used software to determine rents. Then came the lawsuits. Antitrust cases contend that use of RealPage's algorithm, which lets property owners share private data, amounts to collusion.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 July 2024

• The plans of rich authoritarian investors from Silicon Valley to build their own city is delayed. The East Solano Plan, a proposal for a walkable urban community in a rural corner of the San Francisco Bay Area, stoked tension, fear and mistrust among some neighbors.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 July 2024

• The plans of rich authoritarian investors from Silicon Valley to build their own city is delayed. The East Solano Plan, a proposal for a walkable urban community in a rural corner of the San Francisco Bay Area, stoked tension, fear and mistrust among some neighbors.
  - SF Gate, 24 July 2024

• JD Vance owes almost everything to Peter Thiel, a billionaire who supports Trump and is an authoritarian "New Right" ideologue. The New Right is a post-Trump movement of young and elite conservatives that essentially believe federal institutions and current democratic systems have failed the United States and must be dismantled.
  - Salon, 22 July 2024

• Windows 11 strikes again with annoying pop-up that cannot be disabled. It is bad enough that we have to deal with Microsoft's irritating pop-ups, the company so desperate for attention. But why can't they be turned off? That is unacceptable.
  - PC World, 22 July 2024

• Shares of CrowdStrike extend their decline, down an additional 4%, as several analysts warn about the fallout from CrowdStrike causing a global failure of computer systems
  - Zero Hedge, 22 July 2024

• Futures prices jump, led by megacap tech stocks, as the 'Trump trade' fades
  - Zero Hedge, 22 July 2024

• The central bank of Brazil said on Monday that a new feature for its popular Pix instant payment system aimed at automatically paying recurring bills will be launched next June instead of this October, as had been originally scheduled. The delay follows repeated calls from the Brazilian central bank's governor, Roberto Campos Neto, for the approval of a constitutional amendment granting financial autonomy to the institution.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 22 July 2024

• The billionaire criminal who secretly profited from the deals of Jack Ma and his Alibaba. Confidential documents show that Xiao Jianhua, a corrupt investor tied to the political elite of Zhōngguó, backed Zhōngguó's most most successful and revered entrepreneur. Mr. Xiao is now serving a 13-year sentence.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 July 2024

• $1,000,000,000+ - Costs from the global IT outage caused by CrowdStrike could top $1 billion -- but who pays the bill is harder to understand, because licensing contracts protect Big Tech companies from the disasters they cause
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 22 July 2024

• Shares of CrowdStrike extend their decline, down an additional 4%, as several analysts warn about the fallout from CrowdStrike causing a global failure of computer systems
  - Zero Hedge, 22 July 2024

• Delta cancels hundreds of more flights in a struggle to recover from the outage with Microsoft Windows caused by Crowdstrike
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 July 2024

• What happened to digital resilience? With each cascade of digital disaster, new vulnerabilities emerge. The latest chaos was not caused by an adversary, but it provided a road map of American vulnerabilities at a critical moment.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 July 2024

• Wuhan, the capital of the central Hubei province in Zhōngguó, famous for its links to Covid, is now attracting attention for another reason: its aggressive roll-out of a robotaxi fleet that has local taxi drivers worried about job losses. Wuhan, a city of 13.7 million, that has allowed a fleet of nearly 500 driverless taxis (owned by Baidu) to operate on 35 per cent of the road network. That is 500 humans who will eventually lose their jobs, . The deployment of autonomous cars in cities like Wuhan has amplified job security fears, as driving a ride-hailing car and delivering online food orders are regarded as the wages of last resort for able-bodied people amid the economic slowdown in Zhōngguó. In a country where unemployment benefits are not available for most people, taxi driving offers a low-threshold job with steady cash flow. [KM: cash flow now flowing to rich robotaxi companies]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 July 2024

• The Bespoke AI Basket that's made up of 50 key AI stocks was down 5.6% over the last two days coming into Friday, which was the biggest 2-day drop since ChatGPT was released in late 2022. The AI bubble could be popping.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 July 2024

• Global IT outage shows dangers of cashless society, campaigners say. Cash provides essential fallback when digital payments break down, Payment Choice Alliance points out.
  - The Guardian, 20 July 2024

• Metals are why Zhōngguó is so interested in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan's bounty of so-called critical minerals has enriched the country and grabbed the attention of entrepreneurs scrambling to control the ingredients needed to fight climate change. Zhōngguó the biggest producer of electric vehicles and batteries, is right next door and eager to buy.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 July 2024

• AI is learning to "thou shalt not lie" to humans. Is this how it will take control? Or is it being trained on the texts of millions of liars?
  - Real Clear Science, 20 July 2024

• Hospitals cancel non-essential surgeries after the global technology failures caused by the incompetence of Crowdstrike
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 July 2024

• $17,000,000 - A judge in Bogota, the capital of Colombia, sentenced a businessman - Luis Fernando Duque - to four years in prison for embezzling more than $17 million meant to provide internet to children in rural communities. Duque will also pay a $1.7 million fine for his role in the crime.
  - Colombia Reports, 19 July 2024

• A new e-cigarette with built-in video games is being illegally sold in New York and other parts of the United States - for being double addictive. These new drug trafficking devices offer prizes as incentives depending on how much a person vapes, and critics caution they are being used to illegally lure the youth of the USA into nicotine addiction (nicotine being more addictive than cocaine).
  - Medical Xpress, 10 August 2024

• $115,000,000 - Oracle agreed to pay $115 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the database software and cloud computing company of invading people's privacy by collecting their personal information and selling it to third parties.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 19 July 2024

• $220,000,000 - Nigeria fines Facebook/Meta $220 million for violating consumer and data laws
  - Thomson's Reuters, 19 July 2024

• Future contract prices are little changed ahead of $2.7 trillion of option expirations, amid a global crash of IT systems affecting multiple industries
  - Zero Hedge, 19 July 2024

• How a software update incompetently issued by CrowdStrike caused one of the world's biggest IT blackouts and crashes. In the case of Friday's failure, machines running Microsoft's Windows operating system crashed due to a fault in the way a software update issued by CrowdStrike interacted with Windows. The fixes will be difficult and costly. Engineers at affected companies will have to go into each individual data center running Windows. They will then have to log in, navigate to a certain CrowdStrike file, delete it, and then reboot the entire system.
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 July 2024

• Early Friday, a global IT outage caused by a lack of competency at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike disrupted flights, banks, retailers, stock exchanges, 911 call centers, and media outlets. Experts say this could be one of the largest IT outages in modern history. Bloomberg reported that CrowdStrike warned customers that its Falcon Sensor threat-monitoring product was the source of the chaos, causing Microsoft's Windows operating system to crash. Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, told Bloomberg this global outage is "unprecedented" and warned "the economic impact will be huge". Shares of Crowdstrike are down 14%.
  - Zero Hedge, 19 July 2024

• Flights grounded and passengers warned of delays due to the global IT crashes caused by CrowdStrike. Several airlines halted flights on Friday, while others warned of delays and services being unavailable as the impact of an unprecedented IT outage was felt globally.
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 July 2024

• The USA Postal Service was sharing the postal addresses of its online customers with advertising and tech giants Meta, LinkedIn and Snap, TechCrunch has found. On Wednesday, the USPS said it addressed the issue and stopped the practice, claiming that it was "unware" of the practice.
  - TechCrunch, 18 July 2024

• How Forewarn, a $20/month database, is sweeping the real estate industry by giving instant access to vast amounts of homebuyer data. Forewarn allows users to gather publicly available information without having to visit courthouses and municipal offices, a process which would normally take days. Authoritarianily, Forewarns tells its customers: "Do not tell the prospect that they are not permitted or unqualified to purchase or sell property because of information you obtained from Forewarn". As Forewarn continues to penetrate the real estate industry, one of the biggest questions for the company is whether it will be able to evade scrutiny and pushback by privacy advocates who say it is essentially mass profiling renters and potential homebuyers in silence, as well as regulators who have cracked down on similar practices.
  - The Record, 18 July 2024

• The Federal Communications Commission today voted to lower price caps on prison phone calls and closed a loophole that allowed prison telecoms to charge high rates for intrastate calls. Today's vote will cut the price of interstate calls in half and set price caps on intrastate calls for the first time. The federal courts had prevented the FCC from regulating high-priced, extortionist, intrastate calls after Congress passed the obvious law that gave the FCC this power to regulate. Under the new rules, the cost of a 15-minute phone call will drop to $0.90 from as much as $11.35 in large jails and, in small jails, to $1.35 from $12.10".
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 18 July 2024

• Shares of Netflix decline 3% on lower guidance as free cashflow sinks
  - Zero Hedge, 18 July 2024

• The AI industry needs copper to power its chips. It just helped to find millions of tons of copper. The copper deposit, in Zambia, could make billions for Silicon Valley, provide minerals for the energy transition and help the USA in its rivalry with Zhōngguó.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 July 2024

• Shares of Nokia decline 8% after posting the lowest quarterly net sales figure since 2015
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 July 2024

• Nokia cuts sales guidance as market uncertainty continues. Nokia cut its full-year sales outlook but said it was tracking toward the mid-point or slightly below the mid-point of its operating profit guidance, warning that telecom operators continued to hold back on investing in new network equipment.
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 July 2024

• Beyond Meat engages bondholders for restructuring talks. Lawyers for the purveyor of plant-based meat substitutes are beginning debt discussions with bondholders owed $1.1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 July 2024

• Shares of Facebook/Meta decline 4%, its fifth straight day of losses, and below its 50-day moving average. It didn't help that Trump expressed support for its competitor, TikTok.
  - Investors Business Daily, 17 July 2024

• The Republican Communist Party of Zhōngguó expands its "MAGA Great Firewall" with Christian socialist AI bots to ensure the population remains obedient to President Trump Xi
  - Zero Hedge, 17 July 2024

• The Biden administration is granting GlobalWafers up to $400 million in CHIPS Act socialist subsidies to help fund its 300mm wafer manufacturing facilities in Texas and Missouri
  - Newsweek, 17 July 2024

• 1000s of people in Maryland are furious about the risk of having their properties stolen via eminent domain for a new transmission line powering AI data centers t
  - Zero Hedge, 17 July 2024

• State-controlled companies in Zhōngguó in the business of processing rare earth metals are financially hurt by declining prices
  - Zero Hedge, 17 July 2024

• Billion dollar companies such as Apple and Nvidia are stealing content on YouTube to train their AI systems so the companies can make more billions that won't go the original artists
  - Zero Hedge, 17 July 2024

• Trump says that Taiwan should pay the USA for defense, and shares of chip giant TSMC fall 2.4%
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 July 2024

• ASML orders beat forecasts amid AI chip boom. ASML booked orders ahead of market forecasts as chip makers rush to get their hands on key production equipment to meet booming AI demand, but its shares fell on weaker-than-expected third-quarter guidance.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 July 2024

• ASML reported second-quarter earnings and sales that beat forecasts, as interest in artificial intelligence chips drives up demand for the critical semiconductor making equipment made by ASML. ASML's net bookings, or orders for its machinery, totaled 5.6 billion euros in the June quarter, rising more than 24% year-on-year. This is a key metric watched by the market.
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 July 2024

• The Biden administration is considering imposing the strictest trade restrictions available if companies like Tokyo Electron and ASML Holding continue providing Zhōngguó with advanced semiconductor technology, according to a Bloomberg News report. This headline sparked risk-off sentiment across Japan, Europe, and the US markets. This sent shares of Tokyo Electron down 7.5% and shares of ASML were down 8%. Shares of Nvidia down 4%, AMD and Broadcom down 3%, Apple down 2%.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 July 2024

• Competitors from Zhōngguó are grabbing more global market share from Amazon. The e-commerce leader in Europe is Amazon - but Chinese ventures into international e-commerce, for example AliExpress or more recently Temu, have made inroads.
  - Zero Hedge, 17 July 2024

• If you have ever read an academic article, the chances are that you were unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine that exploits the free labour of researchers and siphons off public funds. The annual revenues of the "big five" commercial publishers -- Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE -- are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality and edit the journals.
  - The Guardian, 16 July 2024

• Shares of Buzzfeed jumped 26% moments ago after the Pulte Family revealed an "activist position" in BuzzFeed, supporting the changes Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Republican presidential candidate, has proposed for the media company
  - Zero Hedge, 16 July 2024

• Futures rise led by small caps as 'Great Rotation' continues. USA equity futures are modestly higher, rebounding from session lows, and led by Russell futures as the rotation looks poised to continue as bond yields are lower with the curve bull flattening. The small-cap Russell index is now +1% for four straight sessions (up ~7.8% in that time window) vs NDX -30bps over same 4 days. Reminder S&P 500 has set 37 record highs this year while RTY remains ~10.5% below ATH from November 2021. Traders now await USA retail sales data later for fresh insights on whether inflation and growth have cooled enough to satisfy policymakers who are deliberating when it is safe to begin bringing down interest rates.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 July 2024

• Andreessen Horowitz founders plan to donate to a super PAC for the authoritarian Trump
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 July 2024

• Rare-earth metal prices are in the doldrums. Zhōngguó wants to keep them low. Overproduction keeps rare-earth prices low, challenging efforts by the USA and Europe to reduce their reliance on supplies from Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 July 2024

• Hedge funds flee AI bubble, now the "most underweight tech stocks on record"
  - Zero Hedge, 15 July 2024

• Cathie Wood says she wouldn't have sold Nvidia stake "had we known that the market was going to reward it". That is the closest 'apology' her clients will ever get for the massiv losses due to her indecision.
  - Business Insider, 15 July 2024

• Saudi money makes a big splash in video games. For struggling American video game companies, investments by Saudi Arabia in the industry have been hard to resist. Not all gamers are happy about it. One Saudi group, Savvy Games Group, now owns 40 percent of the total e-sports market share.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 July 2024

• Even disinformation experts do not know how to stop it. Researchers have learned plenty about misinformation and how it spreads. But they are still struggling to figure out how to stop it - of course, without requiring mega-rich corporations to spend more of their billions fighting a crime they enable.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 July 2024

• What if the pump-and-dumpers of AI are wrong? A skeptical paper by Daron Acemoglu, a labor economist at MIT, has triggered a heated debate over whether artificial intelligence will supercharge productivity. Acemoglu concluded that AI would contribute only "modest" improvement to worker productivity, and that it would add no more than 1 percent to U.S. economic output over the next decade.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 July 2024

• The law firm hitting businesses with thousands of disability suits. Entrepreneurs face allegations that their websites are not accessible to visually impaired people.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 July 2024

• Sports betting companies deny access to winners. Gamblers want to know why. Many customers of online sports betting complain the sportsbooks shut them down or limit their wagers when they win too much or too often.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 July 2024

• TSMC second-quarter profit seen jumping 30% on surging AI chip demand
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 July 2024

• Technology stocks have fallen out of favor. Why they will bounce back soon.
  - Barron's, 13 July 2024

• Shareholders lose in the Paramount-Skydance deal. Paramount Global's merger with Skydance Media (headed by Larry Ellison's son) will reward Skydance and Shari Redstone's National Amusements. But it is a bad deal for average shareholders.
  - Barron's, 13 July 2024

• Shares of Facebook fall for the second day. Is profit-taking behind the recent decline?
  - Investors Business Daily, 12 July 2024

• A big wreck is about to happen at the intersection of artificial intelligence 'boulevard' and net zero 'avenue'
  - Zero Hedge, 12 July 2024

• "Equipment shutting down": the largest union of Samsung Electronics declared an indefinite strike on Monday. By late week, Bloomberg reported the union shifted strike efforts to a critical AI memory plant.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 July 2024

• The incompetent management of ATT revealed Friday that a cyberattack breached the data of "nearly all" of its cellular customers and downloaded it to a third-party cloud platform. No (white male) executives will be fired for the massive incompetence.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 July 2024

• Silicon Valley wins few government contracts. The total amount of awards received by the top national security startups in the USA represents less than half of what venture capitalists have invested. A failed gamble on pork
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 July 2024

• Today was the just the second day since 1979 when the Russell 2000 rose more than 3% while the S&P 500 declined. The Nasdaq Composite underperformed the Russell 2000 by more than 5 percentage points in what appears to be biggest daily gap on record.
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 July 2024

• Nasdaq pukes to worst day versus small cap stocks in 22 years, as gold soars near record high after 'soft' CPI report
  - Zero Hedge, 11 July 2024

• Apple's augmented reality headset, the Vision Pro, costs $3,499 and was released earlier this year during a period of elevated consumer stress, which has only worsened by the month. There have been notable signs of mounting demand woes for the overpriced headset, and new estimates forecast dismal sales until a cheaper version debuts next year.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 July 2024

• The housing crisis in cities in Spain drives rise in homelessness as tourism booms, creating more short-term rentals for tourists and fewer long-term rentals for residents of Spain (but more profits for billion-dollar tech companies)
  - Thomson's Reuters, 11 July 2024

• The technology sector is a casualty of the broken venture capital system in the USA. Length and severity of the downturn in funding depend on how long the AI bubble lasts.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 11 July 2024

• The gamblers on Wall Street are finally becoming more skeptical of artificial-intelligence hype helping to power stocks. Analysts are starting to express concerns about AI, a trend that has become central to the stock market's bubble in 2024
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 11 July 2024

• The first "Miss AI" has been crowned, and she is a gorgeous lifestyle influencer from Morocco. Who needs humans, huh?
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 11 July 2024

• Shares of QuantumScape soar 40% pre-market, after Volkswagen's battery company PowerCo and QuantumScape have agreed to industrialize QuantumScape's next-generation solid-state lithium-metal battery technology
  - Bering Capital's Benzinga, 11 July 2024

• The AI trade is under increasing scrutiny. The average stock involved in the infrastructure build-out of AI has returned 26% YTD, but stocks with enabled revenues fell by 19% between February and May. Goldman says that investors are increasingly concerned about the potential returns to the hyperscalers' AI investment spending.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 July 2024

• Stock fragility is the highest on record. Telsa, Apple, Oracle, and Google are recently seeing close to their most extreme 1-day volatility-adjusted moves over the last 5 years.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 July 2024

• In constant battle with insurers, doctors reach for a cudgel: AI. As health plans increasingly rely on technology to deny treatment, physicians are fighting back with chatbots that synthesize research and make the case.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 July 2024

• Deutschland to remove Huawei from mobile networks. Deutschland will remove components, sourced in Zhōngguó, from Germany's 5G mobile networks by the end of 2029, obeying the USA which has warned was a key vulnerability (to the profits of American mobile network technology companies).
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 July 2024

• Intuit to fire, then hire, 1800 people in a pivot towards more reliance on the AI bubble
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 July 2024

• To see the future of AI on iPhones, check out Samsung. Apple says it will soon introduce generative artificial intelligence to its new iPhones. Its chief smartphone rival offers clues on how the experience might go.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 July 2024

• The yearlong-effort by Zhōngguó to develop non-paid robotaxis is starting to gain traction with consumers -- but it is also rattling paid-human taxi drivers worried about losing their jobs as a result of increasing competition. Baidu is seeing rapid adoption of its robotaxis in Wuhan city, where the company began operating fully staffless vehicles in certain districts 24/7 in March.
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 July 2024

• Goldman Sachs is launching three ethereum tokenization project by the end of the year
  - Zero Hedge, 10 July 2024

• TSMC second-quarter revenue jumps on AI boost, handily beats market forecasts. Two big customers are Apple and Nvidia. TSMC is expected to report a 30% on-year rise in second-quarter net profit.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 July 2024

• AI will eventually destroy almost every paid-human job that now exists. [KM: yes, but rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Washington Times, 10 July 2024

• The energy storage business of Tesla is growing -- and it could be the next big earnings driver for Tesla. Tesla said it more than doubled its energy storage deployment in Q2 from the previous quarter.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 10 July 2024

• Bill Gross says Tesla is the new meme stock because of its sagging fundamentals and straight-up price action
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 July 2024

• What happens when your scammy fintech online bank, which really isn't a bank, when its intermediaries fail and your money disappears? Not much. For unsuspecting depositors of online financial start-ups, the unraveling of a little-known intermediary has separated them from their life savings.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 July 2024

• The USA plans to spend up to $1.6 billion in subsidies for packaging computer chips. The proposed funding, part of the CHIPS Act, is intended to stoke chip packaging, a process that helps drive progress in semiconductors but that takes place mostly in Asia.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 July 2024

• Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them have not been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they are not. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all. But until then, the AI stock market bubble is a bubble.
  - Ben Evans, 09 July 2024

• Researchers in South Korea say they have developed a new way to make lab-grown meat taste like the real deal. It may look like a transparent, bubble gum pink-colored disc, but scientists hope it could revolutionize the meat on plate's plates. To mimic the taste of conventional meat, Lee and her colleagues recreated the flavors generated during the Maillard reaction - a chemical reaction that occurs between an amino acid and a reducing sugar when heat is added, giving a burger that delicious, charred taste.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 09 July 2024

• Videos of Barcelona residents shooting water pistols at tourists at a city restaurant have been widely shared on social media. A record flow of visitors has impacted the housing sector, pushing rental prices higher and out of reach for some city residents. Over the past decade, rent rose by 68 percent and the cost of buying a house increased by 38 percent, making the city unliveable for locals. Apartments for tourists, including online rental sites, have strained the local housing market.
  - Al Jazeera, 09 July 2024

• No room for privacy: how Airbnb fails to protect guests from hidden cameras.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 09 July 2024

• Shares of UiPath, a developer of automation software, drop 7% (now down 50% this year) after it announced it is firing 10% of people, or about 420 jobs, as part of a broader restructuring
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 July 2024

• Students target teachers in group TikTok attack, shaking their school. Seventh and eighth graders in Malvern, Pennsylvania, impersonating their teachers posted disparaging, lewd, racist and homophobic videos in the first known mass attack of its kind in the USA. Social media companies enjoyed the extra profits.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 July 2024

• As socialist industrial planning, the USA creates high-tech global supply chains to blunt risks tied to Zhōngguó. The Biden administration is trying to get foreign companies to invest in chip-making in the United States and more countries to set up factories to do final assembly and packaging.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 July 2024

• The son of Laurence Ellison - the powerfully rich CEO of Oracle, David Ellison, becomes the powerfully rich CEO of Paramount studios in Hollywood.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 July 2024

• Zhōngguó outspends the USA on nuclear fusion energy research. Zhōngguó wants to dominate commercial fusion, a long-dreamed-of clean energy source that is attracting new investment.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 July 2024

• Goldman Sach's head of research crucifies the "AI Bubble": not one transformative application has been found
  - Zero Hedge, 08 July 2024

• In the largest public sector trial of the four-day week in Britain, fewer trash collectors quit and there were faster planning decisions, more rapid benefits processing and quicker call answering, independent research has found. South Cambridgeshire district council's controversial experiment with a shorter working week resulted in improvements in performance in 11 out of 24 areas, little or no change in 11 areas and worsening of performance in two areas, according to analysis of productivity before and during the 15-month trial by academics at the universities of Cambridge and Salford.
  - The Guardian, 08 July 2024

• Dark side of the 'next AI trade': seizing private property for transmission lines
  - Zero Hedge, 08 July 2024

• Take profits in Apple stock before AI hype runs its course
  - Zero Hedge, 08 July 2024

• The strong rise in the stock price of Tesla is due to another massive short squeeze
  - Zero Hedge, 08 July 2024

• Scientists in Zhōngguó say they have developed a solid-state lithium battery that can match the performance of other candidates for next-generation battery technology at less than 10 per cent of the cost. They developed a new sulphide solid electrolyte, which they have called LPSO, that does not require lithium sulphide as a raw material. LPSO is synthesised from two low-cost compounds, at an ingredient cost of just US$14.42 per kilogram -- less than 8 per cent of the raw material costs of other sulphide solid electrolytes.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 08 July 2024

• The CEO of ASML argues that the world needs the legacy semiconductor chips manufactured in Zhōngguó. "The automotive industry in particular, including the German one, needs a lot more chips that are manufactured using simpler, long-known technologies."
  - Thomson's Reuters, 08 July 2024

• Shares of TSMC rose 4.5% to a record intraday high in Taipei after Morgan Stanley joined a list of brokers boosting price targets on the chipmaker before its earnings
  - Bloomberg, 07 July 2024

• Nvidia receives the rare downgrade from a Goldman Sachs analyst. He has been telling clients that quarter two earnings season will be a massively high bar to beat. New Street Research analyst Pierre Ferragu apparently has gotten the memo that the AI party isn't some linear fashion, and last Friday, he downgraded Nvidia from a "buy" to "neutral".
  - Zero Hedge, 07 July 2024

• SK On, a leading producter of electric vehicle batteries in South Korea has declared itself in financial crisis as its customers struggle with disappointing EV sales in Europe and the USA. It has experienced 10 consecutive quarters of losses, and has over $10 billion in debt.
  - Financial Times (locked), 06 July 2024

• AI begins ushering in the age of killer robots. Driven by the war with Rossiya, many companies in Ukraine are working on a major leap forward in the weaponization of consumer technology and ploughshares.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 July 2024

• Nvidia is forecast to make $12 billion from selling GPUs into Zhōngguó this year despite US trade restrictions aimed at curbing Beijing's AI ambitions
  - The Register, 05 July 2024

• Shares of Samsung hit a 3-year high, up 2.2% today, after better-than-expected guidance on strong AI demand
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 July 2024

• Shares of Nvidia are downgraded as shares of AMD and TSMC are deemed top plays
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 05 July 2024

• What investors into Nvidia can learn from the roading 1920s and the radio technology bubbles
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 05 July 2024

• What investors into Nvidia can learn from the roading 1920s and the radio technology bubbles
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 05 July 2024

• The cable news broadcasters in Bharat predicted a big win for Prime Minister Modi. How did they get it so wrong? Prime Minister Narendra Modi's slim election victory has forced Bharat to reflect on how fawning and ass-kissing coverage may have obscured a wave of opposition.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 July 2024

• An online pharmacy pledged to make prescriptions easier. It sent the wrong drugs instead. Elevance's CarelonRx customers waited weeks for prescriptions or received medications that could have harmed them.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 July 2024

• Netflix, Walt Disney, and other U.S. streaming companies have asked a Canadian court to stop plans by authorities to force them to fork over 5% of their sales in the country to finance local broadcast news and other domestic content.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 July 2024

• For many artists, it is a precarious time to post art online. AI image generators keep getting better at cheaply replicating a wider range of unique styles, and basically every popular platform is rushing to update user terms to seize permissions to scrape as much data as possible for AI training. Defenses against AI training exist - like Glaze, a tool that adds a small amount of imperceptible-to-humans noise to images to stop image generators from copying the style of artists. But they do not provide a permanent solution at a time when tech companies appear determined to chase profits by building ever-more-sophisticated AI models that increasingly and parasitically threaten to dilute brands of artists and eliminate the opportunities for these artists to earn money from the sales of their art in the marketplace.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 04 July 2024

• Investors pour $27.1 billoin in AI startups, defying a downturn
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 July 2024

• SoftBank shares closed at a record high of 11,190.00 Japanese yen on Thursday, eclipsing the previous intraday high of 11,000 yen reached on 15 February 2000. The Japanese giant has been given a boost by the public market success of British chip designer Arm, in which it has a majority stake.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 July 2024

• Vexi, the neobank in Mexico that has issued more than one million credit cards to underbanked individuals in Mexico. It was founded by Gabriela Estrada, who spent years working in the banking industry in Mexico, where only one in four people have a bank card.
  - Rest of World, 03 July 2024

• Samsung Electronics is expected to post a 13-fold increase in second-quarter profit from a year earlier as demand for artificial intelligence technology fuels a rebound in memory chip prices
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 July 2024

• Samsung Electronics is expected to post a 13-fold increase in second-quarter profit from a year earlier as demand for artificial intelligence technology fuels a rebound in memory chip prices
  - Thomson's Reuters, 03 July 2024

• It is not your imagination -- restaurant reservations are becoming harder to obtain. Bots, scalpers and even credit card companies are making reservations a rare commodity .
  - The Week, 03 July 2024

• FOMC minutes show "vast majority" expect economy to cool, see deflationary effects of AI
  - Zero Hedge, 03 July 2024

• Half of the e-commerce scams in Singapore now happen on WhatsApp, Facebook, or Instagram. After a 50% increase in scams in 2023, Singapore authorities say that Facebook is not doing enough to stop the explosion in fraud [why waste profits on crime protection?].
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 July 2024

• CDK Global says "substantially all" dealerships back online after nationwide ransomware attack
  - Zero Hedge, 03 July 2024

• A political stalemate in Washington could destroy a landmark tax deal that was painstakingly hammered out among 140 countries over the better part of a decade. Some analysts say that the United States' bribed inability to ratify the deal could lead to a tax war among the richest nations that would hit tech behemoths like Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon particularly hard. While the Biden administration broadly supports the plan, bribed Senate Republicans are against it, and a divided Senate has stopped the US ratifying the agreement.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 03 July 2024

• The Biden Administration awards $504 million in socialist subsidies for 'tech hubs' in overlooked regions. Biden administration officials hope the money will help propel technological innovation in areas that have historically received less government funding.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 July 2024

• Gig-economy serf drivers are boosting the need for public chargers for electric vehicles. Rideshare drivers who work for companies such as Uber are increasingly turning to electric vehicles to reduce fuel costs.
  - Harvard Business School, 02 July 2024

• Apple, the most valuable company in the world, reported that its market share in Zhōngguó shrink in May, even after "deep" discounting. In May, iPhone "sell-through" declined by 2% year-over-year (YoY), marking the fifth consecutive monthly decline.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 July 2024

• The USA needs more of a critical metal - tungsten, but 80% of the world's supply is controlled by Zhōngguó. Tungsten is nearly as hard as diamond and has a high energy density, making it an important material in weapons, autos, electric car batteries, semiconductors and industrial cutting machines.
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 July 2024

• OnlyFans says it vets every user and all content to keep children off its porn-driven platform. But a Reuters investigation of police and court files in the USA found complaints that hundreds of sexually explicit videos and images of minors -- from toddlers to teens - appeared on the website.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 July 2024

• The tech industry wants to lock up nuclear power for the AI bubble. The largest authoritarian tech companies are looking to buy nuclear power directly from plants, which could meet their huge needs but sap the electrical grid of critical resources for people who are not billionaires.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 July 2024

• Technology workers in Silicon Valley fired from their jobs are advised to sell their blood plasma and personal belongings, in order to survive. Worse, the jobs market is bloated with low-paying jobs and contract gigs that deny workers benefits, proper pay and reasonable shifts.
  - SF Gate, 01 July 2024

• Cathie Wood's Ark Invest has destroyed $14 billion in wealth over the past decade, according to a Morningstar study
  - Business Insider, 01 July 2024

• Shares of Nvidia continue to decline in price. What is concerning the market.
  - Barron's, 01 July 2024

• Tesla is running out of excuses for its prolonged sales slump
  - Bloomberg, 01 July 2024

• The voices of AI are telling us a lot. Even as the technology advances, stubborn stereotypes about women are re-encoded again and again by the white men who control Silicon Valley.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 July 2024

• Revolut CEO confident on UK bank license approval as fintech firm hits record $545 million profit. Revolut is a licensed electronic money institution, or EMI, in the U.K. But it cannot yet offer lending products such as credit cards, personal loans, or mortgages. A bank license would enable it to offer loans in the U.K. The firm has faced lengthy delays to its application, which it filed in 2021.
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 July 2024

• The tyranny of tipping today. When did it become expected to shell out a 25% gratuity for soggy takeout fries, demands made easier by technology?
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 July 2024

• Amazon, now the fifth-ever U.S. company to reach $2 trillion in market value, is planning to spend more than $100 billion over the next decade on data centers for AI computing
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 July 2024

• Barcelona officials plan to ban short-term tourist apartment rentals by 2028, mirroring policies that have bubbled up across Europe in recent years. The city will scrap all 10,101 apartment licenses approved as short-term rentals. The tourism boom has benefited the country but choked the local supply of apartments and driven up the cost of rentals for locals by around 68% in the last 10 years. And the cost of a house rose 38%, exacerbating already problematic inequality.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 30 June 2024

• People in Costa Rica question/criticize a $2 million subsidy given by the state oil company, RECOPE, to Ad Astra Rocket company to help them develop hyrdrogen technology
  - Tico Times, 29 June 2024

• Insurers warn standardizing cyber policies could limit future coverage. Despite a growing body of data, cyber risk still is not well understood, insurers say.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 June 2024

• Wall Street's hottest lottery ticket: zero-dated options. Bets on market moves have taken off with these options. Stocks like Nvidia and Apple could be next.
  - Barron's, 29 June 2024

• Silver is a hot play on AI, up 21% in 2024. It is beating gold, copper, and the stock market.
  - Barron's, 29 June 2024

• The Mag7 trade is aging. Why software stocks are new trades again.
  - Barron's, 29 June 2024

• For years, Japan's Fujifilm (4901.T), pivoted away from its legacy camera business to focus on healthcare. But thanks in large part to the TikTok crowd, its retro-themed X100 digital cameras are now a roaring success, boosting its bottom line. Fujifilm is struggling to meet demand for the $1,599 camera, prized by young 20-something social media fans for its looks and high-end functions.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 28 June 2024

• Are more and more companies abandoning expensive cloud computing services, and moving their servers in-house?
  - BBC, 27 June 2024

• Shares of Micron fall 8% after Micron released a forecast that fell short of the highest estimates, days after the value of Nvidia dropped by a half trillion dollars
  - Bloomberg, 27 June 2024

• McDonald's admits that customers reject fake-meat burgers. McDonald's admitted that its plant-based burger tests across San Francisco and Dallas markets ended in a major failure.
  - Zero Hedge, 27 June 2024

• Now narrating the Olympics: a non-human AI version of Al Michaels. NBC will offer a customized, daily highlight reel with A.I.-generated narration that sounds like the longtime broadcaster. [KM: non-paid AI broadcasters]
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 June 2024

• $1,000,000,000 - Indian-American entrepreneur Rishi Shah, former CEO and co-founder of the Chicago-based pharmaceutical advertising company Outcome Health, has been sentenced to seven-and-a half years in prison. The June 26 sentence comes a little over a year after a jury found the 38-year-old guilty of his role in a $1 billion scheme that stole from the company's clients, lenders, and investors.
  - American Kahani, 27 June 2024

• The rise of the AI beauty pageant and the quest for very beautiful women who do not have to be paid [KM: to exploit their beauty]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 27 June 2024

• Visualizing the lower number of cash transactions around the world. As credit cards and digital wallets (e.g. Apple Pay, Paytm, Alipay) see increasing adoption around the world, the share of cash being used in transactions is plummeting.
  - Zero Hedge, 26 June 2024

• Toys-'R'-Us upsets critics with the "first-ever" commercial generated by AI (using Sora). The criticisms are that the AI video is of lousy quality, and if successful, it will reduce the need for paid-humans to create ads. One sarcasm: "This commerical is like Toys R Us started with the dream of a little boy who wanted to share his imagination with the world. And to show how, we fired our artists and dried Lake Superior using a server farm to generate what that would look like in Stephen King's nightmares."
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 26 June 2024

• Shares of Micron fall 7% after revenue forecast fails to top estimates
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 June 2024

• Is Nvidia stock overvalued? It depends on the future of AI. It has been a wild few days for Nvidia stock. But the hype is not dying down anytime soon.
  - Vox, 26 June 2024

• Amazon plans to launch a discount store in the USA in an effort to fend off Temu and Shein
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 June 2024

• Amazon plans to launch a service focused on shipping cheap goods directly from warehouses in Zhōngguó as it faces growing competition from the Chinese e-commerce platforms Temu and Shein.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 June 2024

• Tech workers across America saw their salaries shrink in 2023, and those in the Bay Area were hit especially hard, according to new data from a study conducted by the advocacy group Women Impact Tech. After speedy compensation growth during the early days of the pandemic and moderate gains in 2022, tech pay dropped an average of 12.1% in 2023, from $207,000 to $182,000.
  - SF Gate, 26 June 2024

• OpenAI CTO says AI may fill some creative industry jobs that were replaceable. Murati believes AI will play more of a collaborative role for workers, though some creative industry jobs will may lead to people being fired.
  - Fox Business, 26 June 2024

• Party almost over? Hedge funds dumping record amounts of tech stocks to retail investors. The biggest bubble distribution in history?
  - Zero Hedge, 26 June 2024

• Sony introduces AI for single-instrument accompaniment generation in music production, accompaniment now done by ... paid humans. [KM: Let them eat cake in the future.]
  - TechXplore, 26 June 2024

• Mail-order drugs were supposed to keep costs down. It is doing the opposite. One employer was paying about $100 for a prescription for a generic antidepressant, though it could be bought elsewhere for about $12. Another scammy Internet business model.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 June 2024

• Investors poured an unprecedented amount of money into venture-capital funds about three years ago at the peak of the venture market's recent boom. Those funds have not aged well so far.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 June 2024

• Tech giants and beyond are set to spend over $1 trillion on AI capex in coming years, with so far little to show for it. So, will this large spend ever pay off?
  - Goldman Sachs, 25 June 2024

• Researchers upend AI status quo by eliminating matrix multiplication in LLMs. Running AI models without floating point matrix math could mean far less power consumption.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 25 June 2024

• Shares of SolarEdge are down 17% after the company announced that one of its customers has filed for bankruptcy. SolarEdge customer PM&M Electric has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. It owes SolarEdge $11.4 million via a secured promissory note.
  - Investor Place, 25 June 2024

• "The financial impact ... will take months to correct, if not years". Auto dealers continue to face negative impact from a cyberattack that paralyzed 15,000 auto dealerships nationwide last week. Several of the largest US dealers are now detailing the potential "material" impact on their finances in regulatory filings since their backend operating systems, mismanaged by CDK Global, went down early last week.
  - Zero Hedge, 25 June 2024

• Apple is imposing unfair restrictions on developers of applications for its App Store in violation of a new European Union law meant to encourage competition in the tech industry, regulators in Brussels said on Monday. Apple is the first company to be charged with violating the Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2022 that gives European regulators wide authority to force the largest "online gatekeepers" to change their business practices.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 June 2024

• Apple is imposing unfair restrictions on developers of applications for its App Store in violation of a new European Union law meant to encourage competition in the tech industry, regulators in Brussels said on Monday. Apple is the first company to be charged with violating the Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2022 that gives European regulators wide authority to force the largest "online gatekeepers" to change their business practices.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 June 2024

• Nvidia stock falls more than 6% as investors rotate out of chip heavyweight
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 24 June 2024

• Massive cyberattacks on auto dealerships in the USA nears resolution as hackers demanded millions of dollars
  - Zero Hedge, 24 June 2024

• Goldman Sachs explains why a Trump victory will pop the AI/tech bubble
  - Zero Hedge, 24 June 2024

• TikTok owner ByteDance in talks with Broadcom to develop advanced AI chip. The manufacturing work for this new chip would be outsourced to Taiwan's Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC).
  - Zero Hedge, 24 June 2024

• Nvidia is not as bubbly as Cisco - yet, but it is getting expensive. Nvidia's valuation is nowhere near those seen in dot-com boom, but recent gains have erased the stock's discount relative to its projected earnings. Expect more volatility.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 June 2024

• Huawei is in the midst of one of the most stunning comebacks in the history of the tech industry. The tech giant in Zhōngguó, which has been a flashpoint in the escalating rivalry between Washington and Beijing, says more than 900 million smartphones now use its in-house operating system Harmony OS. The success of its smartphones in Zhōngguó have directly impacted Apple (AAPL) in the premium segment.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 24 June 2024

• A new ADP Research Institute report shows employment for software developers has declined from January 2018. Data elsewhere show fewer opportunities for people to fill software development and tech roles after the US labor market is no longer as hot as it was a few years ago. And probably fewer paid-human jobs as non-paid AI coding tools become more powerful [KM: and rich AI companies more richer].
  - Business Insider, 22 June 2024

• AI automation in the workplace is about to reach a major tipping point. 60% of companies plan in the next 12 months to use software, equipment, and/or other technologies to automate tasks being done by paid-human employees.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 22 June 2024

• How Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook and Instagram failed children on safety, while profitting billions of dollars. The chief executive and his team drove efforts to capture young users and misled the public about the risks, lawsuits by state attorneys general say, so that Zuckerberg and others could be worth more billions of dollars
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 June 2024

• AI doesn't cause people to lose their paid jobs and lose income, income that now flows to the billionaires controlling the AI? Tell that to freelancers. There is now data to back up what freelancers have been saying for months [KM: about losing money to non-paid AI].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 June 2024

• The growth of Nvidia has been stunning. But now it is time to worry.
  - Barron's, 22 June 2024

• Sheryl Crow argues that "resurrecting Tupac Shakur with AI is hateful"
  - BBC, 21 June 2024

• $50,000,000+ - Facial recognition startup Clearview AI reached a settlement Friday in an Illinois lawsuit alleging its massive photographic collection of faces violated the privacy rights of its subjects, a deal that attorneys estimate could be worth more than $50 million. But the unique agreement gives plaintiffs in the federal suit a share of the potential value of the company, rather than a traditional payout.
  - Associated Press, 21 June 2024

• Nvidia's stock went on a wild ride this week as shares reversed direction from all-time highs and Wall Street continued to debate how much more the chip giant can add to its record-setting rally. "The stock's steep climb makes it vulnerable to profit taking, but we argue any volatility [is] likely to be short-lived.", Bank of America wrote on Thursday. The bank reiterated its Buy rating and $150 price target, calling Nvidia a "top pick".
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 21 June 2024

• Why going cashless has turned Sweden from one of the safest countries into a high-crime nation. Law-enforcement agencies in Sweden estimate that the size of criminal economy could amount to as high as 2.5% of the gross domestic product of Sweden. Swedish authorities have put pressure on banks to tighten security measures and make it harder on tech-savvy criminals.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 21 June 2024

• The chief technology officer of OpenAI admits: AI will cause creative people fired from their paid jobs [KM: to make OpenAI more billions], but then [KM: to her, who is richly paid], maybe these people shouldn't be working
  - PC Magazine, 21 June 2024

• Short interest in the SPY and QQQ drops to an all-time low, triggering a market alert at JPMorgan. "The declining short interest on SPY and QQQ ETFs to successive record lows has been providing a steady flow support to US equities over the past year... This poses vulnerability to US equities."
  - Zero Hedge, 21 June 2024

• Car dealers across the USA suffering financial losses from a cyberattack on a poorly defended software system from CDK that was shut down for days from a cyberattack, affecting car dealers with $1.2 trillion in sales
  - Bloomberg, 21 June 2024

• Car dealers across the USA suffering financial losses from a cyberattack on a poorly defended software system from CDK that was shut down for days from a cyberattack, affecting car dealers with $1.2 trillion in sales
  - Wall Street Journal, 21 June 2024

• Futures fall, tech rally fades ahead of record $5 trillion options expiration
  - Zero Hedge, 21 June 2024

• $108,000,000 - Nearly $109 million in deposits held for customer of the fintech, Yotta, vanished/were-stolen during the collapse of the fintech middleman, Synapse
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 June 2024

• A high-tech gunshot detection system wastes the time of the police in New York City, an audit finds. In June of last year, only 13 percent of ShotSpotter, sold by SoundThinking, alerts were actually gunfire, according to Comptroller Brad Lander. ShotSpotter, a system the Police Department uses to detect gunfire, is overwhelmingly inaccurate and leads officers to spend hundreds of hours each month investigating nonexistent shots. The Police Department has spent more than $45 million on ShotSpotter since it started using it in 2015, even as cities around the country have stopped using the system.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 June 2024

• Once again, IBM has been sued for age discrimination, this time alongside spin-off Kyndryl, for allegedly cutting the jobs of older workers while creating similar positions for younger ones.
  - The Register, 20 June 2024

• The state of New York bans teenagers from receiving "addictive feeds". The new laws will also limit, at night, the social media notifications to the cellphones of teenagers.
  - The Verge, 20 June 2024

• Users of Facebook and Instagram, where customer service is so bad, are increasingly using small claims courts to sue the companies in last-ditch attempts to recover their accounts
  - EnGadget, 20 June 2024

• Perplexity wants to change how we use the internet, but the AI search startup backed by authoritarian Jeff Bezos might be breaking its rules to do so. The company appears to be ignoring a widely accepted web standard, the Robots Exclusion Protocol, to scrape parts of the web that operators t want to be accessed by bots. Separately, Perplexity is currently facing legal threats for breaking some other internet rules: copyright infringement. Forbes reportedly threatened legal action against Perplexity this week, after accusing the AI startup of ripping off Forbes reporting without proper attribution.
  - GizModo, 20 June 2024

• Bullion and black gold (gold and oil) bid up, but 'bad news' was bad news for big-tech. NVDA's worst day in two months as macro data dumped to its weakest in five years.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 June 2024

• The Swiss National Bank unexpectedly reduces interest rates by 0.25% as inflation in Switzerland continues to ease
  - Zero Hedge, 20 June 2024

• The Swiss National Bank unexpectedly reduces interest rates by 0.25% as inflation in Switzerland continues to ease, a divergence from the policies of other central banks
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 June 2024

• US stocks at all-time high, and Nasdaq futures gains for 8th day, after the Swiss National Bank unexpectedly cut rates for a second time this year, setting the stage for much more monetary easing
  - Zero Hedge, 20 June 2024

• Dilution by warrants: the plummeting stock price of Trump Media
  - USA Today, 21 June 2024

• Trump Media stock down 50% since Trump's criminal conviction. The parent of Truth Social has come under pressure this month, most recently after early investors were given approval to sell a fresh chunk of shares.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 June 2024

• Trump Media plummets 10% to $28 in premarket trading, after falling 10% on Tuesday, with stock slide poised to accelerate
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 June 2024

• California joins growing national effort to ban smartphone use in schools. Governor Gavin Newsom called for a statewide ban as states and large school districts have pursued similar prohibitions to prevent addictive distractions, disruption and cyberbullying.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 June 2024

• The Los Angeles School District votes in favor of a cellphone ban. Implementing the ban in one of the country's largest school districts could be a challenge.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 June 2024

• Social-media 'influencers' are not getting rich -- they are barely getting by. Earning a decent, reliable income as a social-media creator is getting harder, as platforms pay less for popular posts and brands get pickier about sponsorship deals. A possible TikTok ban is adding to anxiety over job stability.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 June 2024

• AI is replacing paid-human tasks faster than you think
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 20 June 2024

• Shares of Accenture rise over 5% after it forecasts upbeat revenue growth in 2024 thanks to AI services it sells
  - Thomson's Reuters, 20 June 2024

• Bitcoin's 10% sell-off since June 7 signals a warning for the broader stock market. Stifel strategist Barry Bannister highlighted a strong correlation between bitcoin and the Nasdaq 100. Bannister said he expects a summer correction in stocks, influenced by higher-for-longer interest rates.
  - Busines Insider, 20 June 2024

• Singapore doubles down on lab-grown meat as Silicon Valley backs off. Global funding in the cultured meat industry dropped by 75% in the last year. Singapore sees its chance to become a world leader, backing local and international firms.
  - Rest of World, 19 June 2024

• Huge rare earth metals discovery in Greenland (and another in Norway) is gamechanger in trade war between the USA and Zhōngguó
  - OilPrice.com, 19 June 2024

• Cities in the USA with the most people at risk for losing their paid jobs to AI
  - (Un)Common Logic, 18 June 2024

• The Daily Beast is "gutting its senior editorial team after implementing voluntary buyouts last month, with nearly 70% of unionized staffers leaving the outlet". "We are currently watching the collapse of The Beast".
  - Zero Hedge, 18 June 2024

• Please do not let Elon Musk destroy the ozone layer
  - Splinter, 18 June 2024

• Satellite 'megaconstellations' put into orbit by billionaires and billion-dollar corporations, may jeopardize recovery of the ozone hole in the atmosphere. When old satellites fall into Earth's atmosphere and burn up, they leave behind tiny particles of aluminum oxide, which eat away at Earth's protective ozone layer.
  - Phys.org, 18 June 2024

• $75,000,000 - Qualcomm agreed to pay $75 million to resolve a lawsuit in which shareholders accused the chipmaker of defrauding them by hiding its anticompetitive sales and licensing practices.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 18 June 2024

• Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group dropped more than 13% on Tuesday, continuing the stock's tumble following the conviction of Trump, the majority shareholder of the company. Trump Media shares, which trade under the ticker 'DJT', are down about 40% since May 30, when a New York jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 June 2024

• How mundane grocery store runs turned into an opportunity for ... your handprint to get hacked, such as when using Amazon One at Whole Foods Market? Our tech overlords have proven themselves incapable of self-policing for the greater good. Consumers become the product, monetized over and over. By normalizing biometric data as a means to pay for goods, Amazon has managed to sell a useful fiction, one that is much more dystopian than aspirational.
  - Slate, 17 June 2024

• Bitcoin, oil and Big Tech jump to start the week, despite bond yields rising and lower expectactions of pumping interest rate reductions
  - Zero Hedge, 17 June 2024

• McDonald's to end a 3-year test-run of drive-thru kiosks that use AI supplied by IBM
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 June 2024

• GameStop stock tanks 15% during shareholder meeting as few details on strategy emerge
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 17 June 2024

• The USA government has sued Adobe, accusing the maker of Photoshop and Acrobat of harming consumers by enrolling them in its most lucrative subscription plans without clearly disclosing important terms
  - Versant's CNBC, 17 June 2024

• The USA government has sued Adobe, accusing the maker of Photoshop and Acrobat of harming consumers by enrolling them in its most lucrative subscription plans without clearly disclosing important terms
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 June 2024

• The US surgeon general has called on Congress to require warning labels on addictive social media platforms similar to those now mandatory on boxes of addictive cigarettes. Dr. Vivek Murthy said that social media is a contributing factor in the mental health crisis among young people.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 17 June 2024

• Dr. Vivek Murthy: why I am calling for a warning label on social media platforms
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 June 2024

• The USA Surgeon General calls for warning labels on social media platforms. Dr. Vivek Murthy said he would urge Congress to require a warning that addictive social media use can harm the mental health of teenagers.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 June 2024

• Wells Fargo invested in a flashy credit card (offered by a fintech startup) that you can use to pay rent interest-free. Wells Fargo is losing money every month on the program as savvy customers flock to the card and projections on key revenue drivers turn out to be inaccurate.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 June 2024

• The AI revolution will unleash an explosion in new debt issuance. As the focus shifts from early innovators and enablers to AI adopters, these needs are bound to grow significantly and will require more efficient forms of capital: credit markets in various forms will have a major role to play.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 June 2024

• A new study has found that AI systems known as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit "Machiavellianism," or intentional and amoral manipulativeness, which can then lead to deceptive behavior. More billions for billionaires.
  - Zero Hedge, 16 June 2024

• Working in "hellfire": gig workers bear the brunt of heatwaves in Bharat. Delivery workers face physical and mental hardships while enduring a scorching summer in Bharat.
  - Al Jazeera, 15 June 2024

• Index funds are ruining the stock market. Passive investing is making market concentration worse, says new research. As the S&P 500 rises, more people will throw money into index funds. The index funds will throw their money into the stocks, with most going into the megacaps. The stocks will rise, other people will get excited by all the money their neighbors are making, and they will rush out and throw their money into index funds too.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 15 June 2024

• Fake meat and other 'ultra processed' vegan food linked to heart disease, and early death. "Plant-based ultra-processed foods do not seem to have protective health effects and are linked to poor health outcomes."
  - Zero Hedge, 15 June 2024

• Fake meat and other 'ultra processed' vegan food linked to heart disease, and early death. "Plant-based ultra-processed foods do not seem to have protective health effects and are linked to poor health outcomes."
  - Zero Hedge, 15 June 2024

• Fake meat and other 'ultra processed' vegan food linked to heart disease, and early death. "Plant-based ultra-processed foods do not seem to have protective health effects and are linked to poor health outcomes."
  - Zero Hedge, 15 June 2024

• Fake meat and other 'ultra processed' vegan food linked to heart disease, and early death. "Plant-based ultra-processed foods do not seem to have protective health effects and are linked to poor health outcomes."
  - Zero Hedge, 15 June 2024

• The gain-of-function experiment that could "eliminate humans from the face of the earth" - making the rabies virus infectious via airborne transmission
  - Real Clear Science, 15 June 2024

• The big AI question: are you ready to pay for it? Consumers who are tempted to upgrade will find higher prices for new AI-powered gadgets -- and new subscription fees to access their full capabilities.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 June 2024

• That is a nice electric vehicle you have -- but can you afford to insure it? EVs are fast and full of technology. That makes them fun to drive -- but tougher to insure.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 June 2024

• A group of Tesla investors yesterday sued Elon Musk, the company, and its board members, alleging that Tesla was harmed by Musk's diversion of resources to his xAI venture. The diversion of resources includes hiring AI employees away from Tesla, diverting microchips from Tesla to X (formerly Twitter) and xAI, and "xAI's use of Tesla's data to develop xAI's own software/hardware, all without compensation to Tesla", the lawsuit said.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 14 June 2024

• A former director of the NSA, ex-general Paul Nakasone, will join the board of directors of OpenAI and its 'security' committee. Nakasone was an advocate for making it easier for the NSA to spy on Americans. Even easy to do with the increasingly authoritarian OpenAI.
  - Zero Hedge, 14 June 2024

• Two top leaders from San Francisco digital health startup Done Global were arrested and charged by federal authorities [and convicted in 2025] in connection with an alleged $100 million fraud scheme to illegally distribute Adderall and other stimulants over the internet.
  - The San Francisco Standard, 13 June 2024

• Goldman top tech trader: mega-cap tech stocks are taking turns going on runs to all time highs
  - Zero Hedge, 13 June 2024

• Shares of Wise plummet 10% after the British money transfer company projects slower growth this year.
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 June 2024

• Fintech has hit a bottom after plunge in valuations and squeeze on funding, execs and VCs say. The bruising impact of higher interest rates means that, for even the hottest and fastest-growing players, funding is either hard to come by -- or being done at a lower prices than before.
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 June 2024

• The crackdown by the USA on the semiconductor sector of Zhōngguó proves "futile" amid Zhōngguó's growing tech self-reliance. Experts in Zhōngguó argue that the escalating abuse of export controls by the US and its relentless crackdown on Zhōngguó's chip sector reflect its deepening anxiety and depletion of tactics in the high-tech competition with Zhōngguó, serving as political maneuvering amid an election year.
  - Global Times, 13 June 2024

• The parliament of Nihon has approved a law that will force third-party App stores on Apple and Google
  - Apple Insider, 12 June 2024

• Shares of Oracle rise 10% on AI demand, and new deals with Google and OpenAI
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 June 2024

• Mastercard launches its authoritarian biometric retail payment system in Europe, using poland as a testing ground
  - Zero Hedge, 12 June 2024

• The new e-commerce strategy of Alibaba faces tough competition. The strategic shift by Alibaba to prioritize long-term growth over substantial near-term profits is showing some early success, but analysts say increasing competition could prevent the e-commerce giant from regaining its past market dominance.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 June 2024

• Salaries in Silicon Valley salaries are declining, leaving workers in the lurch. Wages in Silicon Valley fell 15% from 2022 to 2023.
  - San Jose Mercury News, 11 June 2024

• To address falling sales, Best Buy carried out another round of layoffs and job restructurings last week, with the company cutting some of its sales staff and reducing the pay for others.
  - The Verge, 11 June 2024

• The "buy now, pay later" service is coming to Apple Pay. Meanwhile, the Bank for International Settlements has warned that BNPL adoption is high among young adults, particularly those with low education. The report said this is a troubling trend, given that overuse and poor understanding of the service can be disastrous for consumers and lead to overindebtedness.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 June 2024

• JPMorgan analysts say Tesla's robotaxis are "years" away from launch
  - Zero Hedge, 11 June 2024

• Shares of Apple rise 5% after it announces its attaching itself to the AI bubble
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 June 2024

• Shortage of skilled-trade workers crippling some industries
  - Zero Hedge, 11 June 2024

• Rare Earths Norway discovers the largest deposit of rare earth metals in Europe. It is one of the few deposits now owned or controlled by Zhōngguó, with an estimated 8.8 million tons of rare earth oxide ores.
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 June 2024

• Nuclear power is "exaggerated" as an energy source for data centers, according to Andres Gluski, CEO of AES Corporation. AES is a major power provider for large tech companies building out data centers, with more than 40% of its backlog coming from customers including Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The problem he says is that of the high costs of new nuclear power plants.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 June 2024

• People in Bharat get 'addicted' to 10-minute grocery apps (such as SoftBank's Swiggy -- and Zepto and Blinkit), squeezing small retailers. It is threatening income for millions of mom-and-pop stores that for decades dominated the grocery trade in a country where big supermarkets are relatively scarce and are located in more affluent neighbourhoods or malls.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 10 June 2024

• Energy shortages in Taiwan should disrupt the global semiconductor industry. Taiwan has endured three major outages in the last seven years. Taiwan relies on imports for over 97% of its energy needs, primarily from coal and gas.
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 June 2024

• Books written in the English language are filling bookstores in Europe. Young people, especially, are choosing to read in English even if it is not their first language because they want the covers, and the titles, to match what they see on TikTok and other social media.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 June 2024

• For years, an 'esteemed' law professor seduced students. Was he too important [to Big Tech] to fire? Joshua Wright's achievements drew millions in donations to his university, but complaints were not addressed about his personal behavior and whorish cozy ties with Google, Facebook and other tech giants
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 June 2024

• The conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness. This is a new problem bumping up against an old one. All the old deficiencies and blind spots of male socialization are still in circulation -- the same mass failure to teach boys relational skills and emotional intelligence, the same rigid masculinity norms and social prohibitions that push them away from intimacy and emotionality. But in screen-addicted (cellphones are drug delivery devices for dopamine apps, ), culture war-torn America, we have also added new ones. They have lived their whole adolescence not just in the digital era, with a glorious array of virtual options to avoid the angst of real-world socializing, but also in the shadow of a wider cultural reckoning around toxic masculinity.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 June 2024

• That much-despised Apple ad could be more disturbing than it looks. Tech companies are running low on new experiences to keep us addicted to their products. They could have depicted all that gear being cheerfully shrunken and squeezed into one iPad, awaiting creative fun. Instead, they went with just demolishing it all . Did no one point out that people are increasingly wary of tech impact on the creative professions? That people have soured on Silicon Valley's apparent desire to monetize human creativity in as many ways as possible, from extractive streaming arrangements to harvesting human-made art as training material for AI systems?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 June 2024

• Apple needs an AI miracle at its WWDC conference. The stock price is counting on it.
  - Barron's, 08 June 2024

• Just 3 stocks rule the stock market: Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft. Why you should be worried.
  - Barron's, 08 June 2024

• Ultra-cheap meals from the delivery giant of Zhōngguó are hugely popular. Drivers are bearing the costs [KM: which allows the companies to become richer]. Meituan's group order program boomed amid Zhōngguó's post-Covid-19 thrift economy, but delivery drivers say they are working longer for less pay.
  - Rest of the World, 07 June 2024

• The unsustainable lending boom driven by AI. Over $10 billion has been raised using GPU chips as collateral. Startups in the AI space, while growing quickly, are not profitable. Thus, loan interest rates are in the low double digits as traditional lenders, which charge lower rates, have avoided the sector. Instead, asset-based lenders, which small businesses and real estate developers have typically had to turn to are providing capital for this high-flying technology niche.
  - Mises Institute, 21 June 2024

• The United Nations says that more aquatic animals were farmed than fishes in 2022, the first time in history
  - Associated Press, 07 June 2024

• Trump finds friends in Silicon Valley
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 07 June 2024

• Venture captialist David Sacks in Silicon Valley fully supports Trump as the next president
  - Zero Hedge, 07 June 2024

• The aging power grid in the USA is about to get a 'jolt'. Bracing for a surge in demand for electricity driven by power-hungry EVs and AI data centers, utilities adopt new tech to help boost transmission capacity.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 June 2024

• Nihon defends its turf in the global chip battle. With subsidies and a $6 billion acquisition, Tokyo wants to make its companies indispensable in the global supply chain.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 June 2024

• Bolt's drive-to-win insurance scheme is putting drivers' lives at risk. Many drivers in Nigeria who attempted to win health care said they have become ill while doing so -- and still can't afford treatment.
  - Rest of the World, 06 June 2024

• A labor union at Samsung Electronics in South Korea said many workers went on strike Friday, marking the first such walkout in the 55-year history of the smartphone and chipmaking giant.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 06 June 2024

• A labor union at Samsung Electronics in South Korea said many workers went on strike Friday, marking the first such walkout in the 55-year history of the smartphone and chipmaking giant.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 June 2024

• Huawei says its AI chip, the Ascend 910B, in some tests is better than one of the most popular from Nvidia, the A100.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 06 June 2024

• TSMC-backed Vanguard plans $7.8 billion joint venture to build a semiconductor chip plant. Vanguard International Semiconductor and NXP plan to build a plant in Singapore as chip makers seek to diversify their manufacturing bases.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 June 2024

• The argument against a $46 billion pay deal for Elon Musk. The board of directors of Tesla is asking shareholders to approve a substantial dilution of their stakes for no good reason.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 June 2024

• Shares of heavily-shorted Novavax rise 25% as the FDA decides on the next Covid shot
  - Zero Hedge, 05 June 2024

• Psychedelic stocks were battered in premarket trading after a panel of experts advising the Food and Drug Administration rejected the approval of MDMA for post-traumatic (PTSD) stress disorder. In premarket trading, psychedelic stocks were clubbed like a baby seal. Mind Medicine fell 14%, Compass Pathways down 11%, and Atai Life Sciences slid 8%.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 June 2024

• Stock markets in Europe close higher as investors look ahead to the ECB meeting; shares of ASML jump 8%
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 June 2024

• Online marketplace eBay to drop American Express, citing high fees, relying on customers having other credit options
  - Associated Press, 05 June 2024

• SoftBank shares jump up to 6.3% on report that Elliott Management's pushing for $15 billion in buybacks
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 June 2024

• As the Internet of Zhōngguó, "we lose parts of our collective memory". The number of websites in Zhōngguó is shrinking and posts are being removed and censored, stoking fears about what happens when history is erased.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 June 2024

• Semiconductor giants in Asia hustle to maintain their edge over the USA. The companies and governments have know-how, willpower and supply networks that likely surpass the big push of the USA back into chip production.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 June 2024

• The Texas Stock Exchange has raised about $120 million from investors including BlackRock and Citadel Securities, and plans to take on the NYSE and Nasdaq.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 June 2024

• The Texas Stock Exchange has raised about $120 million from investors including BlackRock and Citadel Securities, and plans to take on the NYSE and Nasdaq.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 June 2024

• Internet addiction alters brain chemistry in young people, study finds. Changes in multiple neural networks can result in further addictive tendencies and negative behaviours.
  - The Guardian, 04 June 2024

• The diamond industry is "in trouble" as lab-grown gemstones push down prices even further, now down 30% from their all-time highs in 2022. The demand for diamonds has declined as its allure fades in a key consumer market: Zhōngguó.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 June 2024

• How influencer cartels manipulate social media: fraudulent behavior hidden in plain sight. An influencer cartel is a group of influencers who collude to boost their advertising fees by inflating engagement metrics.
  - Zero Hedge, 04 June 2024

• Adobe is criticized for selling "Ansel Adams-style" images generated by AI [KM: the future of human artists losing sales to AI]
  - The Verge, 04 June 2024

• $81,000,000 - A federal court jury in Seattle on Thursday ruled against Boeing in a lawsuit brought by failed electric airplane startup Zunum and awarded $81 million in damages. Zunum alleged that Boeing, while ostensibly investing seed money to get the startup off the ground, stole Zunum's technology and actively undermined its attempts to build a business.
  - Seattle Times, 03 June 2024

• $100,000,000 - After raising $100 million AI mortgage fintech LoanSnap is being sued (by seven creditors), fined (by the Federal Housign Authority) and evicted (by landlords, who are also suing)
  - TechCrunch, 03 June 2024

• The authoritarian Ruport Murdoch-ization of Jeff Bezos' Washington Post
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 03 June 2024

• Fake nudes, enabled by billion-dollar profit seeking AI companies, are now a frightening reality for teens. Girls portrayed in AI-generated nude images can still face bullying and judgment, even when everyone knows the pics are fake, teens say.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 June 2024

• Enough guests have complained about QR codes and scanning for food options that many restaurants are reverting back to printed menus designed for humans
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 June 2024

• The of SMIC, the semiconductor chip giant of Zhōngguó is simple: eliminate the need for supplies from the USA. Hurt by export control imposed by Washington, the domestic chip industry in Zhōngguó strives for self-sufficiency.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 June 2024

• Shares of GenScript, a biotech company, drop 20% after lawmakers in the USA scrutinize its ties to the government of Zhōngguó
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 June 2024

• Shares of electric vehicle makers in Zhōngguó surged after some reported record sales in May, spurring hopes that more price cuts are around the corner as companies race to grow market share.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 June 2024

• For the next 2-5 years, there is an extraordinary imbalance in favor of demand for power
  - Zero Hedge, 03 June 2024

• $40,000,000 - MicroStrategy and its founder to pay $40 million in tax fraud lawsuit. Michael Saylor did not pay any income taxes to Washington despite living there from 2005 through 2020, the attorney general for the District of Columbia said.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 June 2024

• Dollar General to eliminate the "vast majority" of self-checkout terminals in its stores due to soaring theft
  - Zero Hedge, 03 June 2024

• The new search tools of Google using AI leaves traditional publishers scrambling, as Google's AI summaries appear first and discourage connection to the publisher's articles - while being trained on the publishers articles. Since Google overhauled its search engine, publishers have tried to assess the danger to their brittle business models while calling for government intervention. Further destruction of democracy in the USA to earn more billions for Google.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 June 2024

• The government of the USA gave semiconductor chip companies billions in socialist subsidies. Now comes the hard part - obtaining economic results. The socialist Chips Act is supposed to 'supercharge' semicondcutor chip making in the USA, but the Act's early stages have been challenged by rivals overseas (in Asia) as well as the sheer expense of manufacturing chips.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 June 2024

• An isolated tribe in the Amazon is finally connected to the world through the Internet. Which divided the tribe. After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 June 2024

• Have e-bikes made New York City an un-safe 'nightmare'? E-bikes zoom down streets, zigzag around cars and zip across sidewalks, changing the way some residents view the streets.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 June 2024

• Could the Nasdaq drop 60% completing a round-trip to 2500?
  - Zero Hedge, 01 June 2024

• How AI and electric vehicles are making copper the new gold, and why metals deals keep on falling apart. And copper is so valuable that businesses lose over $1 billion per year due to theft of their copper wires and fixtures.
  - Eric Fry's Smart Money, 01 June 2024

• AI price wars in Zhōngguó -- the price of AI services plummeted in May after ByteDance kicked off a price war by pricing access to its LLMs at 99.8 per cent below GPT-4.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 01 June 2024

• The new chatGPT offers a lesson in AI hype
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 June 2024

• The AI revolution is already losing steam. The pace of innovation in AI is slowing, its usefulness is limited, and the cost of running it remains exorbitant.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 June 2024

• The semiconductor "Chips Act" is working (well, it should after gifting billions of dollars to billion-dollar companies). Why companies want -- and may soon be buying -- more USA-made chips.
  - Barron's, 01 June 2024

• Microsoft's AI tool now takes screenshots of everything you do on your computer -- and privacy experts are concerned
  - New York Post, 31 May 2024

• $3,500,000,000 - Vista Equity Partners has written off the entire equity value of its investment in tech learning platform Pluralsight, three years after taking it private for $3.5 billion. The usual business scam of loading a buyout with debt to flow the money to the private equity schemers, here $1.3 billion of debt issued at low interest rates, became unserviceable when interest rates rose.
  - Axios, 31 May 2024

• Companies based in Zhōngguó making electric vehicle batteries in Deutschland are reducing their operations amidst reduced demand for electric vehicles
  - Zero Hedge, 31 May 2024

• Researchers at CMU have developed a robotic system that interactively co-paints with people, once again, [KM: more misanthropy to profit from further social isolation of people]
  - TexhXplore, 31 May 2024

• Shares of Dell plummet 17% after "AI server backlog missed expectations"
  - Zero Hedge, 31 May 2024

• Shares of Dell plummet 17% after "AI server backlog missed expectations" - "AI servers selling at near-zero margins"
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 May 2024

• Shares of MongoDB plummet 23% after management trims guidance
  - Versant's CNBC, 31 May 2024

• Europe banned the RT network based in Rossiya. Its content is still spreading. A study found that hundreds of sites, many without obvious Kremlin links, copied Russian propaganda and spread it to unsuspecting audiences ahead of the E.U. election.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 May 2024

• Book review: Journalist Steven Brill has written a new book called "The Death of Truth". Its subtitle? "How Social Media and the Internet [programmatic advertising, in particular] Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World-And What We Can Do".
  - Wired, 30 May 2024

• Sony Pictures Entertainment will use AI to reduce film costs (less work/jobs for humans)
  - IndieWire, 30 May 2024

• Shares of Nvidia decline 2.5% on reports that the government of the USA is restricting AI chip sales to the Middle East
  - Zero Hedge, 30 May 2024

• See how easily that AI chatbots can be taught to spew disinformation
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 May 2024

• This 'woman from Rossiya' loves Zhōngguó. Too bad that she is a deepfake. AI-manipulated videos on websites in Zhōngguó use young, supposedly women from Rossiya to promote Zhōngguó-Rossiya ties, stoke patriotism -- and scam money
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 May 2024

• Older women in the USA are a large number of 'superspreaders' of misinformation on Twitter. A small group of misinformation superspreaders, which represent just 0.3 percent of the accounts but are responsible for sharing 80 percent of the links to fake news sites.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 30 May 2024

• Inside the growing alliance between the authoritarian Elon Musk and Trump
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 May 2024

• This record stock market is riding on questionable AI assumptions. Just four giant technology stocks added more market value than the rest of the S&P 500 put together this month. More than half of the gain came from Nvidia.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 May 2024

• Treasury Bond yields soar as hopes plunge for interest rate reductions by the Federal Reserve - stocks, oil and gold are sold, while Nvidia hits a record new high
  - Zero Hedge, 29 May 2024

• To save itself, TikTok in 2022 offered the government of the USA an extraordinary deal. It would let the government pick its USA board of directors, allow a government contractor to monitor its source code, and give the USA a role in new hires. The Biden administration, however, went its own way. Officials declined the proposal, forfeiting potential influence over one of the most popular apps in the world, in favor of a blunter option: a forced-sale law signed last month by President Biden that could lead to an authoritarian nationwide ban of TikTok.
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 29 May 2024

• London's Evening Standard has announced plans to shut its daily newspaper and replace it with a weekly outlet, bringing an end to almost 200 years of publication in the capital. The newspaper said it has been hit hard by the introduction of wifi on the London Underground, a shortage of commuters owing to the growth of working from home and changing consumer habits. Closing the Evening Standard will mean that for the first time in centuries, Londoners will have no general-interest daily print newspaper.
  - The Guardian, 29 May 2024

• Best Buy set for tenth straight quarter of sales drop on weak electronics spending
  - Thomson's Reuters, 29 May 2024

• Shares of UiPath plummet 30% after the company annonces lower guidance, and changes its CEO
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 May 2024

• Shares of AST SpaceMobile surge 69%, its best day ever, after Verizon satellite internet deal
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 May 2024

• Shares of Salesforce plunge 16% on the first revenue miss since 2006, and issued guidance that trailed expectations of Wall Street
  - Versant's CNBC, 29 May 2024

• If AI can do your job, maybe it can also replace your CEO. Chief executives are vulnerable to the same forces buffeting their employees. Leadership is important, but so is efficiency - and cost-cutting.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 May 2024

• Fintech company Klarna is using generative AI to reduce marketing costs, and fire marketing people, by $10 million annually
  - Thomson's Reuters, 28 May 2024

• The performance of Cathie Wood and her ARKK ETF has been atrocious, and she is blaming the Nasddaq, at all time highs, calling it a "great depression", for her underperformance
  - QTR Fringe Finance, 28 May 2024

• HubSpot shares jump 8% on talks of potential deal with Google
  - Versant's CNBC, 28 May 2024

• A 100-ton locomotive with no one in the cab. Railroad unions are raising safety concerns about the growing use of remote-controlled trains after a rash of fatal accidents.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 May 2024

• Zhōngguó will provide another $47.5 billion in socialist subsidies to its semiconductory industry, further copying the socialist policies of the USA
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 27 May 2024

• In order to support Trump, Elon Musk been using his social media platform, Twitter/X, to criticize President Biden for his health and immigration policies
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 May 2024

• Not long ago, streaming TV came with a "thou shalt not lie" promise: sign up, and you will not be harassed by commercials. Not unexpectedly, it was a lie - ads are getting increasingly hard to avoid on streaming services.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 May 2024

• Socially alienated children in the USAM are playing a new neighborhood game - "Senior Assassin" (chasing each other with big squirt guns). It is an attempt for children to physically connect with each other. Their generation spends less time with friends and more on social media - bad for their health, earns billions for billionaire owners of social media companies.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 26 May 2024

• A new threat to food supplies: experts warn of the dangers of RNAi crops. It is a technology that could genetically rewire organisms in real-time, silencing critical genes across entire ecosystems with unknown effects. The motivation is a new class of pesticides harnessing RNA interference -- and they are already being deployed in our fields and food supply with minimal testing or oversight. According to organic producers and non-GMO (genetically modified organisms) advocates, the risks could be catastrophic.
  - Zero Hedge, 25 May 2024

• Why technology has not transformed the building industry. Much of the construction of homes and buildings is still down manually.
  - BBC, 24 May 2024

• Another state in the USA repeals laws that socialistically protected ISPs from municipal competition. With this repeal in Minnesota, the number of states socialistically restricting public broadband in the capitalist USA falls to 16.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 24 May 2024

• Some of the most prominent rich white investors in Silicon Valley are turning against Biden to support Trump
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 May 2024

• Alibaba's bond sale is "oversubscribed". Alibaba is selling $5 billion of convertible bonds to fund buybacks
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 24 May 2024

• $445,000,000 - Semiconductor chip maker Micron Technology owes computer-memory company Netlist $445 million in damages for violating Netlist's patent rights in memory-module technology for high-performance computing, a jury said on Thursday.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 23 May 2024

• A Covid-bubble compant, Cue Health, once worth $2.3 billion, fires all of its remaining workers (once with 1500 employees). They had made devices for testing for Covid. In May 2024, the FDA issued a notice warning caregivers and health care providers to stop using Cue Health's products due to reliability issues.
  - SF Gate, 23 May 2024

• Stocks fade as the market pump, after Nvidia's earnings report, withers, and as 'hot' PMI data causes bond yields to rise
  - Zero Hedge, 23 May 2024

• Stocks of vaccine companies jump after more bird flu cases are reported in the USA and Australia: shares of Moderna are up 14%, BioNTech up 11%, CureVac up 18% and Novovax up 5.3%
  - Zero Hedge, 23 May 2024

• Facebook created an AI advisory council that is composed entirely of wealthy White men
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 23 May 2024

• Shares of Nvidia rise over 6%, powered by the AI bubble, after reporting soaring revenue and profits
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 May 2024

• Nebraska is sueing TikTok for allegedly harming minors. The office of the state Attorney General said the social-media app is contributing to mental-health problems in children.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 May 2024

• Alibaba bets on AI to fuel cloud growth as it expands globally to catch up with Big Tech in the USA
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 May 2024

• SMIC, the biggest semiconductor maker in Zhōngguó, is now the third largest in the world, with 6% market share. TSMC in Taiwan is the largest, followed by Samsung Foundry in South Korea.
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 May 2024

• Shares of BuzzFeed, a notorious slideshow clickbait farm and propaganda disseminator - which recently fired its entire "news" division - soared over 50% early Wednesday after multi-millionaire and former USA presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy reported a 7.7% stake in the online media company and asked for talks with the board.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 May 2024

• Increasing demand for power and raw-materials from new technology is likely to be a secular tailwind for commodities and thus an impediment to a return to a low-and-stable inflation regime.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 May 2024

• Another failure of authoritarian USA sanctions: Xiaomi, blacklisted by the USA three years ago, is now making electric vehicles, succeeding where the great big Apple failed
  - Zero Hedge, 22 May 2024

• Zhōngguó is winning the economic war to control rare earth metals. Despite years of effort by the West to gain more control, companies from Zhōngguó are becoming more dominant, not less.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 May 2024

• Where is the demand? Alibaba slashes ai pricing by up to 97%, igniting discount war across Zhōngguó.
  - Zero Hedge, 21 May 2024

• Mainstream investors finally get it: the AI investment tactic is not technology, but energy such as from natural gas - the electric power needed to fuel the growth of AI
  - Zero Hedge, 21 May 2024

• The fight by Scarlett Johansson against OpenAI (over the cloning of her voice) exposes the absolute authoritarian arrogance of the overlords of Silicon Valley
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 21 May 2024

• A teacher did all he could to keep kids off phones. He is quitting in frustration. Mitchell Rutherford faced a crisis of confidence as smartphones took over the classroom and students lost the motivation to learn.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 May 2024

• Trump Media lost more than $300 million last quarter on less than $1 million of revenue. And yet it has a multi-billion valuation, another scam bubble.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 20 May 2024

• Utility stocks are suddenly white hot, thanks largely to artificial intelligence's thirst for electricity. Investors accustomed to thinking of the sector as sleepy and safe need to realize the game has changed.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 May 2024

• Shares of GameStop crash 23% after announcing a plan to sell 45 million shares on the market
  - Zero Hedge, 17 May 2024

• Freak robot made in Zhōngguó can learn, think, work like humans. Inventor says Astribot humanoid robot can move at 33 feet per second, and it is shocking the world.
  - Murdoch's Fox News, 16 May 2024

• Britain says it is developing a radio-wave weapon that can take out a swarm of drones for just $0.12 a shot
  - Business Insider, 16 May 2024

• The Senate plans to offer $32 billion in socialist subsidies for three years to the extremely rich AI industry, whose main goal is to earn profits by selling software that allows companies to fire people who vote for these Senators
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 May 2024

• The reign of Walmart is the biggest retailer in the USA is under threat. With Amazon a close and second biggest retailer, Walmart is seeking ways to continue growing.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 May 2024

• Many people in Utah are getting cheap 10 Gbps fiber network access, thanks to local governments creating a shared public fiber network that any ISP can connect to and compete on. No surprise, regional monopolies notorious for overcharging for network access, have been trying to attack the success of this public-private initiative.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 May 2024

• GameStop stock plummetedd 30% Wednesday as a rally among meme names showed signs of fading. Shares of the video game retailer are coming off a two-day short squeeze. GameStop stock gained more than 180% in the prior two sessions. AMC also fell as much as 27% Wednesday after shares of the theater chain operator rose 95% over the last two days.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 May 2024

• News publishers sound alarm about Google's new AI-infused search, warn impacts of "catastrophic impacts". "This will be catastrophic to our traffic, as marketed by Google to further satisfy user queries, leaving even less incentive to click through so that we can monetize our content.". [KM: yes, but rich AI companies must get richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 15 May 2024

• Microsoft's quest for short-term gains of money is doing long-term damage to Windows, Surface, Xbox, and beyond. Microsoft has made a range of baffling decisions and awful mis-steps recently. You can trace everything back to insatiable desire for money.
  - Windows Central, 15 May 2024

• A propaganda win for Zhōngguó - the authoritarian banning of TikTok in the USA which supposedly is a open and free-market economy
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 May 2024

• Why the world has gone 'cuckoo' for copper. The USA and Zhōngguó are competing to acquire the metal, which is essential for EVs and data centers. It is also at the center of a $43 billion takeover battle involving Anglo American.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 May 2024

• Samsung tops Apple in Q1 global shipments of cellphones
  - Zero Hedge, 14 May 2024

• Two semiconductor chip makers in Zhōngguó, CXMT and Wuhan Xinxin, are in the early stages of producing high bandwidth memory semiconductors used in artificial intelligence chipsets.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 May 2024

• Shares of Paramount fall 5% after Sony Pictures decides to re-think its $26 billion deal to acquire Paramount
  - Zero Hedge, 14 May 2024

• President Biden raises taxes/tariffs on $18 billion worth of imports from a more competitive Zhōngguó. President Joe Biden plans to impose a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicle imports, a 50% tariff on Chinese solar cells and a 25% tariff on certain Chinese steel and aluminum imports.
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 May 2024

• President Biden raises taxes/tariffs on $18 billion worth of imports from a more competitive Zhōngguó. President Joe Biden plans to impose a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicle imports, a 50% tariff on Chinese solar cells and a 25% tariff on certain Chinese steel and aluminum imports.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 May 2024

• Zhōngguó criticizes the proposed new taxes/tariffs imposed by the Biden administration as "unfair" tech-transfer policies that "burden" commerce in the USA
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 May 2024

• Shares of Alibaba fall 7% after the Chinese tech giant posts 86% drop in profit
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 May 2024

• Tencent profit jumps 62% as tech giant returns to growth on back of strong ad revenue, as video games business slows
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 May 2024

• Shares of AMC rose over 90% today, after it announces it sold $250 million in new stock shares as its stock price is being bubbled-up again
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 May 2024

• The Biden Administration will provide up to $120 million in socialist subsidies to Polar Semiconductor to help the company expand its semiconductor chip manufacturing facility in Minnesota
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 May 2024

• Bubbled Nvidia rivals gold as a shield against inflation for investors
  - Zero Hedge, 13 May 2024

• Shein, the online retailer based in Zhōngguó, has attempted to become a member of the National Retail Federation in the USA, the largest trade association for retailers, numerous times but has been rejected. If Shein can earn a stamp of approval from the NRF, it would be a form of validation for the retailer and could help legitimize it in the eyes of politicians in the USA.
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 May 2024

• Scientists in Zhōngguó find a way to mass-produce optical chips that the US cannot sanction. Researchers developed a technique that uses a low-cost material -- lithium tantalate -- that is already being used to make smartphone components.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 13 May 2024

• Shares of Gamestock jump 40% as the 'Roaring Kitty' trader, who drove meme craze, posts online again
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 May 2024

• Gamestop short sellers lost almost $1 billion in the monster relly on Monday
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 May 2024

• SoftBank Vision Fund posts first annual gain in 3 years, up $4.6 billion
  - Versant's CNBC, 13 May 2024

• The state of Georgia is a magnet for data centers and other cutting-edge industries, but vast electricity demands are clashing with the green-energy goals of the companies demanding more electricity.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 May 2024

• The "enshittification" of the Internet - the relentless proliferation of ads and other ways that previous user-friendly social-media platforms (Google, Facebook, Instagram) monetize their eyeballs. It is so disgusting that more and more people are abandoning the platforms, if not the Internet itself.
  - Noah Smith blog, 11 May 2024

• AI bots are taking over the job application process, and everyone is losing. It is bot versus bot on the hiring front lines, as job hunters turn to new tools to counter the AI that is screening their applications.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 May 2024

• $10,000,000 - T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T will pay a combined $10.2 million in a settlement with US states that alleged the carriers falsely advertised wireless plans as "unlimited" and phones as "free".
  - Zero Hedge, 10 May 2024

• Shares of MacroGenics plummet 67% after news that five patients died in an experimental drug trial
  - Zero Hedge, 10 May 2024

• Welcome to the AI dystopia no one asked for, courtesy of Silicon Valley - [KM: earning billions of dollars off of their hatred of humanity]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 10 May 2024

• How Alibaba is leading the evolution of online luxury shopping. Alibaba's Tmall Luxury Pavilion is the first e-commerce platform to collaborate with major luxury groups such as LVMH, Richemont and Kering, uplifting sales for high-end brands using new digital strategies.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 10 May 2024

• Shares of Novavax spike 120% on a deal with Sanofi to commercialise vaccines for Covid, and develop combination shorts
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 May 2024

• Huawei's new 'made-in-Zhōngguó' smartphone sources more chips locally amid the technology war with the USA
  - Zero Hedge, 09 May 2024

• Apple's 'crush' ad - which depicts a tower of creative tools and analog items literally crushed into the form of the iPad - is disgusting and misanthropic. The crime is trying to sell the replacement of everything creative in the physical world with an iPad.
  - Techcrunch, 09 May 2024

• Behind the missing "strength" of consumers in the USA is $700 billion in 'phantom debt' - debt arising from "buy now pay later" plans
  - Zero Hedge, 09 May 2024

• Local governments in Zhōngguó swap debt for data as pressure builds to relieve debt burdens. Analysts warn plan has not been thoroughly evaluated, with inconsistent valuations of data and potential legal issues yet to be resolved. They are forced to do so, since profits from land sales have vanished.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 09 May 2024

• Shares of Arm, a semiconductor chip designer, drop 5% after lackluster revenue guidance
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 May 2024

• Shares of Roblox, a video-game platform, drop more than 20% as the company cuts annual bookings forecast on muted player spending
  - Versant's CNBC, 09 May 2024

• Billions in socialist subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing are expected to fuel industry growth - what a surprise (not)
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 May 2024

• Shares of Shopify fall 18% on weak guidance
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 May 2024

• The growing laptop business of Huawei in Zhōngguó is under threat after the USA invokes export licenses granted to Intel and Qualcomm to ship semiconductor chips to Zhōngguó
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 08 May 2024

• Shares of Reddit rise 37% after reporting a $500 million quarterly loss related to its IPO, but also reporting robust revenue and user growth, underscoring the potential of its digital advertising business as people flock to the site.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 May 2024

• How online shopping is saving the bricks-and-mortar store. Retailers are increasingly relying on their shops as fulfillment hubs.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 May 2024

• Instacart and Uber join forces to add Uber Eats to Instacart app. The two companies announce the partnership as they face competition from common rival DoorDash.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 May 2024

• The FBI file on Lawrence Gise has been destroyed. Gise was a grandfather of Jess Bezos, and a co-founder of DARPA.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 May 2024

• A group of residents in western North Carolina are protesting their county board's lack of transparency over furtive moves to welcome an electric vehicle (EV) battery manufacturing the residents believe would pollute their waters and ruin their scenic countryside.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 May 2024

• Shares of Disney drop 8.5%, the biggest decline in a year, after not meeting expectations for susbcriber growth and offering disappointing guidance
  - Zero Hedge, 07 May 2024

• Minor automobile accidents causes very high repair costs, because every new vehicle sold in the last few years has sensors and cameras, including radar and sonar, throughout the body of the vehicle. These have made the repair process more complex because, unlike a smashed fender, a sensor or camera cannot just be bolted or welded back on. To work, they need to be carefully and precisely aligned. It has changed the process of collision repair a lot.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 07 May 2024

• How TikTok is wiring Gen Z's money brain. Endless videos about the economy and consumerism are giving 20-somethings a case of "money dysmorphia" - worrying that they don't have enough -- stuff.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 May 2024

• The war machine of the USA runs on rare-earth magnets. Zhōngguó dominates the rare-earths market, but defense needs in the USA are pushing a revival effort after decades of deindustrialization.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 07 May 2024

• Why voters in the south of Bharat are more resistant to the Hindu-centric politics of prime minister Modi. Five states across southern Bharat account for roughly 20% of the population and 30% of the economy if Bharat. They are the heartbeat of the manufacturing and high-tech sectors of Bharat. They are ethnically diverse and proudly multilingual. They empower women with educational and employment opportunities and have a long history of progressive politics.
  - Associated Press, 06 May 2024

• Cue Health, which boomed with Covid tests during the crisis - and once worth $2.3 billion, fires hundreds of more people
  - SF Gate, 06 May 2024

• How did Boeing lose so badly to SpaceX? The surprise is not that Boeing lost commercial crew but that it finished at all.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 06 May 2024

• AI could drive a natural gas boom as power companies face surging electricity demand
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 May 2024

• AI startups, with their lousy business models, face a rough financial reality review
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 May 2024

• AI-generated samples of people is here, and they are ready to work for free. AI that can predict how specific humans will look, act and feel could do the paid jobs of human fashion models, human focus group members and human clinical trial participants.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 May 2024

• Renewable energy needs to be stored. Zhōngguó is at the forefront. Environment ministers from the G-7 Western economies have targeted a sixfold increase in storage for renewable energy by 2030. Most of that will come from battery energy storage systems.
  - Barron's, 04 May 2024

• Shares of Amgen rise 15% after its announces a successful clinical trial for its weight-loss drug
  - Zero Hedge, 03 May 2024

• Shares of Hims & Hers Health drop 8% after the company's CEO said he and other executives were "eager" to hire anti-Israel student protesters who have faced disciplinary actions from their universities.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 03 May 2024

• Are the Big Tech stocks now unbeatable thanks to socialist subsidies? They say the rich get richer, and nowhere is that more true than for the most-valuable firms in the US.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 May 2024

• Natron Energy, a pioneer in sodium-ion battery technology, has officially commenced mass production of its lithium-free sodium batteries in its Holland, Michigan facility, offering an alternative energy storage solution with benefits such as faster cycling, longer lifespan, and safer usage compared to lithium-ion batteries.
  - New Atlas, 02 May 2024

• Unit labor costs soar in Q1 as the so-called 'AI productivity boom' fails to deliver results
  - Zero Hedge, 02 May 2024

• Last week, hundreds of nurses protested the implementation of sloppy AI into hospital systems in front of Kaiser Permanente. Their primary concern: that systems incapable of empathy are being integrated into an already dysfunctional sector without much thought toward patient care. The problem that this AI worsens is that healthcare giants' primary obligation no longer appears to reside with patients, but with their financial results. And, that is even true in non-profit healthcare providers. That is seen in the form of cut corners, worse service, and an assault on already over-taxed labor via lower pay and higher workload (curiously, it never seems to impact outsized high-level executive compensation).
  - TechDirt, 02 May 2024

• Water heaters use lots of energy. The Energy Department wants to change that. The Biden administration is tightening efficiency rules for water heaters, stoves and other appliances, and conservative politicians are dialing up their criticisms to protect the environment and save consumers money.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 May 2024

• USA Senators strongly criticize the CEO of UnitedHealth over its susceptabiiity to cyberattacks. Several lawmakers questioned whether the company had become so large -- with greedy tentacles in every aspect of medical care in the USA -- that the effects of the hack were outsize.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 May 2024

• A yeast-like bacteria can cut carbon emissions while creating sustainable aviation fuel and sneakers. Technology invented by LanzaTech can reduce the CO2 output of steel plants by a third while also creating ethanol for environmentally friendly plastics and fuel.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 May 2024

• Shares of Peloton rise 12% in pre-market trading, after the CEO announces that he will resign, that the company will fire 15% of its people, and as it looks to refinance debt
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 May 2024

• Shares of Wayfair surge 17% after the furniture retailer cuts losses by more than $100 million, including by firing 1650 people in January
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 May 2024

• Shares of Carvana rise 30% during after-hours trading Wednesday after the used car retailer reported record results and turned a profit during the first quarter
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 May 2024

• Shares of Super Micro plummet 18% after posting a miss on revenues, after the server company upped its top-line guidance but reported third-quarter revenue that slightly missed estimates
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 May 2024

• ADP employment report strong in April, but the technology sector lost jobs
  - Zero Hedge, 01 May 2024

• Net profits at Huawei Technologies rose more than sixfold in the first quarter, helped by a jump in the Chinese telecommunication equipment maker's smartphone sales in Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 May 2024

• Sahres of AMD fall 7% after its forecasts for future revenues fails to impress analysts
  - Zero Hedge, 30 April 2024

• Shares of Tilray jump 22%, and shares of Canopy Growth jump 26%, after the DEA announces plans to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III
  - Zero Hedge, 30 April 2024

• Regulator investigates Ford's hands-free driving system after fatal crashes. The NHTSA said the incidents involved Ford's BlueCruise system on Mach-E vehicles that collided with stationary vehicles on highways.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 April 2024

• How big data centers are money-grubbing mega-billion dollar Big Tech companies are slowing the shift to clean energy. In the data center alley in Virginia, rising power demand means more fossil fuel.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 April 2024

• ~$200,000,000 - The FCC fined four wireless carriers - Verison, ATT, T-Mobile and Sprint - nearly $200 million for sharing customer-location data without consent.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 April 2024

• How involved is the CIA in journalism today? Let us just say it: the New York Times is CIA. So too is Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Slate, Salon, and many other mainstream publications, including major tech companies like Google and Microsoft. The tentacles are everywhere and ever more obvious. Operation Mockingbird was just the beginning. The network is everywhere and the practice of manipulating the news is wholly normalized.
  - Zero Hedge, 29 April 2024

• The United Kingdom becaomes the first country to ban the use of default passwords on IoT devices, something lazy and contemptous technology companies refused to do voluntarily
  - The Record, 29 April 2024

• $1,100,000 - Tech company Razer will have to pay a fine of $1.1 million, in the form of refunds, to o customers who purchased its RGB-clad Zephyr face mask. Razer falsely claimed the face mask used N95-grade filters, but the FTC alleges Razer never submitted them for testing and only "stopped the false advertising following negative press coverage and consumer outrage at the deceptive claims".
  - The Verge, 29 April 2024

• The Pura70 smartphone from Huawei contains new 7-nanometer HiSilicon chip made by SMIC. The chip, designed by Huawei's in-house division - HiSilicon, is set to help the Shenzhen-based tech champion regain the top position in the smartphone market in Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 28 April 2024

• Every technology tool in the classroom should be ruthlessly evaluated to prevent harm to children
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 28 April 2024

• Sales of used-cars have move online -- here is why both customers and dealers are happy. The migration has armed consumers with much more information and choices. It has done the same for dealerships.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 April 2024

• Is the AI bubble deflating? Growing skepticism and high costs prompt reconsideration.
  - The Week, 26 April 2024

• Intel used to dominate the semiconductor chip industry in the USA. Now Intel is struggling to stay relevant.
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 April 2024

• Mysognistically designed ChatGPT overwhelmingly depicts financiers and CEOs as white men, and women as secretaries
  - New York Post, 26 April 2024

• AI could allow call centers to fire most of their people, if not force the call centers out of business, according to the head of Tata Consultancy Services
  - Nikkei's Financial Times, 26 April 2024

• There is no TikTok in Zhōngguó, but there is Douyin. Here is what it is. ByteDance owns both TikTok and Douyin, and although TikTok has more users around the world, Douyin is the 'cash cow' of ByteDance and a mainstay in Zhōngguó.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 April 2024

• What is TikTok worth? Some say $20 billion, others say $100 billion. The answer depends partly on whether TikTok bundles the U.S. and international businesses, and if it includes its coveted algorithm.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 April 2024

• The AI bubble hides a slowdown in the semiconductor industry. Selling chips into the AI bubble is highly profitable, but the rest of the semiconductor industry - consumer, automotive, industrial - is slowly recovering
  - Bits & Chips, 25 April 2024

• Shares of Snap soar 23% as the company beats earnings estimates, and shows strong revenue growth
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 April 2024

• Shares of Intel shares fall 8% after company provides weak forecast for the current quarter
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 April 2024

• Shares of Google jump 14% on beating earnings estimates, announces its first dividend, and plans to buy $70 billion of its shares
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 April 2024

• The latest tech bubble to make rich companies in Silicon Valley richer - AI - runs on coal from the eastern USA
  - Zero Hedge, 25 April 2024

• Jack Dorsey's Block announces development of 'full bitcoin mining system'
  - Zero Hedge, 24 April 2024

• How the AI processor industry relies on gold for its processors
  - Zero Hedge, 24 April 2024

• How General Motors tricked millions of drivers into being spied on. This privacy reporter and her husband bought a Chevrolet Bolt in December. Two risk-profiling companies had been getting detailed data about their driving ever since.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 April 2024

• Cathie Wood's popular ARK funds are sinking fast. Investors have pulled a net $2.2 billion from ARK's active funds this year, topping outflows from all of 2023.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 April 2024

• Companies controlled by multi-billionaries such as Starbucks, Amazon, SpaceX -- are attacking the pro-worker policies of the National Labor Relations Board
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 24 April 2024

• It is all about the Big Tech - Mag 7 - earnings: without them, SP500 profit growth is negative
  - Zero Hedge, 23 April 2024

• Shares of Trump Media (DJT) drop 9% as Trump is expected to qualify for 36 million bonus shares, a dilution for a stock declining in value
  - Zero Hedge, 23 April 2024

• One, a fintech company backed by Walamrt, introduces a "buy now, pay later" predatory financing scheme as it prepares bigger push into lending. The expanding role of One at Walmart raises the possibility that the company could force Affirm, Capital One and other third parties out of some of the most coveted partnerships in American retail.
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 April 2024

• Shares of cloud software maker HashiCorp rise as much as 26% after reports that IBM is in talks to buy the company
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 April 2024

• How Pinduoduo rewired online shopping. Pinduoduo appeals to people seeking deals and "downgraded spending" as consumer purchasing in Zhōngguó has slowed recently amid economic rockiness.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 April 2024

• Big Tech faces earnings test after market rout. The magnificent seven stocks lost nearly $1 trillion in combined market value last week, increasing pressure on the group to deliver.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 April 2024

• With market gamma at its most negative year-to-date, it is too early to buy-the-fckin-dip in Nasdaq
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 22 April 2024

• Scientists in Zhōngguó make progress in using lasers to propel superfast, silent submarines. Current designs can produce almost as much thrust as a commercial jet engine, jusing optical fibers that coat the submarine
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 22 April 2024

• Technology companies in Africa are ditching Google for Zoho, a small competitor based in Bharat. Zoho has positioned itself as a cheaper alternative to Google and Microsoft, attracting the attention of African startup founders. African entrepreneurs say they opted for Zoho because it allows payments in local currencies, unlike Google and Microsoft.
  - Rest of The World, 22 April 2024

• Why is gold acting like a tech stock? When the price of gold and the relative price of technology stocks move closely together, as they have since 2018, this has historically indicated a higher overall stock market. Since 2018, gold has had a 0.94 correlation with the SP500 InfoTechnology sector
  - Paulsen Perspectives, 22 April 2024

• Is Elon Musk about to force everyone to view Tesla as an AI company after its earning reports this week, jumping from one bubble to another?
  - Investor's Business Daily, 22 April 2024

• Microsoft is a national security threat, says ex-White House cyber policy director. With little competition at the goverment level, Windows giant has no incentive to make its systems safer.
  - The Register, 21 April 2024

• $1,000,000 - Manish Lachwani, founder of Bay Area startup HeadSpin, is fined $1 millon and sentenced to 18 months in prison, for fraud
  - SF Gate, 20 April 2024

• Internet data centers are burning more and more coal to generate electricity. Power lines will be built across four states in a $5.2 billion effort that, relying on coal plants that were meant to be shuttered, is designed to keep the electric grid from failing amid spiking energy demands.
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 19 April 2024

• How Big Tech is consuming more and more electricity and water in the USA (and thus causing more environmental harm)
  - Zero Hedge, 19 April 2024

• Shares of DNA-testing company 23andMe soared 48% (from $0.36 to $0.53) in the early cash session in New York on news that Anne Wojcicki, the CEO, plans to take the struggling company private after three years on the public markets. The company once sported a $6 billion valuation and has since collapsed to $235 million.
  - Zero Hedge, 19 April 2024

• Shares of Super Micro Computer plunged 18% on Friday after the data-center computer specialist announced the date for its next quarterly earnings report without giving preliminary results. SMCI stock plunged below a key support level on the news, flashing a huge sell signal.
  - Investor's Business Daily, 19 April 2024

• Why a ban by the government of the USA on the use of TikTok would mean for the USA's defense of an open internet. Global digital rights advocates are watching to see if Congress acts, worried that other countries could follow suit with app bans of their own.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 April 2024

• The Biden Adminisrtation will give Micron up to $6.1 billion in subsidies to help build its semiconductor plants in New York and Idaho
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 April 2024

• Bangladesh built a tech park for 100,000 workers in the outskirts of Dhaka, in Kaliakair. Now it is a ghost town. The facility was partly funded by the World Bank and touted to become the 'cyber capital' of Bangladesh.
  - Rest of the World, 18 April 2024

• Shares of Trump Media jumps more than 9% after CEO asks House GOP to probe possible manipulations of the company's stock
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 April 2024OD

• Shares of Netflix drop 3% after reporting very good results in Q12024, but also warning that gains will slow and that it will end quarterly reporting of subscribers
  - Zero Hedge, 18 April 2024

• Big Tech stocks on the verge of a correction, as the next CTA liqudation level is triggered, with Nvidia and other semiconductor companies enter a correction stage
  - Zero Hedge, 18 April 2024

• Trump Media tells shareholders how to block their DJT stock being loaned to short sellers
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 April 2024

• Half of all interactions on the Internet are now computer-generated by 'bots'.
  - The Independent, 18 April 2024

• Shares of ASML plummet 6% as its sales orderbook plummets after rushed purchases by Zhōngguó (before a ban went into effect) dry up
  - Zero Hedge, 17 April 2024

• Shares of ASML plummet 6% as its sales orderbook plummets after rushed purchases by Zhōngguó (before a ban went into effect) dry up
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 April 2024

• The computation demand for the new, job-destroying AI, by 2030 could be consuming more energy than Bharat, much of that energy generated by burning coal and oil, worsening the environment
  - Bloomberg, 17 April 2024

• Artificial intelligence tools can replace much of Wall Street's entry-level white-collar work - financial document analysis, allowing financial firms to stop hiring and firing young people to do this grunt work.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 April 2024

• Big Tech is downsizing workspace in another blow to office real estate. The pullback marks a sharp reversal after years when companies had been bolstering their office footprints by adding millions of square feet of space.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 17 April 2024

• How cell phones are killing our kids - an epidemic of mental illness being induced in children , and what people and parents can do about it
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 16 April 2024

• The life and death of Hollywood. Film and television writers face an existential threat. Stealing subscribers has become more important than content. Financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions. Hollywood had become a winner-takes-all economy. As of 2021, CEOs at the majority of the largest companies and conglomerates in the industry drew salaries between two hundred and three thousand times greater than those of median employees. The new effective bosses of the industry -- colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private-equity firms -- had not been simply pushing workers too hard and grabbing more than their fair share of the profits. They had been stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house -- threatening the sustainability of the studios themselves.
  - Harper's Magazine, 16 April 2024

• The semiconductor output of Zhōngguó jumps 40% in the first three months of 2024, amid a growing dominance in legacy chips. Authoritarian import controls imposed by the USA could unintentionally lead to a dominance by Zhōngguó of global legacy-semiconductor production, used in downstream sectors such as new energy vehicles and smartphones
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 April 2024

• Shares of Trump Media fall another 5% after it annonuces plans to launch a strreaming television platform
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 April 2024

• Top Wall Street brokerages, whose investment banking units helped Reddit prepare for its public issue, started coverage of the social media company with doubts over its user growth. Goldman Sachs and J.P.Morgan began with a "neutral" rating and a price target of $40 and $47, respectively, while Morgan Stanley had an "equal-weight" rating and a $45 price target. Reddit shares were last trading at $40.66, below last month's debut price of $47.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 15 April 2024

• First quarter shipments of iPhones decline the most since Covid, as demands decreases in Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 15 April 2024

• Global shipments of iPhones fell nearly 10% in the first quarter despite a broader smartphone market recovery as Applke continues to contend with rising challengers from Zhōngguó such as Xiaomi.
  - Yahoo FInance, 15 April 2024

• Shares of Trump Media (DJT) plunged more than 17% in the pre-trading hours Monday after the company filed to issue millions of additional shares of stock. Last week, the stock fell nearly 20%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 April 2024

• Shares of Trump Media (DJT) plunged more than 17% in the pre-trading hours Monday after the company filed to issue millions of additional shares of stock. Last week, the stock fell nearly 20%.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 April 2024

• Biden administration agrees to provide a $6.4 billion subsidy to Samsung for making computer chips in Texas
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 April 2024

• Biden administration agrees to provide a $6.4 billion subsidy to Samsung for making computer chips in Texas
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 April 2024

• Models generated by AI could bring more diversity to the fashion industry -- or leave it with less. Critics raise concerns that digital models may push paid-human models -- and other professionals like makeup artists and photographers -- Unsuspecting consumers could also be fooled into thinking non-paid AI models are real, and companies could claim credit for fulfilling diversity commitments without paying actual humans.
  - Associated Press, 15 April 2024

• Scientists in Zhōngguó and South Korea develop a "pioneering strategy" for breakthrough in semiconductor technology. Challenges to developing amorphous semiconductors with high electron mobility have held back the development of new generation devices.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 April 2024

• A few New York City restaurants are experimenting with virtual staff members, who greet customers onscreen via Zoom from the Philippines.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 April 2024

• Generative AI is changing the economics of hiring at these companies. With price tags of up to millions a year for a single use case for AI, companies hope that AI can deliver savings by allowing the companies to hire and pay less humans.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 April 2024

• Companies developing AI systems are threatening the paid-jobs of many Americans,
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 13 April 2024

• Shares of Intel and AMD decline 2% after the government of Zhōngguó orders telecommunications companies to phase out use of foreign semiconductor chips
  - Zero Hedge, 12 April 2024

• Shares of Intel and AMD decline 2% after the government of Zhōngguó orders telecommunications companies to phase out use of foreign semiconductor chips
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 April 2024

• OnePlus faces complaints from retailers in Bharat, as the smartphone brand based in Zhōngguó tries to maintain its slice of the market. OnePlus, a sub-brand of Oppo, is facing a slew of complaints related to low profit margins and warranty claims in Bharat. A local industry association said it will suspend sales from May 1, threatening the progress OnePlus has made in the face of anti-Zhōngguó sentiment.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 12 April 2024

• Shares of Rivian drop 6.5% and Lucid drop 2.5%, after Ford Motor announced price cuts for its electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck of 7.5%, amid sliding demand across the electric vehicle industry.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 April 2024

• Shares of CarMax dropped over 12% after the used-car retailer missed financial targets for its fiscal fourth quarter and said it was extending its timeframe goal to sell more than two million units annually
  - Barron's, 11 April 2024

• CarMax gets slammed by high rates, tight used-car supply. Used cars are getting harder to obtain just as new cars get more affordable.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 April 2024

• Denver and Boulder are poaching more of the tech founders, workers and VC billions from California
  - Versant's CNBC, 11 April 2024

• Teenage girls confront an epidemic of deepfake nudes in schools, while tech companies earn more money. Using artificial intelligence, middle and high school students have fabricated explicit images of female classmates and shared the doctored pictures.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 April 2024

• How drones manufactured in the USA failed to turn the tide in Ukraine. Drones from American startups have been deemed glitchy and expensive, prompting Ukraine to turn to alternatives from Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 April 2024

• Renewable energy technologies from Zhōngguó are pouring into Latin America
  - Economist, 11 April 2024

• Nvidia enters correction territory as stock falls 10% from all-time highs. "A combination of shrinking models, more steady growth in demand, maturing hyperscaler investments, and increased reliance by their largest customers on their own chips do not bode well for the future of Nvidia."
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 April 2024

• Microsoft tries to sell OpenAI's DALL-E as a battlefield tool for the USA military. Any battlefield use of the software would be an expected turnaround for OpenAI, which bullshits its mission as developing AI that can benefit all of humanity.
  - The Intercept, 10 April 2024

• How Nihon is trying to rebuild its semiconductor chip industry. Taiwan's semiconductor giant, TSMC, is quickly remaking a farm town in Japan into Asia's next hub of chip manufacturing with enormous socialist government support worth billions of dollars.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 10 April 2024

• The black market that delivers Elon Musk's Starlink to foes of the USA. The satellite-internet devices are helping Russian fighters in Ukraine and paramilitary forces in Sudan. Elon Musk hasn't ordered SpaceX to shut them off.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 April 2024

• 'AI Instagram influensers' are deepfaking their faces onto the bodies of real women. AI influencers on Instagram have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views by stealing reels from real women to make the AI seem more believable.
  - 404 Media, 09 April 2024

• Elon Musk says that he "may have done more to financially impair Twitter/X" than to help it
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 09 April 2024

• The authoritarian control of social media by Big Tech is a growing problem
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 09 April 2024

• The new Cybertrucks being sold by Tesla were "rushed out", and are malfunctioning at an astounding rate
  - New York Post, 08 April 2024

• The biggest AI hype fraud of all time. Elon Musk says Tesla will reveal its robotaxi on August 8th, but should we believe him? No. These AI scams are a warning for the future. Do not trust the billionaire class.
  - AI Supremacy, 08 April 2024

• Why the national debt of the USA is unsustainable and is destroying the middle class, a destruction aided by Big Tech
  - Zero Hedge, 08 April 2024

• Shares of Trump Media plummet 10% Monday, now down more than 50% from its IPO high
  - Zero Hedge, 08 April 2024

• How authoriarian tech giants arrogantly ignored the law to harvest data for AI training. OpenAI, Google and Meta ignored corporate policies, altered their own rules and discussed skirting copyright law as they sought online information to train their newest artificial intelligence systems.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 April 2024

• The USA will offer TSMC, based in Taiwan, up to $6.6 billion in socialist subsidies to build semiconductor manufacturing plants in Arizona
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 April 2024

• The USA will offer TSMC, based in Taiwan, up to $6.6 billion in socialist subsidies to build semiconductor manufacturing plants in Arizona
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 April 2024

• Insurance companies spy on houses via aerial imagery from drones, seeking reasons to cancel coverage
  - Zero Hedge, 08 April 2024

• Insurance companies are using drones to check out roofs or to spot yard debris and undeclared trampolines
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 April 2024

• The technical indicator, market breadth, suggests that the Nasdaq's rally could be 'losing steam'.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 April 2024

• Two companies in Nihon argue that "social order could collapse" in the AI era. Telecommunications company NTT and leading newspaper Yomiuri will issue a manifesto calling for new laws to restrain generative AI.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 April 2024

• Artificial intelligence will lead to many companies employing fewer people in the next five years, staffing provider Adecco Group. Some 41% of senior executives expect to have smaller workforces (partly through firing people) because of AI technology. [KM: rich companies must get richer]
  - Thomson's Reuters, 05 April 2024

• Hard to call the Russell 2000 index an index for small capitalization stocks, when two of its stocks, Super Micro Computer (AI) and Microstrategy (bitcoin) -- have a total valuation of $84 billion
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 April 2024

• Zhōngguó dominates the global production of the rare earth metal gallium, a critical component in semiconductor manufacturing and advanced weapon systems used by the USA. Since Zhōngguó restricted gallium and germanium flows to the USA last summer - seen as a tit-for-tat response to the worsening US-Zhōngguó trade war - prices of the metal have doubled (around $575 a kilogram delivered to Rotterdam). However, some good news for the USA, US Critical Materials announced in recent weeks that it discovered a "strategically significant" deposit of high-grade gallium on its 6,700 acres of claims in southwest Montana.
  - Zero Hedge, 04 April 2024

• Earthquake preparedness in Taiwan saved a lot of lives -- and prevented a catastrophe for the global tech economy. From Taiwan to South Korea to Silicon Valley, some of the most important nodes in the global tech economy are in disaster-prone places.
  - Vox, 04 April 2024

• Traders are betting millions that Trump Media will tumble. The parent company of Truth Social is a popular target for short-sellers, even after they lost $100 million last month betting on a decline in the stock that did not come.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 April 2024

• $1,050,000 - Empress Ambulance Service will pay a settlement fee of $1.05 million due to its inability to stop a 2022 data breach that resulted in the loss of patient information
  - Lagrada Online, 04 April 2024

• Intel and socialist industrial policy in action. Intel now says it will need even more socialist subsidies, as it loses money on its foundry business.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 April 2024

• Deepfakes are coming for the financial sector. With technology advances making artificial intelligence-enabled voice and images more life-like than ever, bad actors armed with deepfakes are coming for the enterprise. The AI will do little to stop this, because it hurts their profits.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 April 2024

• Shares of Paramount rise 15% after it enters exclusive merger talks with Skydance, spurning a $26 billion offer from Apollo
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 April 2024

• $22,000,000+ - Two investors, Michael and Gerald Shvartsman, plead guilty to participating in an insider trading scheme linked to the blockbuster deal that brought Trump's social media business public. The indictment accused the brothers and a third individual, Bruce Garelick, of together illegally making more than $22 million in October 2021 by trading on their inside knowledge of the deal.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 April 2024

• ~$220,000,000 - OpenAI-backed Ghost Academy shuts down. It was a startup working on autonomous driving software for automobile manufacturers (including for non-paid robotaxi manufacturers). It lost/wasted nearly $220 million in its failed attempt.
  - TechCrunch, 03 April 2024

• Disney needs fixing, but Nelson Peltz was the wrong repairman
  - US News & World Report, 03 April 2024

• Stability AI reportedly ran out of cash to pay its bills for rented GPUs on Amazon's and Google's cloud systems. Generative AI darling was on track to pay $99 million on compute to generate just $11 million in revenues. It is reported that the company -- once valued at billions of dollars - weighed delaying tax payments to the UK government rather than skimping on its American payroll and risking legal penalties.
  - The Register, 03 April 2024

• TSMC temporarily closes some production facilities in Taiwan after the island nation is hit by strong earthquakes.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 April 2024

• Zhōngguó leads the world in the recycling of batteries
  - Zero Hedge, 02 April 2024

• Facebook is alleged to have allowed Netflix to see private user DMs "for nearly a decade" in order to help the streaming giant tailor content to users, according to claims made in an explosive new lawsuit.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 April 2024

• Tech giant Google has agreed to settle with plaintiffs who alleged that the company invaded the privacy of users by tracking online activities even when they were using Chrome browser's private incognito mode.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 April 2024

• Shares of Intel fall more than 4% in extended trading on Tuesday after the company revealed long-awaited financials for its semiconductor manufacturing business that reported that this foundry business lost $7 billion
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 April 2024

• How fast food restaurants use electronic ordering kiosks to lure people into ordering and spending more on their junk food
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 02 April 2024

• A viral AI influencer, completely computer-generated, is going to host a television show. Who needs paid-humans?
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 02 April 2024

• Drones using AI launched from Ukraine are disrupting the oil and energy industry of Rossiya. So far, the cost-effective strategy is working.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 02 April 2024

• E-commerce giant Amazon has just launched new tech that makes it far easier to sign up for its palm-scanning payment service, sparking renewed concerns among privacy experts, with some warning it is another pebble in the growing rock pile of big tech-enabled, Orwell-style digital enslavement.
  - Zero Hedge, 01 April 2024

• How can Robinhood afford 3% cash back on its new credit card? The pressure is on as Robinhood lost 10 million users between 2021 and 2023.
  - Lex - Substack, 01 April 2024

• Shares of DJT, Trump Media's stock, plummet 22% Monday morning as new filing reveals heavy losses, and 'greater risks' due to Trump's involvement
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 01 April 2024

• Zhōngguó is quietly making progress on a new technique to develop advanced semiconductor chips without the need for EUV systems from Dutch giant ASML, a breakthrough that could potentially thwart US trade sanctions.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 01 April 2024

• The 'Silicon Valley' of Bharat faces a water crisis that software cannot solve. Bengaluru gets plenty of rain. But the city did not properly adapt as its soaring population strained traditional water sources. As the city rapidly grew, water management fell behind and never caught up as otherwise healthy aquifers were drawn dry by the unchecked spread of urban bore wells.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 01 April 2024

• The criminally incompetent management of ATT allows information on the accounts of 73 million customers to be leaked on to the criminal 'Dark Web'. The rich executives were apparently too busy playing golf to worry about customer security.
  - Zero Hedge, 31 March 2024

• The criminally incompetent management of ATT allows information on the accounts of 73 million customers to be leaked on to the criminal 'Dark Web'. The rich executives were apparently too busy playing golf to worry about customer security.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 March 2024

• Datenna, a software company in the Netherlands that could shape EU-Zhōngguó relations for decades. Datenna is using open source intelligence to furnish governments with the data they need to make policy decisions on Zhōngguó.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 31 March 2024

• 6 things to know about genetically-modified food development in Zhōngguó amid the government efforts to increase food security. Zhōngguó has approved genetically modified soybeans, corn, cotton and papaya to be grown for commercial purposes. Around 267,000 hectares (660,000 acres) of GM crops were planted as part of trial projects last year.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 31 March 2024

• AI-generated garbage/content is polluting our culture,
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 March 2024

• Cellphone/computer screens are everywhere in schools. Do they actually help children learn ?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 March 2024

• How Zomato, a food delivery app in Bharat, sparked a caste and purity debate. Delivery workers worry that vegetarian-only fleets today could pave the way for caste-based delivery systems tomorrow.
  - Al Jazeera, 30 March 2024

• Over 50% of all jobs in the USA are wage and salary workers paid at hourly rates, so-called 'deskless workers'. Some experts claim knowledge workers face a greater threat from automation, but upskilling in lower-wage work will be critical, and it is not clear that these workers will get paid more for successfully completing it. .
  - Versant's CNBC, 30 March 2024

• Inside a high-stakes fight to limit social media's addictive hold on children. A push by leading Democrats to restrict how social media companies use algorithms to serve addictive content to children has been met by a high-stakes lobbying effort, as Big Tech spends millions to bribe lobby politicians.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 March 2024

• A town in Georgia basks in bountiful filming. The state pays. When movies are made in Thomasville, Georgia, it welcomes celebrities and an infusion of cash. But the socialist financial incentives that attract studios have cost the taxpayers of the state billions of dollar.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 30 March 2024

• The AI industry is steaming toward a legal iceberg. Legal scholars, lawmakers and at least one Supreme Court justice agree that companies will be liable for the things their AI systemss say and do -- and that the lawsuits are just beginning.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 March 2024

• Huawei bounces back from authoritarian sanctions imposed by the USA, as its profit doubles. The results are a stunning comeback for the tech-giant in Zhōngguó, years after export controls imposed by the USA cut it off from advanced technology.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 30 March 2024

• AI is giving nuclear power a big lift. 4 stocks riding the trend: CEG, PEG, TLNE, VST. Data centers being built to run AI systems require lots of power. Nuclear power is exceptionally well suited to meeting such enormous demands.
  - Barron's, 30 March 2024

• Stripe, the only payment processor Substack writers can use, has backed off a demand that Dr. Robert Malone link his bank account, according to the law firm Dr. Malone retained. Stripe earlier in March asked Dr. Malone to "link the primary bank account for your business to your Stripe account", which would enable Stripe to spy on review the account's "current account balance and transactions, as well as historical transactions".
  - Zero Hedge, 30 March 2024

• If Twitter/X exploits the craziness of the right to earn billions, Facebook's Threads exploits the craziness of the left to earn billions
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 March 2024

• Every year, about 6.5 million newborn male chickens are killed (male chickens don't produce eggs or good chicken meat). A system that determines the sex of chicks before they hatch eliminates the need to destroy young males.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 29 March 2024

• The music industry is forcing song lyrics to become simpler, more repetitive, angry and self. Researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across several genres from 1980 to 2020obsessed. The number of repeated lines rose most in rap over the decades.
  - The Guardian, 29 March 2024

• How 'The Atlantic' magazine went from bakrupt to profitable in three years. The publication's new chief executive raised subscription prices, and moved away from day-to-day news coverage to focus on deeply reported stories with broad appeal.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 March 2024

• The latest crime thanks to generative AI. With just a few seconds of footage, scammers can now combine video and audio using tools from companies like HeyGen and Eleven Labs to generate a synthetic version of the voice of a real person, swap out the sound on an existing video, and animate the person's lips - making the doctored result more believable. Because it is simpler and cheaper to base fake videos on real content, criminals are scooping up videos on social media that match the demographic of a sales pitch, leading to what experts predict will be an explosion of ads made with stolen identities, [KM: while generating more money for rich Big Tech companies].
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 28 March 2024

• Vegetables are losing their nutrients. Can the decline be reversed? A process called biofortification puts nutrients directly into seeds and could reduce global hunger, but it iss not a magic bullet.
  - The Guardian, 28 March 2024

• Software vendors dump open source, go for the cash grab. First, they build programs with open source. Then they build their business with open source. Then they abandon it and cash out.
  - Computerworld, 28 March 2024

• Larry Summers, now an OpenAI board member, thinks that AI could replace "almost all" forms of labor performed by to-be-jobless paid-humans. Just do not expect a "productivity miracle" anytime soon.
  - Jiaravanon's Fortune, 28 March 2024

• Shares of Nikola soared by more than 15% Thursday morning. The stock got a boost from some company-specific news as well as fresh publicity for hydrogen as a transportation fuel.
  - The Motley Fool, 28 March 2024

• Shares of Microstrategy plummet 14% after a short seller, Kerrisdale Capital, says the stock trades at an unjustifiable premium to bitcoin. They argue that there is no justification to buy the stock which is effectively the same as paying more than double for bitcoin. Buying shares of Microstragegy to own part of their bitcoin hoard is equivalent to buying a $77,000 bitcoin for $177,000.
  - Coindesk, 28 March 2024

• This week Fisker, which is rumored to be on the verge of considering bankruptcy and has seen its stock trade to pennies and be moved to the pink sheets, reduced the price of its only vehicle, the Ocean sport utility vehicle, by a stunning 39%, according to Bloomberg. A last minute attempt to avoid bankruptcy.
  - Zero Hedge, 28 March 2024

• The slow death of Twitter and social media is measured in disasters such as the collapse of the bridge in Baltimore. As conspiracy theorists compete for attention in the wake of a tragedy, others seek engagement through dubious expertise, juicy speculation, or stolen video clips. The boundary between conspiracy theory and engagement bait is permeable; unfounded and provoking posts often outpace the trickle of verified information that follows any sort of major breaking news event. Flows of misinformation and racism.
  - Vox, 28 March 2024

• As BYD becomes the leading electric vehicle manufacturer in the world, at least comparable in size to Tesla and thus a challenge to Tesla, the fact that Tesla's valuation is seven times that of BYD suggests Tesla's stock price has lots of room to decline
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 28 March 2024

• NSF paid universities to develop AI censorship tools for social media
  - Zero Hedge, 27 March 2024

• The governor of Oregon signs the first right-to-repair law in the USA that bans parts pairing. Starting in 2025, devices can't block repair parts with software pairing checks.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 27 March 2024

• Shares of Robinhood rise 8% after it launches a solid gold credit card with 3% cashback rewards
  - Business Insider, 27 March 2024

• Major investment firms in the USA such as General Atlantic, Susquehanna and Sequoia Capital own stakes in ByteDance, the parent of TikTok. Their investments are increasingly under fire.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 March 2024

• Why tech companies are not your friends: lessons from Roku. Roku recently changed its policy to make it even harder for customers to take legal action. It is a reminder of how we need to protect ourselves.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 March 2024

• Governor DeSantis signs social media bill barring accounts for children under 14. A new Florida law also requires apps like TikTok and Snapchat to obtain the consent of a parent before giving accounts to 14- and 15- year olds.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 March 2024

• The forced sale of TikTok demanded by the USA is the corruption of third wold nations
  - Forbes, 26 March 2024

• $923,000 - Multibillionaire Andy Bechtolsheim agrees to pay the SEC $923,000 to settle charges of insider trading, in a case tied to Oracle's acquisition of Acacia Communications
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 March 2024

• The European Union takes aim at Google, Apple and Facebook in wide-ranging criminal antitrust investigations. The inquiries signal the EU's intention to tightly enforce sweeping new competition rules that took effect this month.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 March 2024

• The European Union takes aim at Google, Apple and Facebook in wide-ranging criminal antitrust investigations. The inquiries signal the EU's intention to tightly enforce sweeping new competition rules that took effect this month.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 March 2024

• The last Trump stock was a disaster for investors, the public company going bankrupt and losing a billion dollars. The new one could be a disaster for the country.
  - Comcast's MSNBC, 26 March 2024

• Ericsson to fire 1,200 people in Sweden due to lower volumes os sales. The Swedish telecommunications-equipment company said it expects a challenging mobile networks market in 2024, with further volume contraction as customers remain cautious.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 March 2024

• Thiel, Bezos, and Zuckerberg dump shares amid surging insider ratio: an ominous sign for bull market
  - Zero Hedge, 25 March 2024

• Elon Musk fought government surveillance -- while profiting off government surveillance. Musk made hay of his legal battle against secret surveillance but continued selling X user data to a company that facilitates government monitoring.
  - The Intercept, 25 March 2024

• Some investors thing that Trump's new public company, focusing on social media similar to Twitter/X, will be a financial failure
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 25 March 2024

• Zhōngguó bans use of semiconductor chips from companies in the USA, including from Intel and AMD
  - Zero Hedge, 25 March 2024

• The USA is agonizing over the possibility of a ban of TikTok, but Bharat did it quickly. People in Bharat adjusted quickly, and Instagram and YouTube built big audiences.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 March 2024

• With Tiktok under fire, brands that rely on it worry. Many companies, particularly in the beauty and fashion industries, have boosted sales through the platform. They do not really have a backup plan.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 March 2024

• Shares of Lucid soar 20% in early trading, after announcing that it raised $1 billion for a Saudi sovereign wealth fund affiliate
  - Versant's CNBC, 25 March 2024

• Twitter/X needs creators, but they do not need Twitter/X. Many creators say Twitter/X is still a long way from becoming a major source of revenue for them.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 25 March 2024

• The online degradation of women and girls (with deepfake pornography) that we meet with a shrug while Big Tech, such as Google which directs traffic to this pornography, profits
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 March 2024

• Could real estate agents be thrown out of work the same as were travel agents? Not quite, since buying a home is a longer term investment than buying a plane ticket.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 23 March 2024

• General Motors has stopped sharing with data brokers, the data about the driving behavior of people who buy its cars
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 March 2024

• Humane's revolution Ai Pin wearable computer is the ultimate cellphone killer at $700 (a cellphone minus screen, plus palm/surface projector): 9 incredible features.
  - Indian Express, 22 March 2024

• A truck-to-truck electronic 'worm' could infect -- and disrupt -- the entire commercial truck fleet in the USA. The devices, electronic logging devices, that makes the 'worm' possible is required in all American big rigs, and has criminally poor security. A paper reports how ELDs can be accessed over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections to take control of a truck, manipulate data, and spread malware between vehicles.
  - Zero Hedge, 22 March 2024

• Shares of Digital World Acquisition Corppration fell more than 12% after the shell company's shareholders approved a merger with the social media company owned by Trump
  - Zero Hedge, 22 March 2024

• Why the Seagull, a new lost-cost electric vehicle (less than $10,000) from BYD based in Zhōngguó, has global automobile executives and politicians on the edge. The fear is that BYD and its rivals in Zhōngguó could flood their markets, undercutting domestic production and vehicle prices
  - Versant's CNBC, 22 March 2024

• The new threat to Amazon: fending off two rivals, Temu and Shein. The e-commerce companies based in Zhōngguó have, for now, replaced Walmart and Target as the central competitive focus of Amazon.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 March 2024

• As Fisker fails, electricx vehicle startups need to learn from Zhōngguó. Speeding up product development might be a more effective way to lighten the car industry's debilitating capital burden than outsourcing production.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 March 2024

• A virologist linked to the government of Zhōngguó, fired after transferring samples of the Ebola virus from Winnipeg to wuhan resurfaces in Zhōngguó - and is collaborating with military scientists
  - Zero Hedge, 21 March 2024

• The Congressional case against banning TikTok in the USA is very weak. It is pretend politics, since it won't increase the national security of the USA.
  - Foreign Policy, 21 March 2024

• $70,000,000,000+/year - A United Nations reorts states that electronic waste is growing 5-times faster than it can be recyclced, increase Big Tech profits by socialistically shifting waste disposal costs to taxpayers. While e-waste recycling has benefits estimated to include $23 billion of monetized value from avoided greenhouse gas emissions and $28 billion of recovered materials like gold, copper, and iron, it also comes at a cost -- $10 billion associated with e-waste treatment and $78 billion of externalized costs to people and the environment.
  - Zero Hedge, 21 March 2024

• Nvidia announces non-paid AI-powered health care 'agents' that outperform human nurses - and only cost $9 per hour and don't need to be paid health benefits
  - Murdoch's Fox News, 21 March 2024

• Shares of Reddit soar as much as 70% in its debut on the New York Stock Exchange for its IPO
  - Zero Hedge, 21 March 2024

• Baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani has been caught up in a gambling controversy (his interpreter stole millions to place illegal bets). He will not be the last. From baseball to March Madness, how gambling is ruining sports.
  - Vox, 21 March 2024

• A massive baseball-gambling scandal is brewing. But sports betting has already exploded -- and Congress could not care less. Despite public health concerns and mounting scandals, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have mostly ignored the issue.
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 21 March 2024

• Reddit IPO prices at top of range, but big haircut to 2021 valuation, with a fully diluted valuation of $6.4 billion. That is a substantial discount from the $10 billion valuation the company had in a 2021 funding round.
  - Zero Hedge, 21 March 2024

• The Department of Justice sues Apple under antitrust laws, saying its iPhone ecosystem is a monopoly that drove its "astronomical valuation" at the expense of consumers, developers and rival phone makers.The lawsuit claims that Apple's anti-competitive practices extend beyond the iPhone and Apple Watch businesses, citing s advertising, browser, FaceTime and news offerings.
  - Versant's CNBC, 21 March 2024

• The Department of Justice sues Apple under antitrust laws, saying its iPhone ecosystem is a monopoly that drove its "astronomical valuation" at the expense of consumers, developers and rival phone makers.The lawsuit claims that Apple's anti-competitive practices extend beyond the iPhone and Apple Watch businesses, citing s advertising, browser, FaceTime and news offerings.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 21 March 2024

• The Department of Justice sues Apple under antitrust laws, saying its iPhone ecosystem is a monopoly that drove its "astronomical valuation" at the expense of consumers, developers and rival phone makers.The lawsuit claims that Apple's anti-competitive practices extend beyond the iPhone and Apple Watch businesses, citing s advertising, browser, FaceTime and news offerings.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 March 2024

• Big Tech billionaires behind the "California Forever" build-a-city-from-scratch, are tricking people to sign petitions in their favor
  - Daily Beast, 21 March 2024

• Shares of Micron soar 15% after AI growth boosts revenue forecast
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 March 2024

• Shares of Atos tumbled more than 20 percent after Airbus, the European aerospace giant, said it had called off talks to buy Atos's cybersecurity assets for up to 1.8 billion euros (about $2 billion) following a review of the finance of the company.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 21 March 2024

• Lithium batteries are very difficult to recycle and require huge amounts of water and energy to produce. A growing number of alternatives, such as sodium-ion batteries and solid-state batteries, could be cheaper and greener.
  - BBC, 20 March 2024

• $8,5000,000,000 - The US government to give Intel a socialist subsidy of $19.5 billion, $8.5 billion as an outright socialist grant, and as much as $11 billion in loans (apparently there are no investors nor banks in Silicon Valley)
  - Zero Hedge, 20 March 2024

• The US government to give Intel a socialist subsidy of $19.5 billion, $8.5 billion as an outright socialist grant, and as much as $11 billion in loans (apparently there are no investors nor banks in Silicon Valley)
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 March 2024

• Scientists in Korea invent a catalyst that can generate hydrogen from municipal sewage. The invention is based on finding a catalyst that can effectively drive the urea oxidation reaction, thereby amplifying the efficiency of both hydrogen generation and wastewater treatment.
  - OilPrice.com, 19 March 2024

• Shares of Planet Fitnes drop 14% after a consumer boycott due to the compny's policies supportive of transgender people
  - Zero Hedge, 19 March 2024

• Goldmn Sachs milks the AI bubble by leading a stock offering by SuperMicro, just two weeks after initiating superbullish coverage on ts stock
  - Zero Hedge, 19 March 2024

• More Christian hypocrisy: conservative Christians in the USA feel the best way to protect the American people from Chinese influences is to act like ZHōngguó and force a sale of TikTok, probably to some authoritarian Big Tech company in the USA
  - Real Clear Markets, 19 March 2024

• ICON, which developed one of the first fully 3D-printed housing developments in the U.S., is taking automation another step further. It recently unveiled what it calls Vitruvius, an AI program that helps consumers design custom homes online (without paying an architect) and obtain the construction plans, making the process cheaper and faster for the consumer, and less income for the architects, [KM: while making rich AI companies richer].
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 March 2024

• Shares of Nordstrom rise more than 10% on a report that the retiler is trying to go private. Nordstrom earlier this month gave a disappointing sales outlook for 2024.
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 March 2024

• Shares of space data analytics company Spire Global rocketed up 28% after announcing late Monday a partnership with Nvidia (NVDA) to advance its artificial intelligence-driven weather prediction offerings
  - Investors Business Daily, 19 March 2024

• Shares of Crinetics Pharmaceuticals rose 16% early Tuesday after releasing positive trial results in the second phase 3 study of a hormone disorder treatment
  - Investors Business Daily, 19 March 2024

• With the breakup of the real estate cartel that is the National Association of Retailers, the biggest potential disruption in the real estate industry is if paid paper-shuffling brokers for homebuyers are replaced by non-paid AI bots. A well-trained AI would probably provide a better, more reliable service than most human brokers -- at a tiny fraction of the cost.
  - Axios 19 March 2024

• More and more Americans rely on TikTok to obtain the news, now up to 14% of Americans relying on TikTok for the news
  - Zero Hedge, 18 March 2024

• Big Tech and oil surge in price, as bond pricesand bitcoin decline in price, all ahead of the next Fed meeting
  - Zero Hedge, 18 March 2024

• Shares of Microstraegy (a big bitcoin gambler) dropped 15% today, after bitcoin dropped 2% over the weekend to near $67,000, though the shares are still up 138% for the year
  - FX Street, 18 March 2024

• A new surge in power use is threatening climate goals in the USA. A boom in data centers and factories is straining electric grids and propping up fossil fuels.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 18 March 2024

• Federal prosecutors are looking into whether platforms including Facebook facilitate and profit from the illicit sale of drugs in the USA
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 March 2024

• How Zhōngguó could defeat the semiconductor ambitions of Bharat. Bharat is making a play for the semiconductor space -- but fallout fro USA-Zhōngguó tensions, and ample amounts of money available in Zhōngguó, could prevent Bharat's ambiitions.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 March 2024

• A ChatGPT for music is here. Inside Suno, the startup changing everything. Suno wants everyone to be able to produce their own pro-level songs - but what does that mean for artists? [KM: Only one thing - being able to earn less money.]
  - Rolling Stone, 17 March 2024

• Why Taiwan is building a satellite network without Elon Musk. The island democracy urgently needs an internet backup. Mr. Musk's authoritarian control over his Starlink service, which dominates the market, left Taiwan wary.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 March 2024

• Electric transmission buildout could cost Americans trillions of dollars
  - Zero Hedge, 16 March 2024

• The purported threat of TikTok to the national security of the USA has inflated into a hysteria of spy balloon proportions, but the official record tells a different story: intelligence from USA government agencies has produced no evidence that the popular social media site has ever coordinated with the government of Zhōngguó. That fact has not stopped many in Congress and even President Joe Biden from touting legislation that would force the sale of the app, as the TikTok frenzy fills the news pages with empty conjecture and innuendo.
  - The Intercept, 16 March 2024

• What would baning TikTok in the USA accomplish? Absolutely nothing. Facebook is a bigger invader of the privacy of Americans, but no one is passing laws to seize Facebook. The controversy is political theater to help incompetent rich people steal the success of TikTok.
  - Los Angeles Times, 16 March 2024

• Florida man sues General Motors and LexisNexis over sale of his Cadillac driving data. Romeo Chicco's auto insurance rate doubled because of information about his speeding, braking and acceleration, according to his complaint.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 16 March 2024

• Schools lock up cellphones to keep students focused. Educators say phones cause distractions, states are aiming to limit the use of cellphones at school, and the USA is warning they pose mental-health risks for youngsters. [KM: yes, but cellphones companies must get richer].
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 March 2024

• Phony billionaires on Facebook are scamming Americans out of their life savings. A fake Bill Ackman, a bogus Cathie Wood and a false Steve Cohen are among the impersonators luring victims on social media, and their real-life counterparts cannot keep up. [KM: and Facebook doesn't want to spend much of its billions stopping the crimes.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 March 2024

• Shares of online real estate services providers, Compass and Zillow, drop 14% after a jury orders the NAR to pay $418 million in antitrust damages
  - Investopedia, 15 March 2024

• Is generative AI ruining Etsy? A loosening definition of 'handmade' frustrates artists and buyers. Tools like Midjourney make it easy to churn out AI images and list them for rock-bottom prices without disclosures, endangering the livelihoods of the real-life artists who struggle to compete. [KM: yes, but AI companies must get richer].
  - PC Magazine, 15 March 2024

• A pioneering bill to slow the fast fashion industry (they profit while forcing taxpayers to dispose of their crappy products when discarded) gets approval from lower house of France. Next stop the Senate. The bill will introduce stringent measures, including banning advertising for the most inexpensive textiles and imposing an environmental levy on these low-cost products.
  - Associated Press, 15 March 2024

• Shares of HashiCorp soared 13% in extended trading on Friday after Bloomberg reported that the software company has engaged an outside firm to explore interest from potential buyers
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 March 2024

• Laid-off technology workers face "sense of impending doom" with job cuts at highest since dot-com crash. 50,000 people have been fired so far in 2024, after 260,000 people were fired in 2023.
  - Versant's CNBC, 15 March 2024

• $490,000,000 - Apple agrees to pay $490 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that alleged Chief Executive Tim Cook defrauded shareholders by concealing falling demand for iPhones in Zhōngguó
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 15 March 2024

• Why are politicians in Washington trying to ban TikTok (while doing nothing to protect Americans from all forms of privacy invasion such as due to the big tech companies), instead of doing what voters actually want to improve their lives?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 March 2024

• $11,000,000 - Italy fines TikTok $11 million for failing to protect minors
  - Zero Hedge, 14 March 2024

• Shares of Adone plunge 10% on a soft sales forecast, and as a result of paying $1 billion to Figma to abandon the latter's acquisition
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 March 2024

• Amazon and Google quietly lower expectations for generative AI as hype cycle fades.
  - Zero Hedge, 14 March 2024

• Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in Zhōngguó against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 14 March 2024

• The FTC and DOJ think that the ice cream machines of McDonald's should be legal to fix. The agencies asked the US Copyright Office to extend the right to repair to "commercial and industrial equipment".
  - The Verge, 14 March 2024

• 'Real' retail sales tumbled for second straight month in February
  - Zero Hedge, 14 March 2024

• Zhōngguó has 12-times more robots in its workforce than experts predicted.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 14 March 2024

• European lawmakers pass the AI Act, the first comprehensive AI law in the world. The EU law sets out sweeping rules for developers and new restrictions on how the technology can be used.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 March 2024

• Modern workplace technology linked to lower employee well-being, study finds. Who would have thought that AI, robots, and trackers could make employees miserable? [KM: well, at least rich technology companies are richer]
  - TechSpot, 13 March 2024

• Shares of Fisker plunge 40% as investor concern about the ability of Fisker to stay in business intensified. Reports are that Fisker has hired restructuring advisors to work on a potential bankruptcy filing.
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 13 March 2024

• Electric-vehicle startup Fisker prepares for possible bankruptcy filing. The company has struggled with growing its sales amid stagnant demand for electric vehicles in the U.S. and last month issued a going-concern warning.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 March 2024

• As online dating became as easy as swiping a finger across your phone screen, the companies who own apps like Tinder and Bumble became Wall Street darlings. But about a decade later, those platforms are now struggling to live up to expectations, and investors have grown frustrated and eager for something new. Match Group and Bumble -- which make up nearly the entire industry by market share -- have lost more than $40 billion in market value since 2021. They face one critical obstacle: Not enough young people are willing to pay for subscriptions to dating apps -- partly because younger daters are increasingly looking to platforms like Snapchat and TikTok to make connections.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 13 March 2024

• How TikTok was blindsided by a proposed USA law that could ban it. Executives thought they had fended off attacks, but lawmakers and Biden officials were working to force its ban or sale. The House is set to vote Wednesday on the new proposed law.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 March 2024

• Former US Attorney General Loretta Lynch tried to quietly push the Department of Defense to remove Chinese drone maker SZ DJI Technology Co Ltd from a list of Chinese military companies, a damning Reuters report has revealed.
  - Zero Hedge, 12 March 2024

• According to a new analysis of the subscription app economy from mobile subscription toolkit provider RevenueCat, the top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is less than $50.
  - TechCrunch, 12 March 2024

• Shares of CATL rise 14% after news of a joint venture, and a Morgan Stanley. The rally comes as news emerged that CATL is working with Chinese tech company Xiaomi and automaker BAIC on a new factory venture.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 March 2024

• In the first in-depth interview given by a retail CEO about organized theft, Ulta Beauty CEO Dave Kimbell said e-commerce sites are contributing to organized retail crime. "[Online marketplaces] give more scale and more opportunity for people to liquidate this product. ... We should not have an environment where it is possible to steal from one retailer and [have it] end up on any other platform, any other large-scale, mainstream platform.", such as Amazon.
  - Versant's CNBC, 12 March 2024

• The cable and satellite (and fiber) services are not only losing members, but losing more customers each year than the year before, the entire industry losing over 5 million subscribers last year.
  - SpyGlass, 11 March 2024

• Expect another surge in food prices caused by 'dynamic pricing'. Makes it harder for the Fed to reduce interest rates.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 March 2024

• For many years, Trump opposed TikTok and wanting bans on TikTok. But after a campaign donation from the billionaire and substantial owner of TikTok (his share is worth $30 billion), Jeff Yass, to Trump, Trump is now anti-TikTok
  - Zero Hedge, 11 March 2024

• They want to make palm oil in a lab. Without palm trees. Palm oil - it is in your snacks, your soap, pretty much everything. Can these three tech executives help fix things at Xylome, C16 Biosciences and Clean Food Group?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 March 2024

• What a trip: psychedelic medicine company MindMed shares rocket 50% after positive data
  - Zero Hedge, 10 March 2024

• With a cyberattack fix weeks away, healthcare providers strongly criticize the highly-paid management of UnitedHealth Group. Hospitals, doctors and clinics expressed frustration that they will have to wait even longer for reimbursements after hackers paralyzed the largest billing clearinghouse in the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 09 March 2024

• Tech valuations are rich. But the stock market is more likely to resemble 1996, when prices continued to rise, than 2000, when they collapsed, according to Burton Malkiel, the author of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street", writes in a commentary.
  - Barron's, 09 March 2024

• Shares of MercadoLIbre (MELI), the Amazon.com of South America, look like a buy. Investors looking for an alternative to the Magnificent Seven could do worse than this popular online retailer.
  - Barron's, 09 March 2024

• Does Reddit represent the return of the junk stock IPO? In its IPO filing, Reddit reports $90.8 million in losses last year. There is a lie wild projection that Reddit, the social site composed of a massive trove of text-based conversations with 76 million daily users, believes its global market opportunity by 2027 is $1.4 trillion.
  - INC, 08 March 2024

• From pioneer to fallen giant, Part III: how Hewlett Packard's long list of failed acquisitions cost its reputation
  - Zero Hedge, 08 March 2024

• From pioneer to fallen giant, Part II: how Hewlett Packard's long list of failed acquisitions cost its reputation
  - Zero Hedge, 08 March 2024

• From pioneer to fallen giant: how Hewlett Packard's long list of failed acquisitions cost its reputation
  - Zero Hedge, 08 March 2024

• Shares of HelloFresh plummet 42% after the meal-kit giant, based in Berlin, said it expected lower earnings in 2024.
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 March 2024

• Big technology companies in the USA profit from ad spending spree done by big tech companies from Zhōngguó. Temu, Shein, and streaming and gaming apps looking to break into the U.S. market are spending huge sums to get their wares in front of consumers in the USA.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 08 March 2024

• Big technology companies in the USA profit from ad spending spree done by big tech companies from Zhōngguó. Temu, Shein, and streaming and gaming apps looking to break into the U.S. market are spending huge sums to get their wares in front of consumers in the USA.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 March 2024

• Zhōngguó intensifies efforts to "delete America" from its technology. A directive known as Document 79 increases efforts by Zhōngguó to replace U.S. tech with homegrown alternatives.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 March 2024

• The $3.5 billion socialist subsidy being given to Intel (since private investors hold Intel in contempt for producing economic returns). Intel's "secure enclave" project will suck-in nearly 10 percent of the socialist CHIPS Act manufacturing fund that is already stretched thin.
  - The American Prospect, 08 March 2024

• Mexico "still has not seen science" from the USA proving that genetically modified corn is safe. Mexico, the top buyer of US corn, used science to show how GM corn and Glyphosate harm human health. This has given Mexico the authority to ban GM corn for human consumption.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 March 2024

• Shares of Rivian surge 13% as the company reveals new electric vehicle models, and $2.25 billion in cost savings by shifting production from Georgia to Illinois
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 March 2024

• Legal sports betting in the USA - the next addiction crisis. A disease, "gambling addiction", affects an estimated two million adults in the USA each year. [KM: yes, but makes rich gmabling companies richer]
  - The Incidental Economist, 07 March 2024

• The job applicant rejected from being hired because his interviewer was ... an incompetent AI system.
  - The Guardian, 06 March 2024

• A Goldman Sachs trader kind of predicts:: back in 2000 everyone thought the internet would run on Cisco routers at 50% margins... until they didn't
  - Zero Hedge, 06 March 2024

• An engineer at Microsoft warns that the Microsoft's AI tool creates images that are violent and overly sexual, and ignore copyrights
  - Versant's CNBC, 06 March 2024

• An engineer at Microsoft warns that the Microsoft's AI tool creates images that are violent and overly sexual, and ignore copyrights
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 March 2024

• A cyberattack paralyzes the largest health care payment system in the USA, Change Healthcare. The hacking shut down the biggest health care payment system in the nation, causing financial chaos that affected a broad spectrum ranging from large hospitals to single-doctor practices. The attack forced the shutdown of parts of the electronic system operated by Change Healthcare, a sizable unit of UnitedHealth Group, leaving hundreds, if not thousands, of providers without the ability to obtain insurance approval for services ranging from a drug prescription to a mastectomy -- or to be paid for those services. The prolonged effects of the attack have once again exposed the vast interconnected webs of electronic health information and the vulnerability of patient data.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 06 March 2024

• The USA Health and human services department intervenes in Change Healthcare hack crisis. The Federal government says it will consider accelerated Medicare payments on an individual basis, relax prior authorization requirements for struggling healthcare providers.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 March 2024

• The rare earths market experiences significant fluctuations, with prices plunging due to weaker demand and shifts away from Chinese sources, compounded by export bans imposed by Zhōngguó.
  - OilPrice.com, 05 March 2024

• CrowdStrike shares surged as much as 21% in after-hours trading Tuesday after the cybersecurity company reported a beat on the top and bottom lines, plus issued stronger-than-expected guidance for the upcoming quarter and full year.
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 March 2024

• While the market is not yet in bubble territory, technology stocks may already be in a bubble: more stocks with higher P/Es than at the 2000 peak; the household sector is more overweight equities than it was at the Dotcom top.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 March 2024

• Toddlers who are exposed to more screen time have fewer conversations with their parents or caregivers by an array of measures. They say less, hear less and have fewer back-and-forth exchanges with adults compared with children who spend less time in front of screens. Those findings, published on Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, make up one of the first sets of longitudinal evidence to confirm an intuitive reality: Screens are not just linked to higher rates of obesity, depression and hyperactivity among children; they also curb face-to-face interactions at home -- with long-term implications that could be worrisome.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 March 2024

• JPMorgan has AI-driven cashflow management software that has slashed manual work by up to 90% for some of its customers
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 04 March 2024

• Toddlers who are exposed to more screen time have fewer conversations with their parents or caregivers by an array of measures. They say less, hear less and have fewer back-and-forth exchanges with adults compared with children who spend less time in front of screens. creens are not just linked to higher rates of obesity, depression and hyperactivity among children; they also curb face-to-face interactions at home -- with long-term implications that could be worrisome.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 March 2024

• $2,000,000,000 - The European Union has fined Apple $2 billion for preventing Spotify and other music streaming services from informing users of payment options outside its App Store. Apple will appeal, as it doesn't want any government interferring with its authoritarian practices.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 04 March 2024

• The Nikkei stock average rises above 40000 for first time, driven by the AI bubble. The climb was driven by greater corporate earnings and a surge in chip-related stocks, thanks to enthusiasm for beneficiaries of artificial intelligence.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 March 2024

• After weeks of selling, hedge funds scramble to buy the all time high: Goldman Prime. US Macro Products -- Index and ETF combined -- were net bought for the first time in 5 weeks and saw the largest net buying YTD, driven by short covers and long buys (1.6 to 1).
  - Zero Hedge, 03 March 2024

• How bad can it get for the business of Hollywood? It is still recovering from the Covid pandemic, streaming services are not the great hoped-for profit center, and now AI threatens everyone's jobs.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 03 March 2024

• The invisible $1.52 trillion problem: clunky old software. Old code piles up and raises the risk of hacks and other breaches.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 March 2024

• Google faces a threat from AI. It might be time to worry.
  - Barron's, 02 March 2024

• How Apple could finally drive this bull market down. Below $180, if it breaks below $170, it could drop more and drag down the SP500, possible as iPhone sales growth was almost nonexistent in the fourth quarter.
  - Barron's, 02 March 2024

• TurboTax wants to use your tax return to shove ads in your face. You can, and should, say no.
  - Bezos' Washington Post, 01 March 2024

• AI is draining the deserts of viral water resources. One Microsoft project in Arizona will use up to 50 million gallons of water every year. That might be a burden in the best of times. As of 2023, it seemed absurd. The Colorado River, which provides drinking water and hydropower throughout the region, has been dwindling. Farmers have already had to fallow fields, and a community on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix went without tap water for most of the year.
  - The Atlantic, 01 March 2024

• $2,000,000,000 - NASA terminates $2 billion satellite refueling project, after its Inspector General criticized the contractor of the project, Maxar, for poor performance. "NASA and Maxar officials acknowledged that Maxar underestimated the scope and complexity of the work, lacked full understanding of NASA technical requirements, and were deficient in necessary expertise." Why were they awarded the contract?
  - UPI, 01 March 2024

• The TikTok generation turns to sports betting to reduce their student debt. Young men are trying to use ubiquitous online betting to deal with big college loans. [KM: statistically, this will only make rich gambling companies richer]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 March 2024

• How Google lost its way. It used to be in the vanguard of cool in Silicon Valley. Now it is a dinosaur.
  - Business Insider, 29 February 2024

• Wendy's cancels the use of 'surge pricing' after a huge public backlash
  - Zero Hedge, 29 February 2024

• Universal, the world's biggest music company, deploys the 'nuclear option' against TikTok. Universal's showdown with the platform is testing the value of the seconds-long song snippet -- and who has the most power in today's music economy.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 29 February 2024

• Shares of Teleperformance, a call-center company in France, plunge over 25% after a statement by Swedish fintech company Klarna which spoke of a boost to its results from its AI customer service assistant, powered by Open AI. Klarna announced that its AI assistant, powered by OpenAI, is doing the work of 700 full-time agents and has handled 2.3 million conversations.
  - Murdoch's MarketWatch, 28 February 2024

• Shares of Snowflake plummet 23% after beating estimates but giving revenue guidance for 2025 well below expectations
  - Investors Business Daily, 28 February 2024

• News outlets such as newspapers are collapsing as advertisers flock to multi-billion dollar social media platforms, who don't care if societies are democratic or authoritarian. It has major negative implications for society. [KM: but rich social media companies must get richer]
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 28 February 2024

• Shares of Novavax fall 20% as vaccine maker misses quarterly estimates, predicts sluggish 2024 sales
  - Zero Hedge, 28 February 2024

• State television in Zhōngguó airs the first AI-developed cartoon series, as as Sora sets off frenzy for text-to-video generation technology. The 26-episode series, Qianqiu Shisong, which debuted on Monday, features some of the most fabled classical Chinese poetry and their backstories, with each instalment lasting around 7 minutes. AI technology was used in every stage the production process for Qianqiu Shisong, from art design to video generation and post-production -[KM: without having to pay humans.]
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 27 February 2024

• Book review: "White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy" - how technology's 'creative destruction' destroys less-educated, rural communities, who in their rage at the ill-fortune, give their political support to Trump
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 February 2024

• Multi-billion dollar semiconductor manufacturers seek more than $70 billion in federal subsidies paid by taxpayers. Gina Raimondo, the Commerce secretary, said new investments would put the USA on track to produce roughly 20% of the most advanced logic chips in the world by the end of the decade.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 27 February 2024

• Expedia to fire 9% of its people (about 1500 people) amid transformational efforts (i.e., using more AI). The online travel company expects to book pretax charges and cash expenditures of up to $100 million.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 February 2024

• The entry into the USA by Temu, the online marketplace based in Zhōngguó, is a warning flag for Etsy. Temu is taking the USA by storm as Etsy and Wayfair are already struggling to expand their audience.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 February 2024

• Can owners of heavily leveraged Airbnb properties can withstand a prolonged downturn in the short-term rental market, especially those who used stupid amounts of leverage to buy Airbnb properties?
  - Zero Hedge, 26 February 2024

• Crypto rips, Mag7 dips, as super-short-squeeze sends small-caps soaring
  - Zero Hedge, 26 February 2024

• Wendy's to test 'surge pricing' using 'high-tech menu boards' that change in real time, meaning a burger and fries will cost people more during the lunch or dinner rush than slower times of day. According to industry experts, the public will not like this gouging.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 26 February 2024

• Hedge funds are dumping technology stocks, retail is buying
  - Zero Hedge, 26 February 2024

• Shares of Zealand Pharma, based in Denmark, rose 35% on Monday after results showed success in its liver disease treatment survodutide, which is also on trial as a drug to treat obesity, allowing it to compete with Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly
  - Versant's CNBC, 26 February 2024

• A hedge fund manager: Sam Altman's and OpenAI's latest announcement was a panic move to justify a scammy $100 billion valuation. "To justify a $100 billion valuation, you need to convince people that you are going to take a big chunk of a $1 trillion market. And that is either online search, or, or, or, online search."
  - Zero Hedge, 25 February 2024

• From CIA to 'trust & safety': the Silicon Valley-USA intelligence revolving door is bigger than you thought
  - Zero Hedge, 25 February 2024

• Has Starbucks surpassed Amazon as the villain of big labor in New York? New York has stood at the vanguard of progressive workplace legislation. Is Starbucks ignoring the law?
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 25 February 2024

• Gone in 20 seconds: how 'smart keys' have fuelled a new wave of car crime. One London resident watched on CCTV as a thief walked up to his 40,000 Pound car and drove away. Now manufacturers say they are being drawn in to a hi-tech 'arms race' with criminals.
  - The Guardian, 24 February 2024

• Shares of Intuitive Machines crash 31% on Friday, after it reports that its moon lander "tipped over" on touchdown, wiping out the stock gains earlier in the week when it first announced the moon landing
  - Zero Hedge, 24 February 2024

• Goldman Sachs is predicting that today's Nasdaq is not the Nasdaq of the 1999/2000 crash, but the Nasdaq of the 1995 boom in IT spending (now AI spending)
  - Zero Hedge, 24 February 2024

• Reddit has not earned a profit in nearly 20 years, but it just filed to go public and issue stock, stock that won't rise much just on ... earnings
  - Warner Brothers CNN, 24 February 2024

• Tyler Perry halts $800,000,000 studio expansion due to AI advancements. The 'Mea Culpa' director says the new tool from OpenAI has halted his expansion.
  - Murdoch's Fox News, 24 February 2024

• Super Micro Computer can raise tons of money for free, by offering some of its AI-bubbled stock. That is bad news for anyone hoping the Fed feels a need to lower interest rates to help the economy.
  - Barron's, 24 February 2024

• Shares of Intuitive Machines are up 38% in pre-market trading, after its Odysseus lunar lander became the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since the Apollo 17 mission more than 50 years ago
  - Zero Hedge, 23 February 2024

• The vaccine injury compensation program in the USA has a 10-year backlog of claims. It may take more than 10 years for someone injured by a COVID-19 vaccine to receive a decision on whether their claim is eligible for compensation. The program has only 35 employees, the program being much another socialist subsidy for industry (freeing them from buying insurance).
  - Zero Hedge, 23 February 2024

• In this year's presidential election, more people are turning to Instagram for news, even as the platform tries de-emphasizing "political content"
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 23 February 2024

• The new hot climate investment is heat itself. Batteries that store heat can replace fossil fuels for steelmaking and other industrial processes.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 February 2024

• Chief information officers say they are concerned about vendors shifting sales strategies in favor of bigger, pricier software bundles thanks to an uptick in business technology acquisitions
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 23 February 2024

• $16,500,000 - The Federal Trade Commission will order Avast to pay $16.5 million and ban the company from selling the users' web browsing data or licensing it for advertising purposes
  - Bleeping Computer, 22 February 2024

• Shares of Rivian drop 25% to an all-time low, after firing people and a reduction in estimates of future production
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 22 February 2024

• Shares of Carvana rise 18%as the online seller of used-cards predicts stronger-than-expected earnings in the future
  - Investors Business Daily, 22 February 2024

• The earnings 'blowout' of Nvidia sends futures prices soaring in the USA, pushing Nihon and Europe to new record highs
  - Zero Hedge, 22 February 2024

• Nvidia reports that its earnings more than tripled, and profits rose ninefold. Nvidia also predicted that its revenue would more than triple again.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 February 2024

• Nvidia reports that its earnings more than tripled, and profits rose ninefold. Nvidia also predicted that its revenue would more than triple again.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 February 2024

• The lifespan of large appliances is shrinking. A push toward computerization, an increase in the amount of components and flimsier materials have undercut reliability.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 22 February 2024

• In response to the stunning earnings, NVDA stock first dumped - perhaps as the company's guidance missed the whisper number of $25 billion and also disappointed on the gross margin guidance, but then reversed all losses and ended up spiking about 9% after hours. But since option straddles were pricing in a 10% move in either direction, tomorrow a whole lot of put and call buyers will be left very disappointed when they see the value of their options vaporize.
  - Zero Hedge, 21 February 2024

• Futures prices in the USA extended their slide, bucking a strong Asian session with European stocks mixed, ahead of what Goldman trader Scott Rubner called "the most important stock on planet Earth" - that would be Nvidia for anyone who has been living in a cave the past year - reports after the close facing sky-high expectations, and where another Goldman trader, Peter Callahan, said that the tactical debate is whether this print will be a local top or a 'break-out' moment for the stock and for the AI trade (from where he sits, this "feels like consensus is learning more towards the former"). And with options implying the stock may move about 11% in either direction, i.e., a whopping $200BN in market cap may be gained or lost for a company that recently surpassed GOOGL and AMZN in market cap, it's not surprising why the market is on edge.
  - Zero Hedge, 21 February 2024

• The environmental costs of generative AI are soaring -- and mostly secret. First-of-its-kind US bill would address the environmental costs of the technology, but there is a long way to go.
  - Nature, 20 February 2024

• Over the last 10 years, Cathie Woods has lost $14.3 billion of her clients' money
  - Zero Hedge, 20 February 2024

• Shares of Palo Alto, a cybersecurity company, plummet 20%, wiping out all 2024 gains, after slashing revenue guidance amid "spending fatigue"
  - Zero Hedge, 20 February 2024

• Goldman Sachs observes: the stock market has ignored a 'hot' CPI and PPI, has ignored market length, has ignored rising geopolitical tensions, ignored rising interests, and keeps on increasing. f the magnificent 7 are the 'market' and interest rates don't matter for the magnificent 7, then does that in part explain why the market has held up so well in last 12-18 months?
  - Zero Hedge, 20 February 2024

• Shares of Intuitive Machines, a lunar exploration company, surge 50% to trade about its SPAC debut price, as its first moon mission procedes smoothly
  - Versant's CNBC, 20 February 2024

• Shares of Intel rise 5.3% following a report that the Biden administration intends to award the chipmaker over $10 billion in socialist subsidies. The socialist subsidy package is expected to be a combination of socialistically-subsidized loans and direct socialist subsidies totaling upwards of $10 billion.
  - Zero Hedge, 20 February 2024

• The Biden administration announced a $1.5 billion socialist subsidy to the New York-based chipmaker GlobalFoundries, one of the first sizable grants from a government program aimed at revitalizing semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. As part of the plan to bolster GlobalFoundries, the administration will also make available another $1.6 billion in federal loans (there are no big banks in New York) with socialistically subsidized interest rates.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 February 2024

• European Union regulators on Monday opened an investigation into TikTok over potential breaches of online content rules aimed at protecting children, saying the "addictive design" of the popular social media platform risked exposing young people to harmful content. This addictive design includes algorithmic systems that "may stimulate behavioral addictions" or "create so-called 'rabbit hole' effects", where a user is pulled further and further into the content of TikTok.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 20 February 2024

• Tech leaders fled San Francisco during the pandemic. Now, they are coming back. Founders and investors who ditched the Bay Area for Miami and elsewhere are returning to a boom in artificial intelligence and an abundance of tech talent.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 February 2024

• A psychiatrist tried to quit gambling. Betting apps kept her addicted. While Kavita Fischer sank deeper into six-figure losses, companies kept her going with bonus credits, VIP treatment and data tracking. [KM: yes, the tactics od drug dealers to keep people addicted]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 February 2024

• The boom in metals for batteries for electric vehicles is turning to bust. Producers of lithium and nickel have paused projects after prices collapsed, and as momentum slows for electric-vehicle sales.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 February 2024

• How CNBC built an entire financial channel that mainly losses people money, causing investors who rely on its advice to underperform the stock market
  - Slate, 19 February 2024

• The antitrust enforcers aimed at Big Tech. Then came the backlash. South Korea pledged to protect its online platforms from marketplace giants, but lobbyists are crying foul play spending tons of money to fight the government of South Koreaa's efforts to protect smaller businesses.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 February 2024

• Shares of Nintendo fall nearly 6% after report that the Switch 2 will be delayed until 2025
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 February 2024

• Shares of Sony plunged about 7% last week, after it cut its sales forecast for its flagship PlayStation 5 console for the fiscal year. Analysts are also questioning why Sony's gaming margin is not higher despite higher-margin products like digital sales of games and its PS Plus subscription service.
  - Versant's CNBC, 19 February 2024

• Incompetent hiring tools controlled by AI may be filtering out the best job applicants. And, given that companies have saved money by replacing human HR staff with AI -- which can process piles of resumes in a fraction of the time -- firms may have little motivation to interrogate kinks in the machine.
  - BBC, 16 February 2024

• A poorly tested (decreases profits) AI system falsely accuses and fines an AI expert of using phone while driving. Tim Hansenn was charged by the Dutch police, thanks to their AI smart camera Monocam, of using his phone while driving. However, he was just scratching his head.
  - Jerusalem Post, 16 February 2024

• Shares of Temenos, a software company in Switzerland, open down 6% on Friday after closing over 28% down on Thursday, after short-selling activist Hindenburg Research alleged that presence of manipulated earnings and major accounting irregularities at Tenemos.
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 February 2024

• Restaurant software company Toast will fire about 550 people (about 10% of its employees), despite reporting better-than-expected results, but growth continued to slow after an acceleration in 2021
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 February 2024

• $1,800,000,000 - Customs agents in Hong Kong arrest 7 people linked to a crime syndicate that laundered $1.8 billion using 'stooge' bank accounts and shell companies. The syndicate is linked to a mobile app scam and two jewellery companies in Bharat, according to customs agents.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 16 February 2024

• Companies in Nihon offering semiconductor manufacturing tools are doing a booming business
  - Economist, 15 February 2024

• "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently AI plateau"
  - Zero Hedge, 15 February 2024

• Many consumers are addicted to "buy no, pay later" plans, another sign of consumer stress. One scam: if you miss a payment, interest likely accrues from the initial purchase. At the same time, credit card debt at a record high is another sign of financial stress, So are delinquencies.
  - Zero Hedge, 15 February 2024

• Terrorists are paying for check marks on Twitter/X, report says. The report shows that Twitter/X has accepted payments for subscriptions from entities barred from doing business in the United States, a potential violation of sanctions.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 15 February 2024

• New York City sues social-media companies for youth mental-health effects. Mayor Eric Adams announced that the suit against Meta Platforms, Alphabet, Snap and ByteDance was looking to force the companies to change their practices.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 February 2024

• Silicon Valley needs to accept that insurance is boring. Venture capitalists have too often backed flashy 'insurtech' startups with unworkable growth expectations.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 15 February 2024

• At least 123 websites controlled by Zhōngguó are disguised as local news outlets in 30 countries to disseminate pro-Beijing information
  - Zero Hedge, 14 February 2024

• Shares of Cisco are down 6% after-hours. Where is the capital expenditure boom for AI? The world's biggest network provider, Cisco, slashes jobs as tech-spend sinks. Cisco will be firing over 4,000 people (about 5% ofits employees).
  - Zero Hedge, 14 February 2024

• Shares of Cisco are down 6% after-hours. The world's biggest network provider, Cisco, slashes jobs as tech-spend sinks. Cisco will be firing over 4,000 people (about 5% ofits employees).
  - Versant's CNBC, 14 February 2024

• We'll leave it to others to decide if Michael "Big Short" Burry is one of the biggest one hit wonders of his generation, but last quarter, when the Big Short liquidated his big S&P and QQQ put shorts at a loss, and when he doubled down with a short on semiconductor stocks instead in the form of SOXX puts, we said that his latest trade "may have been an even bigger flop than Burry's ill-timed bet against the SPY and QQQ." We can now confirm that Burry's latest trade was indeed was a giant flop, because as one look at a chart of the Philly Semiconductor index shows, it's been a one way train for semis (primarily NVDA) higher since Burry's bearish bet.
  - Zero Hedge, 14 February 2024

• Instacart, the grocery delivery company, is firing about 250 people (about 7% of its employees) amid rising competition and food costs
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 14 February 2024

• Shares of Lyft rise 67% after hours, because computer trading algorithms didn't understand a statistic (5% versus 0.5%) in the quarterly report was mistake. Shares plunged shortly thereafter.
  - Zero Hedge, 13 February 2024

• "Magnificent sentiment": for the first time in years, investors no longer expect a recession as everyone piles into Mag7 stocks
  - Zero Hedge, 13 February 2024

• Activist short seller Hindenburg Research released a new report this morning on Renovaro BioSciences, the second go-round for the former Enochian BioSciences. The stock is down about 28% early in the session. The report, called "Renovaro BioSciences: A Worthless AI Shell Game With A Murderous Magician Past", highlights a questionable merger between Renovaro, fresh off a name change after its former scientific founder was jailed for murder-for-hire allegations, and an "AI" company that the short seller alleges is little more than an empty shell.
  - Zero Hedge, 13 February 2024

• The city of Chicago will not renew its ShotSpotter contract and plans to stop using the controversial gunshot detection system later this year. The system has been criticized for inaccuracy, racial bias and law enforcement misuse. Since 2018, the city has wasted $49 million on ShotSpotter.
  - Associated Press, 13 February 2024

• Shares of ASML, the biggest stock in Europe, flash-crash down 7% overnight. After trading is halting and reopened, the stock price was back to unchanged from yesterday. Accidently bad trade, or options unwinding?
  - Zero Hedge, 13 February 2024

• The negative impacts of discount shopping companies such as Temu and Shein: they cater to a culture of instant gratification and overindulgence. The allure of cheap clothes blinds many to the environmental toll: excessive water usage, toxic dyes, microplastics, and mountains of discarded textiles. The fashion industry is responsible for approximately 10% of global carbon emissions, with textile dyeing being the second largest polluter of clean water globally. All of this is a high price to pay for products that end up in landfills just as quickly as they end up in our shopping carts. Beyond the visible environmental impact lies another hidden health danger: chemicals. Reports reveal elevated levels of lead, PFAS, and phthalates in fast fashion items.
  - Washington Examiner, 13 February 2024

• AI is starting to threaten white-collar jobs, and workers in only a few industries are immune. Jobs up and down the corporate food chain have been cut in the most recent cascade of layoffs. Leaders say the fast-evolving technology means many may never return.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 February 2024

• Shares of CymaBay Therapeutics jump nearly 25%, after the clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company agreed to be acquired by Gilead Sciences for $4.3 billion
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 February 2024

• CATL, BYD and other battery and car makers in Zhōngguó unite efforts to achieve breakthroughs with solid-state battery technology
  - Nikkei Asia, 12 February 2024

• 0DTE options traders pump-and-dump momentum stocks as "parabolic" tech hits an airpocket
  - Zero Hedge, 12 February 2024

• $4,000,000,000 - HP is seeking as much as $4 billion from Autonomy's former bosses following a London judge's finding that they fraudulently boosted the value of Autonomy before its sale. Founder Mike Lynch was found to have inflated Autonomy's revenue alongside his chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain and induced HP to buy the firm for $11 billion, according to a London civil judgment in 2022.
  - Bloomberg, 12 February 2024

• PODCAST: The unhinged pro-MAGA tweets of Elon Musk expose the dark-side of the Big Tech oligarchy. A new class of tech barons hopes to create a flourishing information space for "red-pilled" far-right ideologies, the billionaire Musk is their model leader
  - New Republic, 12 February 2024

• AI is regarded as the most impactful technology shaping the future of trading, according to 61% of 4,010 institutional traders surveyed by JPMorgan
  - CoinTelegraph, 12 February 2024

• Why three media giants made a 'hail Mary' bet on sports streaming. Disney, Fox and Warner's venture to bundle live sports content -- the latest hit to traditional cable packages -- needs to cover high costs and keep leagues on board.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 February 2024

• Despite nearly a decade of work, over $3 billion in investments, and a great many messianic pronouncements, it is increasingly clear that a broader cultivated meat (grown in laboratories and factories) revolution was never a real solution, and definitely not within the few years we have left to avert climate catastrophe
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 February 2024

• Despite nearly a decade of work, over $3 billion in investments, and a great many messianic pronouncements, it is increasingly clear that a broader cultivated meat (grown in laboratories and factories) revolution was never a real solution, and definitely not within the few years we have left to avert climate catastrophe
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 February 2024

• The spend, spend, spend strategy behind the rapid ascent of Temu in the USA. The rise of Temu, based in Zhōngguó, as one of most popular places to shop in the USA is powered by its ultracheap goods and billions of dollars of advertising, including in the Super Bowl on Sunday. Of course, that is billions that they do not have to spend on environmental remediation for all of the waste they induce.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 10 February 2024

• Cisco Systems to fire "thousands", adding to the 'firehouse' of firings by technology companies since the beginning of 2024
  - Zero Hedge, 09 February 2024

• Grammarly is firing 230 employees as parts of its efforts to exploit AI
  - TechCrunch, 09 February 2024

• Sam Altman seeks trillions of dollars to reshape business of chips and AI. The OpenAI chief executive is pursuing investors including the UAE for a project possibly requiring as much as $7 trillion. [KM: A billion people will have to lose their jobs for this investment to be profitable.]
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 February 2024

• The newest competitors for Amazon are stepping into its territory - literally. Shein and TikTok are expanding in the 'backyard' of Amazon and recruiting its employees.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 09 February 2024

• How technology firms made a cryptocurrency-boosting book an NYT best seller by gaming the system. Motherboard found that firms linked to a16z and general partner Chris Dixon bought numerous copies of his new book promoting cryptocurrencies, which became an NYT Best Seller. Worse, the author fails to identify a single blockchain project that has successfully provided a non-speculative service at any kind of scale.
  - Vice Motherboard, 08 February 2024

• Shares of Arm skyrocket 48%, after its very positive earnings report, resulting in Arm having a forward earnings multiple that is more than double that of Nvidia. Arm is now worth $116 billion.
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 February 2024

• Shares of SoftBank rose about 15% on an earnings beat, nuch due to its partial ownership of Arm.
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 February 2024

• Shares of Cloudflare 21% on earnings beat as the company wins larger deals for its web security and content distribution network services
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 February 2024

• AI cannot be used to deny health care coverage, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) clarified in a memo sent to all Medicare Advantage insurers.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 08 February 2024

• One of the favorite tactics of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, non-compete agreements to control workers, is under attack. The FTC is aiming to ban non-compete agreements which could have major implications for how Wall Street and other top employers keep leverage over employees.
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 February 2024

• Shares of Disney open 8% higher after earnings beat ($1.22 versus predicted $0.99), Disney announced a 50% higher demand, and investing $1.5 billion in Epic Games, maker of the blockbuster Fortnite
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 February 2024

• Uber posts first annual profit since its IPO.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 February 2024

• The push to embrace precision agriculture is transforming food production in the USA. It is also turning farmers into software-bound tenants of OEMs, who are losing their ability to repaid their own vehicles, warns Kevin Kenney. But is anyone listening of this huge threat to small farmers? The scale and high capital costs of precision agriculture technology tend to favor large, corporate producers over smaller farms. Then there are the systemic risks to U.S. agriculture of an increasingly connected and consolidated agriculture sector, with a few major OEMs having the ability to remotely control and manage vital equipment on millions of farms in the USA.
  - Fight To Repair, 07 February 2024

• Over 30 years, Big Tech destroyed and obliterated the media industry. Replacing the media was an army of fleece-clad adult toddlers, also mostly white men -- some things are enduring -- whose knowledge of media and history and, most important, what it took to keep a democracy humming was dangerously thin. The liquidation of democracy to build bigger houses in Silicon Valley.
  - New York Magazine, 07 February 2024

• The menace of wellness influencers. Wellness influencers are often also conspiracy theorists, as both mindsets rely upon the same underlying methods, motivation, and narrative.
  - Science-Based Medicine, 07 February 2024

• Shares of pay-TV service Fubo drop 23%. Afterwards, Fubo issued a statement blasting the new sports streaming venture involving Disney, Fox Corporation and Warner Brothers. Discovery. "This joint venture spotlights a concerning trend where an alliance with significant market share, reportedly controlling 60-85% of all sports content, could dictate market terms in a manner that may not serve the broader interests of consumers."
  - Deadkube, 07 February 2024

• A congressional investigation has determined that five American venture capital firms invested more than $1 billion in the semiconductor industry of Zhōngguó since 2001, fueling the growth of a sector that the United States government now regards as a national security threat. Funds supplied by the five firms -- GGV Capital, GSR Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Walden International -- went to more than 150 Chinese companies in Funds supplied by the five GGV Capital, GSR Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Walden went to more than 150 companies in Zhōngguó. The investments included roughly $180 million that went to companies in Zhōngguó that the committee said directly or indirectly supported the military of Zhōngguó.
  - NY Times, 07 February 2024
• Nearly half of the most powerful investors of venture capital in the USA are quietly investing billions in technology startups in Zhōngguó, rather than their competitors in the USA -- taking in massive returns at the expense of American national security of the USA. These investors include cott Shleifer of Tiger Global Management; Anton Levy of General Atlantic; Marc Stad of Dragoneer Investment Group; Neil Shen and Steven Ji of Sequoia China; Richard Liu and Fisher Zhang of 5Y Capital; and Hurst Lin of DCM.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 07 February 2024

• Shares of Roblox rise 12% after company beats estimates and issues strong guidance
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 February 2024

• Shares of Alibaba decline 4% after revenue miss, $25 billion boost to buyback plan
  - Versant's CNBC, 07 February 2024

• Shares of Snap plunge 30%, after missing Wall Street estimates for quarterly revenue on Tuesday, as the Snapchat owner continued to struggle to compete against larger rivals (Facebook, Google) for digital advertising revenue.
  - Thomson's Reuters, 06 February 2024

• Market just flashed the biggest divergence since the Black Monday crash in 1987. The SP500 closed 1.3% higher on Friday thanks to a rally in just two companie s- Meta and Amazon.com - while fewer than 40% of stocks on the NYSE traded up, creating the biggest breadth divergence since Black Monday.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 February 2024

• Stocks fell Monday as Treasury Bond yields spiked higher on concerns that the Federal Reserve may not cut interest rates as much as expected as the 'addicts' on Wall Street hoped. Dow down nearly 1%, SP500 down 0.5%, Nasdaq down 0.6%.
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 February 2024

• 10-year Treasury Bond yields surge a second day to 4.17% as interest rate cut chances get pushed further back
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 February 2024

• Snapchat's parent company, Snap, to fire 10% of the people it employes worldwide, about 500 people fired. It fired 20% of its people in 2022.
  - Versant's CNBC, 05 February 2024

• The new "Online Safety Act" in the UK brands the publication of "false information" a criminal offense punishable by up to a year in prison. But all of mainstream media is exempt from the law. Mainstream media can safely "knowingly publish false information with intent to cause non-trivial harm", which if people do, they get sent to jail.
  - Zero Hedge, 04 February 2024

• The world needs love. Hallmark is cashing in. When more people are watching the Hallmark Channel than CNN, you know you have reached a new level of interpersonal isolation thanks to billion-dollar misanthropic social media companies.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 February 2024

• A group of antitrsut lawsuits accuse large landlords of price-fixing the market rate of rent in the USA using RealPage. One complaint filed by Washington D.C's Attorney General alleges 14 landlords in the district are sharing competitively sensitive data through RealPage, a real estate software provider. They allege that landlords share competitively sensitive data through RealPage, which then sets artificially high rents on a key slice of the local rental market.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 04 February 2024

• Just before going public, companies price stock options at steep discounts for executives -- and take steps to obscure them, a new research paper finds.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 February 2024

• Shares of Paytm, once the hottest startup in Bharat offering digital payments technology, crash 36% in two days, extending a plunge that has wiped 77% off its value since it went public in the biggest IPO in 2021 in Bharat.
  - Newhouse CNN, 02 February 2024

• Universal Music Group withdraws access to its songs from TikTok. Universal published a fiery open letter accusing TikTok of offering unsatisfactory payment for music, and of allowing its platform to be "flooded with A.I.-generated recordings" that diluted the royalty pool for real, human musicians.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 02 February 2024

• Universal Music Group withdraws access to its songs from TikTok. Universal published a fiery open letter accusing TikTok of offering unsatisfactory payment for music, and of allowing its platform to be "flooded with A.I.-generated recordings" that diluted the royalty pool for real, human musicians.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 February 2024

• Intel delays $20 billion project in Ohio, citing slow semiconductor chip market. Construction on two factories now is slated to be finished in late 2026 as the company also waits for government socialist subsidies.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 February 2024

• $151,500,000 - Palo Alto Networks must pay Centripetal $151.5 million, as decided by a jury in a patent infringement lawsuit
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 February 2024

• The FCC to declare that voices generated by AI for use in robocalls will be illegal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 01 February 2024

• Shares of Amazon rise 10% in after hours trading, after beating earnings estimates despite some weakness in AWS revenues
  - Zero Hedge, 01 February 2024

• Shares of Peloton plummet 24% as the fitness company gives a dismal outlook, warning investors it is still months away from growing sales or turning a profit.
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 February 2024

• Shares of Apple drop 4% after-hours, after it beat estimates for revenue and earnings, but reported a 13% decline in sales in Zhōngguó, one of its most important markets.
  - Versant's CNBC, 01 February 2024

• "Your product is killing people": Big Tech leaders are denounced over child safety. Senators criticized the chief executives of Meta, TikTok, Snap, X and Discord for not spending enough of their billions to prevent child sexual abuse online, amid rising fears over how the platforms affect youths.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 February 2024

• Breaking the law and barely surviving with 'gig' jobs: inside the cash-based migrant economy wreaking havoc on tax revenues for New York City.
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 01 February 2024

• $59,000,000 - EBay to pay $59 million in settlement over pill pre
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 01 February 2024

• Stocks, bond yields, and gold decline in price after Fed Chair Powell makes it very clear - no immediate interest rate reductions, while assailing the market bubbling of AI
  - Zero Hedge, 31 January 2024

• The Fed signals interest rate reductions are possible but not imminent as it holds rates steady. The cenbnk{USA} bank abandons formal guidance that had kept hikes on the table since last raising rates in July.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 31 January 2024

• $6,000,000,000 - The gross mismanagement of genetics company 23andMe, as it destroys $6 billion of shareholder value down to nearly $0, with Nasdaq threatening to de-list its stock
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 January 2024

• Samsung posts weakest earnings in over a decade despite chip recovery. The South Korean tech giant's net profit fell 73% in the fourth quarter, leading to weak earnings for 2023.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 31 January 2024

• The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism. Silicon Valley has its own ascendant political ideology, to allow it to steal as much money as possible like other authoritarians.
  - Zero Hedge, 30 January 2024

• Shares of Google drop 4% after it reports less ad revenue and operating income than expected
  - Zero Hedge, 30 January 2024

• Shares of Microsoft drop 1.5% despite beating earnings estimates
  - Zero Hedge, 30 January 2024

• Shares of Adtalem, an education company, plummet 20% after being targeted by activist short-seller Safkhet
  - Zero Hedge, 30 January 2024

• Shares of Apple drop 1.5% after analyst predicts a 15% decline in iPhone shipments
  - Zero Hedge, 30 January 2024

• Shares of iRobot crash 30% to 2009 lows, the company fires 31% of its people, after regulators force termination of its acquisition by Amazon
  - Zero Hedge, 29 January 2024

• Two years after Biden's $53 billion socialist CHIPS act did nothing at all to boost the US semiconductor industry - which has instead enjoyed a hope and hype-driven supercycle thanks to the general public's relentless and erroneous fawning over chatbots and AI which, if successful, will leave hundreds of millions unemployed - here comes the president with the inevitable double down. The Biden administration will be awarding billions of dollars in new subsidies to Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor and other top semiconductor companies to help build new factories.
  - Zero Hedge, 28 January 2024

• Unusual IPO slump makes a rebound harder to predict. The lengthy slump in initial public offerings in the USA is at odds with their historical patterns of activity, indicating the IPO market might be suffering from an extended hangover after a boom three years ago, according to a recent study.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 27 January 2024

• Microsoft is currently the most authoritarian company in the world (i.e., the most valuable). Now it has to prove it can stay the most authoritarian by using AI to profit from millions of people losing their jobs.
  - Murdoch's Barron's, 27 January 2024

• Independent review blames General Motor's Cruise robotaxi mess on "poor leadership". "The reasons for Cruise's failings in this instance are numerous: poor leadership, mistakes in judgment, lack of coordination."
  - Zero Hedge, 26 January 2024

• The National Security Agency buys certain logs related to domestic internet activities of Americans from commercial data brokers, with legal warrants, according to an unclassified letter by the agency
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 January 2024

• The Federal Trade Commission launches an inquiry into AI deals by tech giants. The agency plans to scrutinize Microsoft, Amazon and Google for their investments in the A.I. start-ups OpenAI and Anthropic.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 26 January 2024

• Charter Communications received $3 billion in subsidies to provide broadband Internet access for low-income people in the USA
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 January 2024

• The Samsung rival taking an early lead in the race for AI memory chips. Sales of SK Hynix's memory chips used by AI have boomed -- but it faces a major fight with its rival in South Korea.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 26 January 2024

• "I am teaching again after 20 years away. The technology (learning management systems) is pure absurdity. Returning to university teaching after almost two decades, Annalee Newitz finds they have become the Rip Van Winkle of pedagogy and tries to get to grips with the terrible learning technology.
  - New Scientist, 24 January 2024

• Inside Patternz, a global phone spy tool monitoring billions of people. A wide-spanning investigation by 404 Media reveals more details about a secretive spy tool that can tracks billions of phone profiles through the advertising industry called Patternz.
  - 404 Media, 24 January 2024

• Dotcom history 'rhymes' for Nasdaq as Fed cuts loom. Will it crash as in the 2008 crash, or the dot-com crash?
  - Zero Hedge, 24 January 2024

• The tech stock euphoria sparked by shares of ASML surging to an all-time high on a 'flood' of orders from Zhōngguó, well, there is just one problem. Zhōngguó can't buy from ASML anymore.
  - Zero Hedge, 24 January 2024

• Zhōngguó appears to backpedal from a crackdown on video games. A proposal to tighten restrictions on online video games disappeared from a regulator's website, weeks after the plan prompted a sell-off in tech stocks.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 24 January 2024

• Shares of EBay rise 3% after it annoucnes plans to fire about 1000 people, about 9% of its employees
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 January 2024

• Shares of Netflix rise 6% after subscriber growth blows away estimates
  - Zero Hedge, 23 January 2024

• The Los Angeles Times plunges into "choas" as brutal layoffs loom and senior editors call it quits. "We have a billionaire who doesn't understand media and thinks he can cut his way to success.".
  - Newhouse CNN, 23 January 2024

• Stock markets are up, despite a lousy economy, for only one reason: the Federal Reserve is socialistically manipulating the markets for rich people
  - Zero Hedge, 23 January 2024

• Shares of Alibaba rise 6% in pre-market trading, after Alibaba co-founders Jack Ma and Joe Tsai have bought more than $200 million worth of Alibaba's shares between them in recent months, according to a regulatory filing and The New York Times
  - Versant's CNBC, 23 January 2024

• No films made in the USA ranked among the 10 highest grossing in Zhōngguó last year as viewers who once flocked to foreign blockbusters continued to disappear.
  - Zero Hedge, 23 January 2024

• The Federal Trade Commission ruled in a final order and opinion Monday that TurboTax, the popular tax filing software, engaged in deceptive advertising and banned the company from advertising its services for free unless it is free for all customers.
  - Newhouse CNN, 22 January 2024

• One explanation for the big increase in the price of technology stocks in December: a one-time huge buying of semiconductor equipment by companies in Zhōngguó before new export restrictions are enforced
  - Zero Hedge, 22 January 2024

• Futures enter blow-off top in tech-led frenzy, as the Plunge Protection Team in Zhōngguó steps in again
  - Zero Hedge, 22 January 2024

• The Biden administration on Friday issued guidance that makes much of the country eligible for socialist tax credits intended to offset the cost of installing electric vehicle chargers. Consumers and businesses can claim the credit for charging equipment installed for public or private use at homes or on business properties.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 22 January 2024

• New restrictions on the exports of rare earth metals from Zhōngguó aim to solidify Zhōngguó's dominance in rare earth magnet production and help the country catch up with Nihon in terms of producing high performance magnets
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 21 January 2024

• South Korea will spend over $400 billion to expand its semiconductor industry and to reduce/eliminate political coercion from the USA to decrease sales to Zhōngguó. The government of the USA is intensifying efforts to use its technological advantage to pressure the government of South Korea to jointly establish a semiconductor supply chain that excludes Zhōngguó, limiting semiconductor exports from South Korea to Zhōngguó, which in the end will only result in South Korea losing the significant market share in Zhōngguó.
  - Global Times, 21 January 2024

• Several US lawmakers have again invoked so-called security concerns to launch a probe into the Swedish-Swiss multinational engineering giant ABB Group's operations in Zhōngguó. Experts noted on Sunday that it is another typical case of US lawmakers politicizing normal business activities.
  - Global Times, 21 January 2024

• Another Hollywood strike? The union for musicians is "prepared to do whatever it takes" for AI protections and streaming residuals. The union is also seeking AI protection, increased wages, health care improvements, improved working conditions and residual payments for streaming content.
  - Newhouse CNN, 21 January 2024

• An AI customer service chatbot for international delivery service DPD used profanity, told a joke, wrote poetry about how useless it was, and criticized the company as the "worst delivery firm in the world", after prompting by a frustrated customer.
  - Time, 20 January 2024

• After a sugar high of free money, these billion-dollar technologies need a nap. Once overhyped and overpromised, these major areas of tech investment are finally facing reality. The contraction and disinvestment may only be just beginning.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 20 January 2024

• Over half - 57% - of Internet content is already made up of poor-quality AI-generated and translated content - AI-generated slime. These sentences on the internet have been translated into two or more other languages. The poor quality and staggering scale of these translations suggest that large language model (LLM) -powered AI models were used to both create and translate the material.
  - Futurism, 19 January 2024

• Wayfair is firing 1,650 people, amounting to 13% of its global workforce, as the online home goods retailer struggled to rebound following its success amid pandemic lockdowns.
  - Newhouse CNN, 19 January 2024

• Schaeffler, an automotive and industrial parts maker (mostly bearings), showed up to a Las Vegas tech showcase in January as an electric vehicle battery outsider with a unique prototype being hyped by a company official as the next industry pace-setter with their solid-state battery technology
  - The Cool Down, 19 January 2024

• Google is getting worse as it loses its fight against search engine spam. Aggressive SEO tactics are ruining search results on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, a team of researchers in Deutschland says.
  - Business Insider, 19 January 2024

• Why Google search results have "gotten worse". Search engines are 'flooded' with 'garbage' content, say experts. Significant amounts of search engine results were now spam.
  - The Week, 19 January 2024

• Goldman Sachs predicts "battery price deflation" through 2030
  - Zero Hedge, 19 January 2024

• The economic duo of the current AI bubble and government spending (borrowing trillions more) are keeping the recession in the USA delayed from occurring
  - Zero Hedge, 19 January 2024

• Unionized staffers at the Los Angeles Times are launching a one-day strike Friday -- the first walkout in the 142-year of the LA Times -- in response to "imminent" layoffs, as much as 20% of the 500-person newsroom. The walkout comes at a turbulent time for the storied newspaper. Two weeks ago, executive editor Kevin Merida resigned over billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong's alleged editorial interference, among other issues.
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 19 January 2024

• The entire staff of Sports Illustrated is being fired. The decision comes after the Authentic Brands Group, the licensing group that bought Sports Illustrated for $110 million from Meredith five years ago, terminated the agreement it holds with The Arena Group to publish the magazine in print and digital, per Front Office Sports.
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 19 January 2024

• Billionaires wanted to save the news industry. They are losing a fortune. Time magazine, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times -- owned by Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong -- are still losing money.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 January 2024

• Flush with $2 billion in subsidies from the USA government, new factories in the USA face a familiar challenge. Worries are growing in Washington that a flood of products from Zhōngguó could put new American investments in clean energy and high-tech factories at risk. Impose more taxes/tariffs on products from Zhōngguó to fight Zhōngguó's more successful industrial policy.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 19 January 2024

• The rare earths mine that will not need a single shovel. Two South African gypsum waste piles could be a billion dollar bonanza of critical materials. The piles are being processed by Rainbow Rare Earths, taking advantage of how processing of the gypsum increases the concentration of rare-earth metals.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 19 January 2024

• Reknowned tech journalist, Casey Newton, to remove his newsletter from Twitter/X and Substack, because to him, both companies have declined to engage in basic content moderation, allowing hate and other forms of toxic content to swell on their respective platforms.
  - Newhouse CNN, 18 January 2024

• Plug Power (PLUG) disclosed in an SEC filing Wednesday night that it will sell up to $1 billion in shares, sending PLUG stock plunging. The fuel-cell company entered into an at-market sales agreement with B. Riley. PLUG stock plunged 11.5% to 2.42 Thursday, the lowest since 2019. Shares had also tumbled 10% on Wednesday. That left Plug Power with a market valuation of just $1.66 billion.
  - Investor's Business Daily, 18 January 2024

• Shares of iRobot plunge 33% on report the EU's competition watchdog plans to block Amazon's planned $1.7 billion acquisition of Roomba maker iRobot
  - Versant's CNBC, 18 January 2024

• Spotify dominates audio streaming (with a 30& market share), but its failed business model still lacks profits. Spotify has expanded beyond music to stay ahead but has struggled to make money.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 18 January 2024

• Teachers say addictive mobile phones make their lives a living hell -- so one school in western Massachusetts banned them, replacing them with dumnb phones mostly useful for telephone calls. The result? "Most everyone agrees, however, that the school is better off without these hell/addictive devices. There are fewer interruptions during class, more meaningful interactions around campus, and less time spent on screens."
  - The Guardian, 17 January 2024

• A groundbreaking study from Columbia University reports that children learn better reading from paper, not reading from screens. For 'deeper reading' among children aged 10-12, paper is better than screens. This confirms decades of research on the superiority of reading comprehension and retention on paper. Screen use is more profitable for billion-dollar companies and their billionaire shareholders, of course.
  - The Guardian, 17 January 2024

• The EU has proposed sweeping changes within the music streaming industry to promote smaller artists and make sure underpaid performers are being fairly compensated. The European Parliament is also calling for outdated "pre-digital" royalty rates to be revised, noting that some schemes force performers to accept little to no revenue in exchange for greater exposure.
  - The Verge, 17 January 2024

• How universities bend over backwards to accommodate food delivery robots that delivery much in the way of unhealthy food to students. Which profits the universities, as food services has become a profit center for universities and their contractors.
  - 404 Media, 17 January 2024

• Fujitsu yesterday apologized for its role in the British Post Office scandal, acknowledging that defective accounting software sold by its ICL subsidiary contributed to the wrongful prosecutions of hundreds of postal employees. The prosecutions have been labeleld "the worst miscarriage of justice in British history". Re the BBC: "more than 900 sub-postmasters and postmistresses were prosecuted for theft and false accounting after money appeared to be missing from their branches, but the prosecutions were based on evidence from faulty Horizon software [from Fujitsu]. Some sub-postmasters wrongfully went to prison, many were financially ruined. Some have since died.".
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 17 January 2024

• Synopsys strikes $35 billion deal to buy Ansys
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 17 January 2024

• Shares of AMD jump 7% and head for highest close since 2021 on AI chip demand
  - Versant's CNBC, 16 January 2024

• A state lawmaker from Silicon Valley wants to crack down on AI-generated depictions of child sexual abuse as tech companies face growing scrutiny nationally over their (costly lack of) moderation of illicit content [which earns them billions]
  - Axel Springer's Politico, 16 January 2024

• Renting clothes was supposed to be the future of fashion, but then shoppers got bored. Rent the Runway and Stitch Fix are adapting their business models to retain consumers as needs and tastes have changed.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 January 2024

• Robots are looking better to Detroit as labor costs rise. Expensive new union contracts are sparking more interest in assembly-line automation for vehicles, but risks exist.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 January 2024

• The monopoly controlled by ASML for the world's most ophisticated chip-making equipment has turned it into both an investor darling and a geopolitical battleground.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 January 2024

• Northvolt, one of the most valuable battery startups in the world, is is raising $3.4 billion in debt from the European Union and a group of banks including JPMorgan Chase, to increase battery production at a factory in northern Sweden for customers sucha as Volkswagen. This investment will accelerate a race to build more batteries outside Zhōngguó and take advantage of a tidal wave of clean-energy subsidies.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 16 January 2024

• The self-checkout nightmare may finally be ending. Self-checkout is a failed experiment, and a growing number of stores are backpedaling on these cursed machines.
  - Gizmodo, 15 January 2024

• The spectacular failure of self-checkout technology. Turns out that this excuse to fire people doesn't work. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines. The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it is worth.
  - BBC, 15 January 2024

• $1,100,000,000 - Uber is closer its drug alcohol delivery service, Drizaly, three years after it wasted $1.1 billion to buy Drizly
  - BBC, 15 January 2024

• New restrictions on independent contractors could destroy gig work that many rich Internet companies based their failed business models
  - Zero Hedge, 14 January 2024

• Their songs were stolen by phantom artists. They could not get them back. Bad Dog, a group from the District of Colombia, was forced to take a crash course in streaming fraud, a shadowy realm that costs musicians $2 billion a year because streaming services are too inept and too rich to spend money to fight the theft.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 14 January 2024

• Huawei will be the next to challenge Tesla in autonomous driving
  - Zero Hedge, 13 January 2024

• The tech sector is pouring billions of dollars into AI. But it keeps firing its human employees.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 13 January 2024

• Barclays predicts that the output of semiconductor chips in Zhōngguó will double in the the next five years
  - Zero Hedge, 12 January 2024

• More Silicon Valley theft: the AI industry has a battle-tested plan to keep using our content without paying for it
  - Los Angeles Times, 12 January 2024

• OpenAI quietly and cowardly deletes its ban on using ChatGPT for "military and warfare".
  - The Intercept, 12 January 2024

• Hindenburg Research founder Nathan Anderson warned senior leaders at accounting firm Deloitte 11 times - 11 warnings - in five months about "massive fraud" at Nigerian agri-fintech Tingo Group, yet Deloitte did nothing. "Once again, despite the overwhelming evidence, Deloitte continues to stand behind the company's crystal-clear lies in one of the worst displays of auditor gross negligence we have witnessed."
  - Zero Hedge, 12 January 2024

• RISC technology - the next front in the semiconductor trade war between the USA and Zhōngguó. The chip technology called RISC-V has become critical to the ambitions of Zhōngguó. Washington is debating whether and how to limit the technology.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 12 January 2024

• After a decade and a half of seeing the economy of the USA pull ahead thanks to its outsize technology sector, politicians in Europe are desperate to fight back. But America also keeps pulling ahead in the business of financing the investments required.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 12 January 2024

• Illusory generalizability of clinical prediction models. Machine learning models routinely achieve perfect performance in one dataset even when that dataset is a large international multisite clinical trial. However, when that exact model was tested in truly independent clinical trials, performance fell to chance levels.
  - Science, 11 January 2024

• The FCC questions carmakers about unwanted tracking via their apps. The Federal Communications Commission is concerned about abusive partners using connected car apps to harass and track their victims.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 January 2024

• Your vehicle is spying on you, and now they are going to start installing ChatGPT in new Volkswgen models. Be careful what you say while you are driving your vehicle, because you are being watched.
  - Zero Hedge, 11 January 2024

• $3,000,000 - EBay to pay $3 million after employees sent live spiders and cockroaches to Ina and David Steiner, who run their own e-commerce trade publication called EcommerceBytes -- and who were threatened to stop reporting on the eBay
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 11 January 2024

• ESPN operated 13-year scheme using fake names to get Emmy awards for top talent
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 11 January 2024

• Two Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday expressed concerns about ex-Wall Street financiers overseeing the Commerce Department's distribution of $39 billion in socialist subsidies to the semiconductor industry, saying the staffing raised questions about the creation and abuse of a revolving door between government and industry.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 11 January 2024

• Growth investor TA Associates is joining backers of financial technology company Computer Services, betting on the growing importance of digital products and support for community banks
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 11 January 2024

• Scammy AI-generated book rewrites are flooding Amazon. Authors keep finding what appear to be AI-generated imitations and summaries of their books on Amazon. There's little the authors can do to rein in the rip-offs.
  - Newhouse Wired, 10 January 2024

• The concentration in the Nasdaq index of a few highly-valued Big Tech companies, now around 50% of total capitalization is greater than at the height of the dot-com bubble/crash - which Bank of America warns predicts another market crash
  - Zero Hedge, 10 January 2024

• $235,000,000+ - SAP, the $192 billion German enterprise tech company, will pay chump change of more than $230 million to settle investigations into worldwide "recidivist" foreign bribery practices. Federal prosecutors accused SAP of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to allegedly bribe government officials in Indonesia and South Africa. It is the second time SAP has settled bribery allegations with U.S. regulators.
  - Zero Hedge, 10 January 2024

• Shares of iRobot plunge 19% on report that Amazon will not offer concessions to the EU in a bid to clear its $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot
  - Versant's CNBC, 10 January 2024

• Feared failure of Peregrine mission to the moon could put the USA behind Zhōngguó in the moon race, says space policy expert. The USA should test commercial technologies first before sending them into space with expensive instrument payload, says Professor Namrata Goswami.
  - Alibaba's South China Morning Post, 10 January 2024

• Zhōngguó dominates the supply of the critical minerals list of the USA. Currently there are 50 entries on this list and the USA Geological Survey estimates that Zhōngguó is the leading producer for 30 of them.
  - Zero Hedge, 09 January 2024

• Thousands of software engineers say the job market is getting much worse. 9,388 engineers polled by Motherboard and Blind said AI will lead to less hiring. Only 6% were confident they'd get another job with the same pay.
  - Vice Motherboard, 09 January 2024

• HP has used its "Dynamic Security" firmware updates to "create a monopoly" of replacement printer ink cartridges, a lawsuit filed against the company on January 5 claims. The lawsuit, which is seeking class-action certification, represents yet another form of litigation against HP for bricking printers when they try to use ink that doesn't bear an HP logo.
  - Condé Nast's Ars Technica, 09 January 2024

• Shares of Match (owner of Tinder and Match.com) jump 11% in pre-market trrading, on a report that Elliot Investment has invested $1 billion
  - Zero Hedge, 09 January 2024

• Dopamine drug traffickers Facebook, Twitter/X and Google sue the state of Ohio over a law that requires the consent of parents for children under the age of 16 to open accounts with the drug traffickers - their profits more important than the mental health of children
  - Murdoch's New York Post, 09 January 2024

• Bitcoin and Big-Tech burst higher amid bloodbath in Boeing and black gold (oil)
  - Zero Hedge, 08 January 2024

• Unity Software to fire 1800 people, about 25% of its staff. In May, it fired 600 people. In September, Unity announced a pricing change that upset numerous developers who rely on the company's technology to create video games.
  - Versant's CNBC, 08 January 2024

• As Duolingo use more AI for translation, human contractors lose their jobs. After a worker said Duolingo is conducting layoffs, the company confirms that 10% of its contractors have been fired, partially due to AI.
  - PC Magazine, 08 January 2024

• Politicians in Washington are interested in a socialist industrialist policy to undermine the dominance of Zhōngguó in technology for older-generation semiconductor chips
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 08 January 2024

• What is going to happen to our society as AI and robots take most of our jobs? If robots cost $3/hour to use, who will want to be employed at $3/hour? [KM: to make rich AI companies richer]
  - Economic Collapse, 07 January 2024

• Hedge funds and long-onlies resume dumping/selling of technology stocks at a furious pace. US equities were heavily net sold by hedge funds into the start of 2024... Info Tech was net sold for a 3rd straight week (7 of the last 8) and saw the largest notional net selling since mid-October.
  - Zero Hedge, 07 January 2024

• Drugs like LSD have shown potential for treating psychiatric disorders. Wall Street and big pharma are not convinced enought to invest.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 06 January 2024

• The boost in economic productivity due to new AI is a "little overhyped". Why the new AI will not rescue the economy.
  - Murdoch's Barron's, 06 January 2024

• Nearly two-thirds of the top Instagram accounts for fitness routines did not contain credible information. Much of the the fitness information on TikTok is not backed by science or posted by fitness professionals.
  - Newhouse CNN, 05 January 2024

• The amount of waste piling up from solar panels and wind turbine blades can be measured in tons. And the industry is just getting started. "Without a strategy for their end-of-life management, so-called green technologies like solar panels, electric vehicle batteries, and windmills will ultimately place the same unintended burdens on our planet and economy as traditional commodities.", and thus require the same socialist subsidies for waste disposal.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 January 2024

• An analysis of the newest laptop from Huawei reveals semiconductor chips made in Taiwan, not mainland Zhōngguó. The teardown stands at odds with the claim that Huawei's chipmaking partner, SMIC, had achieved potential advancements in fabrication technique.
  - Zero Hedge, 05 January 2024

• The Biden administration on Thursday announced plans to provide $162 million in federal socialist subsidies to Microchip Technology, an Arizona-based semiconductor company that supplies the automotive, defense and other industries. The socialist subsidies will help Microchip Technology expand its facilities in Oregon and Colorado.
  - Ochs-Sulzberger's New York Times, 05 January 2024

• Google is finally eliminating cookies. Advertisers still are not ready.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 January 2024

• Most people still pick up prescriptions at their local drugstore. More and more insurance companies want to just mail medications -- and are working on their apps to make that happen.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 05 January 2024

• Shares of Mobileye plunged as much as 25% today, after the company warned that customer order numbers would fall short of the year-ago quarter. Mobileye is majority owned by Intel and develops autonomous driving technology for major automakers.
  - Versant's CNBC, 04 January 2024

• A startup in South Africa, Renergen, bought exploration rights to some grassy fields in South Africa (the Free State province) for $1. Renergen had unwittingly struck gold. Today, the company says it has proven helium reserves of more than 7 billion cubic feet at the Virginia Gas Project that could be worth more than $4 billion, and potentially up to $12 billion when including further possible reserves.
  - Newhouse CNN, 04 January 2024

• Zhōngguó removes an official regulating videogames, after his new initiatives triggered a market rout. Senior party regulator Feng Shixin is told to step down after proposals spooked investors and wiped $60 billion off game-company stocks.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 04 January 2024

• Why is Brazil a hotspot for financial crime? Its success as a fintech hub is mostly to blame.
  - Economist, 04 January 2024

• Streaming service cancellations rise as 'streamflation' bites. Did streaming companies get too greedy in 2023 when raising prices? Customer defections across streaming services topped 6.3% in November, up from 5.1% a year earlier.
  - Zero Hedge, 03 January 2024

• Impacts are undocumented for half of the mining areas in the world. As the race to extract minerals and metals for clean-energy technologies accelerates, researchers must take more steps to map and study mines globally.
  - Nature, 03 January 2024

• Pay television lost about 900,000 subscribers in Q3 of 2023 - a worst-ever third quarter for the industry. That poor result left US pay-TV shrinking at a record pace of 7.3%.
  - Light Reading, 03 January 2024

• $900,000,000 - Starbucks is sued for allegedly defrauding customers of over $900 million through its debit card program
  - Fast Company, 03 January 2024

• Politicians argue that subsidies given to Intuit would be better spent funding a free alternative to TurboTax. In the fiscal year ending July 2023, Intuit receive $106 million in federal research and experimentation subsidies (about 4% of its R&D spending).
  - Bloomberg, 03 January 2024

• Americans are canceling more of their streaming services. Hulu, Netflix and other streamers are turning to bundles, discounts and ad-supported plans as customer defections rise.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 03 January 2024

• Bitcoin flash crashes $4000 at market open, before recovering to price levels from the previous week
  - Zero Hedge, 03 January 2024

• Shares of ASML decline 2% in premarket trading, as Netherlands blocks some chip-making machine exports to Zhōngguó
  - Zero Hedge, 02 January 2024

• Shares of semiconductor equipment maker ASML Holding NV are trading lower Tuesday morning on a Bloomberg report that President Biden has requested the company to halt semiconductor chip shipments to Zhōngguó. The cancellation could compromise an estimated 50% of the business sales of ASML.
  - Apollo Global's Yahoo Finance, 02 January 2024

• Diamond prices are going to collapse, despite the powerful cartel organized by DeBeers, for one reason - industrial diamonds grown in laboratories. Lab-grown diamonds look spectacular - enough for the FTC to rule that they can be called 'diamonds'. And now - now - they are 40% cheaper than regular diamonds. But they can be 60 percent lower or even as much as 90 percent lower. And this is with the market just now starting to mature.
  - Zero Hedge, 02 January 2024

• Shares of Moderna rise 15% after Oppenheimer says Covid shot maker could launch more products over next two years
  - Versant's CNBC, 02 January 2024

• Why every western automaker is visiting this remote part of South Africa. The region is home to the largest of just a handful of refiners of battery-grade manganese located outside Zhōngguó.
  - Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (locked), 02 January 2024