DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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In 1961, New York City commenced a new urban plan that included massive downzoning. To give a sense of how much urban growth has been stunted compared to previous trends, before the downzoning, Manhattan had 7 Congressional districts. Today it has 2.5.

Mamdani is going them one better. He’s chasing all of the productive people out of the city; by the end of his term, New York will have about a million freeloaders and politicians (but I repeat myself) and not much else.

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In our cells, cytoskeletal proteins called tubulins snap onto each other to form soaring tubular arches and rails, capable of spanning entire cells, growing at one end while they fall apart at the other. These tubes, known as microtubules, form and bloom and decay in a dance that controls many aspects of eukaryotic life. They handle our chromosomes and help cells divide. They carry machines and act as tracks for motors. They push and pull cellular membranes, turning them into useful shapes.

Now, researchers have found that these proteins are in those mysterious cells. What are they doing there? And could they be part of what, so long ago, helped our ancestors strike out in new directions?

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By now, the hand-drawn feature was supposed to be dead. It’s been 25 years or more since the talk started.

Back in 1995, Toy Story proved that CG features could be great — and massively successful. Just a few years later, Pixar’s president (that is, Steve Jobs) was boasting that hand-drawn animation was outmoded. “The characters we make are far more expressive, so we tell better stories,” he said.3

The workers who created Pixar’s movies didn’t necessarily feel that way. “My first love is really 2D animation, so I’d like to think it’s not dead. And I don’t think it is,” said Pete Docter in 2001. He argued that it has its own strengths, techniques that “will never work in CG.” The studio’s Doug Sweetland agreed: “people didn’t stop painting” with the invention of photography, he noted.4

They made good points. But Hollywood is a strange business. Certain decisions get made based on the buzzwords or slogans going around the corporate offices that day. If it sounds good, and it appears to help the bottom line, even a myth can become common sense.

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A recent post from Daniel Lacalle, “How Keynesians Got The US Economy Wrong Again,” exposed the widening gap between John Maynard Keynes’ economic theory and reality. Despite the confident forecasts of leading Keynesian economists, the U.S. economy in 2025 continues to defy expectations. The Federal Reserve’s tightening cycle failed to trigger the widely predicted “hard landing,” and growth has proven more resilient. Simultaneously, inflation remains somewhat sticky, but still declining, and the economy refuses to follow the neat, linear pathways that textbook models suggest.

This latest embarrassment for Keynes’ orthodoxy is part of a much larger story. The failures aren’t isolated miscalculations but the predictable result of a flawed framework that policymakers have clung to for decades. Keynesian economics didn’t just “get it wrong” in 2025, but has repeatedly failed to deliver on its promises for over forty years. And the consequences are becoming impossible to ignore.

At its core, Keynesian economics is deceptively simple. When demand for the private sector falls, the government should borrow and spend to fill the gap. The idea is that temporary fiscal stimulus injections will smooth business cycles, reduce unemployment, and quickly return the economy to full capacity.

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Today we will pour one out for the vaunted technical interview process, which is on its last leg. And we’ll talk a little about what’s replacing it.

This post has been almost 35 years in the making; that’s how long I have been conducting technical interviews. And for a few of those decades, I also worked to try to improve the process itself. I’ve had to care a lot about it, because it’s so broken.

It turns out interviewing was broken long before I learned the trade, and despite the many attempts to band-aid it, it’s still broken today. It has managed to survive in spite of that. But it is finally dying on its own. People are a bit unclear on what’s next, so we’ll talk about some of our options.

But it’s not an easy path I bring you, no silver bullet. Remember that, grasshopper, when you get to the end and come back to yell at me.

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I once had a job interview for a backend position. Their stack was Node.js, MySQL, nothing exotic. The interviewer asked: “If you have an array containing a million entries, how would you sort the data by name?”

My immediate thought was: If you have a JavaScript array with a million entries, you’re certainly doing something wrong.

The interviewer continued: “There are multiple fields that you should be able to sort by.”

This felt like a trick question. Surely the right answer was to explain why you shouldn’t be sorting millions of records in JavaScript. Pagination, database indexing, server-side filtering. So I said exactly that.

…

My crime? Prioritizing real-world efficiency over theatrical scale. The interviewer didn’t see a practical engineer, he saw a candidate who “lacked vision.”

I wish I had known this when I was interviewing for jobs. It would have saved me a lot of grief.

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Over the last half-billion years, squid, octopuses and their kin have evolved much like a fireworks display, with long, anticipatory pauses interspersed with intense, explosive changes. The many-armed diversity of cephalopods is the result of the evolutionary rubber hitting the road right after lineages split into new species, and precious little of their evolution has been the slow accumulation of gradual change.

They aren’t alone. Sudden accelerations spring from the crooks of branches in evolutionary trees, across many scales of life — seemingly wherever there’s a branching system of inherited modifications — in a dynamic not examined in traditional evolutionary models.

That’s the perspective emerging from a new mathematical framework published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that describes the pace of evolutionary change. The new model, part of a roughly 50-year-long reimagining of evolution’s tempo, is rooted in the concept of punctuated equilibrium, which was introduced by the paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in 1972.

Never trust a ‘scientific truth’ that is less than a hundred years old. And never trust anything said by Dr Fauci at all.

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Researchers at the University of Vermont have found a new way to understand language, challenging a major assumption in psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that has guided research for more than 70 years.

Their study, published in Science Advances, presents “ousiometrics,” a quantitative approach to studying essential meaning. The work suggests that language is not organized mainly around emotion, but around a deeper pattern shaped by power, danger, and order.

The central finding is striking: across language, humans consistently lean toward safety.

Never trust any ‘scientific truth’ that is less than a hundred years old. And never trust anything said by Dr Fauci at all.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

This sprawling ancient metropolis in the jungle of Ecuador has revealed a unique form of urbanism found only in the Amazon. Sofia Quaglia visits the site for the story of this mysterious civilisation.

Of course, whenever a Narrative Media ‘journalist’ claims to be giving you The True Story, you ought to be especially on the lookout for The Agenda.

Naturally, being an instance of FemBot Journalism, it can’t start with anything except a Charming Anecdote before getting to the actual thing you came to read.

But persist—you may find an actual fact in the least likely location.

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Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz has ruled that companies in Delaware will be able to vote in elections just like people.

This is especially wacky for Delaware.

As per the US Census Bureau, the estimated human population of Delaware is just over 1 million.

But there are over 2 million corporations headquartered in the state, which means there are far more companies in Delaware than there are people.

According to Bloomberg Law, the ruling came up because the town of Fenwick Island was already letting corporations vote in its municipal elections (they own most of the property, after all).

The ACLU thought letting companies vote as if they were human beings might drown out the real people who actually live in the city of Fenwick Island, so they sued.

You can’t make this shit up.

The Washington Poop, paper of record for the Deep State.

Democratic state leaders around the country have an unusual strategy to stymie President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion settlement fund for people who claim they were wrongly investigated by the government.

Their plan: Tax the payouts at 100 percent.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has endorsed the idea, saying, “It’s an action we look forward to taking.” State legislators in New York and Wisconsin are crafting bills on the topic. And Democratic candidates are rallying behind the tactic in blue states.

Simple remedy: Don’t live in a Blue state. (Ask me a hard one.)

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The departure of more than 10,000 federal lawyers has left some agencies without sufficient staff and has boosted the ranks of state attorneys general offices and advocacy group

Raise your hand if you think that the Federal government needs more lawyers.

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When authorities tell you to be afraid of a virus, your mind can make symptoms real, even when no pathogen exists. This is not conspiracy theory; it’s documented science, and it has been weaponized against the public for decades. The nocebo effect — the evil twin of the placebo — is the key to understanding how pandemics are manufactured as psychological operations. The word “nocebo” means “I will harm” in Latin, and that’s exactly what this phenomenon does: it turns negative expectations into real physical harm.

The idea that a suggestion can make you sick is as old as medicine itself, yet it has been deliberately ignored by the scientific establishment because it threatens the entire foundation of the infectious disease model. Research on the nocebo effect in the context of COVID-19 shows that the pandemic produced a “nocebodemic effect” characterized by mass negative interpretation of health services and medical treatments. When combined with the fear narrative pumped out by governments and media, this creates a perfect storm of psychogenic illness that requires no actual virus to produce symptoms. The institutions that profit from sickness have learned to weaponize this effect on a scale never seen before.

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The ultimate claim to victimhood is the claim that a group of people are “refugees” from mass persecution or “genocide.” The political left covets this victim status more than anything else because, within first world liberal societies, refugees have immediate political capital and access to easy money. Within every leftist narrative there is an agenda for power and a life without adult responsibility.

It is perhaps ironic that thousands of progressive activists and LGBT advocates are leaving red states over imaginary oppression after they spent years attacking conservatives for escaping blue states over very real medical tyranny. At least conservatives never called themselves “refugees.”

Leftists specifically believe their rights are being violated in red states because conservative governments won’t allow them to mutilate their children with hormone therapy and sex change surgeries. This nightmare trend, which is increasingly proven by science to have a detrimental effect on the minds and health of the people who undergo gender therapies, is still heavily protected in leftist havens like Seattle.

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Needless to say, this version of “Christian” is not one that any of the Apostles would recognize.

For at least a decade the progressive movement has been obsessed with infiltrating every aspect of American life and culture, even going so far as co-opting Christian churches in an attempt to claim them as “safe spaces” for woke ideology. This might sound odd to those who grew up in the devoutly atheist era of liberalism, but those days are long gone and seem quaint in comparison to today’s cavalcade of circus freaks.

Well, despite their crushing defeat in 2024 the parade of unhinged woke Democrats has not abated. In fact, it seems to be getting worse. Numerous democratic socialists are running for office in blue states and cities and some are unseating more centrist Democrat incumbents. The party is being overrun with far-left fanatics, a predictable outcome when one accepts the fact that leftists never admit they are wrong and always double down.

A prime example, maybe the most egregious example, is James Talarico – A Democrat candidates for US Senate in Texas. Talarico is a former middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian who has served in the Texas House of Representatives since 2018. Talarico has ties to an NGO called Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE), which coaches potential civic leaders in far-left ideology.

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German remigration activist Maximilian Märkl, who was arrested by federal police on Friday as he prepared to board a flight to Portugal and forbidden to leave the country, defied the travel ban and was greeted as a hero when he arrived at the Remigration Summit in Porto after 22 hours of driving across Europe.

“It was a little European adventure,” Märkl said in an interview with alternative TV channel AUF1, adding that the drive through Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal reminded him of “just how beautiful our homeland is and how much it’s worth fighting for.”

While expecting legal consequences upon his return to Germany, the spokesman for Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland, said he’s counting on alternative media and the organization’s support network to stand behind him.

I would refuse to remain in a country that did that sort of shit.

Fortunately, America is not that bad … yet.

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In a small workshop in northern France, in Montreuil-aux-Lions, a very special kind of thread has been woven for seven generations: the silk threads of Maison Declercq, master trimmers, whose creations enable the restoration of some of the finest fabrics and pieces of furniture in the world.

Their story touches me particularly deeply, as I grew up between Saint-Étienne, the capital of ribbon and trimmings, and Lyon, the capital of silk, where the most prestigious historic silk houses, such as Prelle or Tassinari et Châtel, still thrive today. Even as a child, I never tired of admiring the incredible wooden looms invented by the craftsmen of my homeland, impressive cathedrals of thread that gave birth to a thousand-and-one wonders in shimmering colours. Tassels, rosettes, ribbons, tiebacks: all these seemingly useless trinkets, yet they once elegantly adorned a delicate bergère chair where Queen Marie-Antoinette used to rest, or a sumptuous curtain drawn by Empress Eugénie. The Declercq family hails from the North, yet shares the same heritage and the same expertise.

There are artisan Houses that do not merely produce objects but weave “the thread of history.” Houses where every gesture seems to defy the brutality of the centuries, where the craftsman’s hand extends that of his ancestors in a stubborn fidelity to beauty. The Declercq workshop, an artistic trimmings maker since 1852, belongs to that category of French companies that the whole world envies us for.

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Christians in Finland are having a hard time of it lately. On the heels of the Finnish Supreme Court convicting MP Päivi Räsänen of “hate speech” over a booklet on the biblical view on homosexuality, now the country is going after mentions of God in songs sung at school graduations.

The Finnish Discrimination and Equality Board has fined the city of Espoo for repeatedly discriminating against the same student by exposing him to Christian content in songs traditionally performed at Christmas and end-of-year celebrations in spring. The city was fined €10,000 and ordered to pay the student an additional €2,500 in compensation.

Parents of the student said in their complaint that they had not been informed ahead of time or given the opportunity to withdraw their student from the events.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

t has never been a great time to be an infantryman. But today’s conditions are especially pitiable. In the “kill zone” imposed by both sides’ drones in eastern Ukraine, the risk of finding yourself inside a lethal video game is omnipresent. In February Ukrainian troops trying to join the small number of their comrades still inside Myrnohrad, a town in Donetsk, knew that Russian drones operated by well-hidden pilots would make it impossible to do so in vehicles. They had to infiltrate gingerly through the forests. It could take weeks. They might not get out for months.

The after-effects might last years. Soldiers returned from the front keep their windows covered and lights dimmed even when hundreds of kilometres outside the zone. Trapped in what psychologists speak of as hypervigilance and hyperarousal, the sound of a drone can trigger fear and a feeling of helplessness. They glance up as they walk.

As the battle for Myrnohrad was grinding on, American and Israeli jets taking part in the other great-power war of the moment were bombarding Iran at will. Their pilots had everything they needed to pound, assess and pound again, all the sensors the world’s most advanced military forces could bring to bear—on-board infrared and radar, back-up from drones nearby and radar farther off, satellite oversight and more besides. Israel hacked traffic cameras in Tehran to track Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, as it closed in to kill him.

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Repellents are central to personal protection and to reducing transmission of mosquito-borne diseases. Although substantial effort has been devoted to identifying the sensory and molecular pathways underlying repellent detection, the diversity of reported modes of action has hindered the development of a unified framework. It is generally assumed that insects respond to repellents in a fixed, aversive manner. However, an unexplored possibility is how plastic the innate meaning of repellents may be. We present experiments testing whether the innate response of Aedes aegypti to DEET (the gold-standard repellent) can be shifted from aversion to attraction. First, we identified and validated an appetitive behavioural response in mosquitoes equivalent to PER conditioning in flies and bees: the biting attempt response (BAR). Next, we trained individual mosquitoes to associate DEET with a blood meal using Pavlovian conditioning. We then examined whether mosquitoes trained with blood as a positive reinforcer would display the BAR when presented with DEET alone or on host skin. Finally, we trained females to associate DEET with sugar and tested their subsequent response to DEET alone. Across all experiments, trained mosquitoes showed a reversal in the valence of DEET, shifting from innate avoidance to a learned appetitive response. These results demonstrate that experience can render DEET attractive by establishing associations with two rewarding contexts: vertebrate blood feeding and plant sugar feeding. We discuss the implications of this learned attraction for understanding repellent mechanisms and for designing strategies to improve personal protection.

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In the excellent Discworld series the character Lord Vetinari has a clock in his waiting room which is designed to tick irregularly in order to make his visitor feel ill at ease. Inspired by a post featured on Hackaday I decided to build my own version of this clock with a simple and easy to make design.

Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.

US tech billionaire Peter Thiel has temporarily moved his family to Buenos Aires, drawn by the libertarian ideology and regulation-busting agenda of Argentina’s President Javier Milei.
Thiel, the founder of data intelligence group Palantir, plans to spend roughly three months in Argentina initially and has enrolled his children in a local private school, said two people familiar with his plans.

Since arriving in Buenos Aires in April, Thiel has attended a Superclásico football match between the city’s two biggest teams and spent a Saturday at a local chess club, placing third in a tournament. Thiel told the club’s surprised young players he hoped to return, according to one member.

Go Where You’re Treated Best.

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An American aircraft fired a Hellfire missile into a cargo ship’s engine room on Friday, disabling the vessel after it tried to break the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. Central Command said on Saturday that the military took action against the Gambia-flagged M/V Lian Star after it tried sailing through the Gulf of Oman towards an Iranian port on May 29.

It’s the fifth time since early April that U.S. forces have directly fired on a ship to disable it as part of enforcing the blockade. The U.S. and Iran have maintained dual and competing blockades on the Strait of Hormuz, a major route for oil, gas and other important chemicals, for several weeks, and the status of transit through the strait has been a point of contention between the two countries.

American forces issued more than 20 warnings to the merchant ship, saying it was violating the blockade.

“A U.S. aircraft disabled the vessel by firing a Hellfire missile into the ship’s engine room after Lian Star’s crew failed to comply,” CENTCOM said in its statement. “The ship is no longer transiting to Iran.”

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape,
You walk onto the lawn,
You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Don….

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Racing through dinner cleanup after a long day? Your dishwasher sits empty while you scrub plates by hand, joining millions of Americans quietly abandoning an appliance once considered essential. Despite smarter features and energy improvements, dishwashers are losing their grip on daily routines across the country.

Federal efficiency standards transformed dishwashers into marathon cleaners. Modern machines take 2.5 to 4 hours per cycle—a far cry from the quick turnarounds families actually need. The Department of Energy’s push for water conservation limits new models to 5 gallons per cycle, with proposals dropping that to 3.2 gallons by 2027. You get cleaner dishes eventually, but “eventually” doesn’t work when kids need their lunch containers ready for tomorrow morning.

Once again, government screws up everything it touches.

New York Post.

Five people were killed and 44 others were injured when a non-English speaking bus driver from Staten Island smashed into stopped traffic along I-95 in Virginia on Friday morning, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

Jing S. Dong, a Chinese native who obtained US citizenship, was allegedly driving the motorcoach from New York City to Charlotte, NC, when it struck a Chevrolet Suburban in Stafford County, near Quantico, just after 2:30 a.m.

The crash sparked a chain reaction involving at least 6 vehicles, officials said. Traffic had slowed down for a work zone on the highway at the time of the crash.

Babylon Bee.

Democrats have forcefully condemned Republicans for going so low as to play videos of Senate candidate James Talarico saying things.

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The absence of shame as a constraint. This is the component hardest for the credentialed class to model, because the credentialed class is constituted by shame. The credentialed class is the class of people who have internalized the institutional consequences of saying the wrong thing, and who have organized their public speech to avoid those consequences. Trump did not come up through any of those institutions. He came up in New York real estate and tabloid culture, both of which are environments where shame is a vulnerability rather than a discipline, and where the operators who succeed are the ones who have learned to act without it. He says things the credentialed class would be unable to say, not because the things are necessarily wrong, but because the credentialed class has been trained to feel an autonomic flinch before the words leave the mouth. Trump does not have the flinch.

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Mehek Cooke, senior national security and legal analyst for the Daily Signal, said that recent anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in New Jersey are part of a broader pattern of organized agitation aimed at undermining law enforcement and President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda.

Appearing Thursday on NewsNation’s “Katie Pavlich Tonight,” Cooke responded to video of protesters outside an immigrant detention facility who blocked a trucker’s exit route. She said the confrontation revealed the growing divide between political activists and hardworking Americans.

“I think it’s frightening and it’s a pattern,” Cooke said, pointing first to the Black Lives Matter riots where cities completely shut down because of rioters before mentioning sanctuary city policies. She said current anti-ICE protests are “a direct violation of our law.”

Cooke argued there is a clear distinction between peaceful protest and conduct that obstructs law enforcement and prevents ordinary Americans from doing their jobs.

“There’s one thing about peaceful protest, but these individuals are obstructing justice,” Cooke said of the viral video of the truck driver admonishing protesters. “Look at that man. He’s a working man. Aren’t Democrats supposed to stand for working people?”

Cooke argued the truck driver in the video became a symbol of broader public frustration.

The American Mind.

Writing in 1833, Justice Joseph Story, one of the greatest jurists of the early republic, warned against a dangerously exaggerated conception of the freedom of the press. “There is,” Story observed in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, “a good deal of loose reasoning on the subject of the liberty of the press, as if its inviolability were constitutionally such, that, like the king of England, it could do no wrong, and was free from every inquiry, and afforded a sanctuary for every abuse; that, in short, it implied a despotic sovereignty to do every sort of wrong, without the slightest accountability to private or public justice.” This idea, Story held, “is too extravagant to be held by any sound constitutional lawyer.”

Story’s warning is as relevant today as it was when it was written almost 200 years ago. Much too often, the contemporary press is not content with the equal constitutional rights shared by all Americans. Instead, its members frequently assert special privileges that are not based on the Constitution. In some cases, they even claim a prerogative to do things that would land any ordinary American in serious legal trouble. This problem is illustrated by the recent remarks of A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, at an event sponsored by Yale Law School.

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Looks like another “Summer of Love” is setting up for the progressively virtuous city of Seattle. The weather’s improving and the bullets are flying. It’s not exactly what Irving Berlin had in mind when he wrote, Nothing but blue skies from now on. On the other hand, if you inhabit Bluesky, the leftist social media platform, your attitude about Seattle’s current crime wave is likely, nothing to see here.

Residents of Seattle’s Aurora Avenue corridor are particularly upset after a recent gun battle between, presumably, rival gang members. They fired as many as forty rounds at each other from opposite sides of Aurora Avenue so it must have been a pretty serious beef. And this is how beefs are commonly settled in lightly policed, modern progressive cities where they just don’t want to have to put any more black and brown people in prison. So the bullets fly and innocent bystanders best get out of the way.

Remember the last “Summer of Love?” Why, it seems like only yesterday. 2020 it was, in those heady days and weeks following the demise of George Floyd when, despite draconian COVID restrictions, people were nonetheless given carte blanche access to the streets to gather in vast numbers to “protest,” as well as to vandalize, topple statues, burn, loot and assault, all in the name of a useless thug who wasn’t white. And it was then that Seattle’s famed autonomous zone was established, first known as CHAZ, then shortly after as CHOP.

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Criminals get caught when they brag. They seemingly cannot help it.

All these “hidden camera” interviews where government workers or politicians let the cat out of the bag to a perfect stranger over a drink (with perhaps some sexual attraction thrown in for good measure) are pretty much the same thing. Look at all the leaks to journalists by people whose job it is to keep a secret, yet are somehow incapable of doing it.

Or even consider Hunter Biden, who blabbed endlessly to prostitutes. Wow. Using beautiful women to get powerful men to talk is a technique as old as time. What is astonishing is that it works.

Why?

My wife is fond of a program that uses bodycam footage of traffic stops to document people talking themselves into jail.

John C. Wright explains it all to you.

And now, a word from the Patriarchy:

In all of life, men go out into the wilderness, fight and built, and found a new settlement. This can be either literal wilderness or figurative. Starting a business, starting a political movement, springs from a similar male conquering impulse.

Then women and old men come into the frontier, after it is conquered and safe, and they make it nice and civilized and set up lace curtains in the windows, doilies on the chairs, flower gardens.

The woman and old men move into the settlement, built a church, start a school, elect a sheriff, close the opium dens and gambling dives, drive away the saloon girls, streetwalkers, and the roughnecks, and make the streets safe for women and children to walk at night.

In business, unfortunately, this means women flock to the HR department and try to make the competitive dog-eat-dog atmosphere of capitalism into something socialist, childproof, and sterile, and safe.

And in entertainment, the female impulse is to prevent entertainment, sex and violence, at all costs, but instead to use stories teach and lecture, as every mother must to do to every small child.

And when this happens, the men, sick of being stifled, move onto a new wilderness, a new business, a new venture. There is no female Elon Must in all of history, no female Einstein, no female Thomas Edison, or Thomas Aquinas, nor Christopher Columbus, Alexander the Great, Richard the Lionheart or Sir Edmund Hillary.

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint.
~Hesiod, 8th century BC

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While wave upon wave of smartglasses and face-based wearables crash on the shores of CES, traditional glasses really haven’t changed much over the hundreds of years we’ve been using them. The last innovation, arguably, was progressive multifocals that blended near and farsighted lenses — and that was back in the 1950s. It makes sense that autofocusing glasses maker IXI thinks it’s time to modernize glasses.

After recently announcing a 22-gram (0.7-ounce) prototype frame, the startup is here in Las Vegas to show off working prototypes of its lenses, a key component of its autofocus glasses, which could be a game-changer.

IXI’s glasses are designed for age-related farsightedness, a condition that affects many, if not most people over 45. They combine cameraless eye tracking with liquid crystal lenses that automatically activate when the glasses detect the user’s focus shifting. This means that, instead of having two separate prescriptions, as in multifocal or bifocal lenses, IXI’s lenses automatically switch between each prescription. Crucially — like most modern smartglasses — the frames themselves are lightweight and look like just another pair of normal glasses.

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Apparently Wilhelm II was the Joe Biden of early modern Germany.

Like Hitler without the talent.

Believe me, you don’t want to be in a berthing compartment when there’s farting going on….

Example.

dickover?n.?:?a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

Thanks to Daring Fireball for this PSA.

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Automobiles have been around for well over a century. During that time, we’ve gotten pretty good at designing and building their basic components and controls: seats, doors, pedals, steering wheels, mirrors, etc. But when today’s automakers decide to make an electric vehicle (EV), they seemingly forget much of what they once knew, creating new versions of features that are objectively, obviously worse than the time-tested designs they replace.

When Tesla ushered in the modern EV era in the early 2000s, some of these changes made sense, at least from a marketing perspective. To convince a cautious public to consider an EV, the vehicles had to appear “futuristic.” Flush door handles that automatically extend when you approach the car are definitely cool and fancy! But electronic door mechanisms like these have also proven to be unreliable, and possibly dangerous.

On the interior, Tesla settled on a minimal design dominated by a large touch screen. Touch screens provide a lot of flexibility. This is why our phones no longer have physical keyboards on them. Touch screens are also, perhaps surprisingly, less expensive than the array of physical buttons and switches that they replace in car interiors. This savings is especially important on EVs, where the cost of the vehicle is dominated by the battery (yes, to an even larger degree than an internal-combustion car’s cost is dominated by its engine). But despite their cost savings, the over-use of touch screens in cars has proven unpopular. They’re also not great for safety.

In 2026, we’re well past the time when EVs need to compromise safety and functionality in order to appear futuristic. As for the cost savings, well, that’ll be harder to shake. Once automakers got a taste for cheap touchscreens, they spread to all cars, not just EVs.

To help the industry get back on the right track, I’ve created a checklist for car designers. Make sure your new car—EV or otherwise—checks all these boxes to avoid making the same stupid mistakes that have plagued modern cars for years.

CNBC, a Voice of the Crust.

A federal judge on Friday barred President Donald Trump from adding his name to that of the Kennedy Center, as he did in late December, ruling that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

Judge Christopher Cooper ordered that Trump’s name be removed from the facade of the center and other sinage within two weeks.

Cooper also temporarily blocked the Washington, D.C., performing arts landmark, which in December had been renamed the “Trump Kennedy Center,” from being closed for two years for renovations at the behest of the president, who is chair of its Board of Trustees.

Cooper’s order came in response to a lawsuit by Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and ex officio Kennedy Center trustee, whose civil complaint challenged the renaming, the closure of the center for renovations, and being stripped of her voting rights by board in May 2025.

The Telegraph (UK).

Boarding schools are “increasingly not British at all” after a surge in the number of foreign students, the UK’s top educational philanthropist has said.

Sir Peter Lampl, the founder of the Sutton Trust, said British children were being “priced out” of boarding schools, with their places taken by international students.

Sir Peter, a former adviser to Sir Tony Blair, claimed this was partly a result of Labour’s “narrow-minded and mean-spirited” VAT raid on private schools, which had handed an advantage “to our foreign competitors”.

The War Zone.

Members of Congress are moving to push the U.S. Navy to develop a containerized version of its High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system. Containerized designs could help accelerate the service’s fielding of laser directed energy weapons on a wider array of ships, providing added layers of close-in defense. The Navy has already been experimenting with palletized designs as part of its larger laser development efforts, which have faced continued hurdles in recent years.

An early draft of the annual defense policy bill, or National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), for the 2027 Fiscal Year, would authorize the addition of $5 million to the Navy’s budget for work on a containerized HELIOS. It would also add $2.5 million for a “Containerized Maritime High Energy Laser Weapon System,” which does not otherwise appear to be mentioned, at least by that name, in the service’s proposed budget for the 2027 Fiscal Year. The House Armed Services Committee released this draft NDAA earlier this week.

The Navy’s proposed budget for the next fiscal cycle does already include a request for $75.6 million for a separate Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS) effort. The development of a containerized 150-kilowatt-class laser directed energy weapon, along with work toward 300 and 500-kilowatt-class designs, are part of the stated plans for JLWS. It’s unclear whether the Maritime High Energy Laser Weapon System mentioned in the draft NDAA is related to JLWS.

HELIOS, which the Navy has also designated Mk 5 Mod 0, is a 60-kilowatt-class laser directed energy weapon. At that power level, it is able to destroy or at least damage certain targets, such as drones or small boats, a capability that has now been demonstrated in multiple tests. There has been talk in the past about scaling HELIOS’s power rating up to 150 kilowatts.

The War Zone.

President Donald Trump on Friday announced he was lifting the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports enacted last month. The move comes amid media reports and administration messaging that Washington and Tehran appear to be drawing closer to a deal that could lead to ending the conflict. Iranian officials have rejected that notion. TWZ cannot confirm either side’s assertions.

“Ships caught in the Strait due to our amazing and unprecedented Naval Blockade, which will now be lifted, may start the process of ‘heading home!’” Trump proclaimed on Truth Social, referring to the Strait of Hormuz. The strategic chokepoint has been largely closed to most traffic by Iran since not long after the launch of Epic Fury on Feb. 28.

Trump’s comments may reflect a still unsigned Memorandum of Agreement with Iran that paves the way for reopening the Strait and is designed to create negotiating space to deal with the larger issues of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Watch it.

The YouTube channel MAXIMONICS has the data.

Read it.

For the past several days, ICE agents and Antifa affiliated protesters have clashed outside the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey. The rioting protesters have blocked the entrance, stopping vehicles from entering the facility. Multiple trucks can be seen in this video at a standstill.

I’m going to ask the question again: Why Doesn’t the FBI Stop this violent, organized, national activity?

…

How can a group within America openly threaten police, use violence against police, throw Molotov cocktails, bricks and explosive fireworks at police. Use batons, shields, bats and physical violence against police and federal law enforcement; destroy vehicles, set cars on fire, destroy property, trash and block the streets and create chaos, completely without consequence?

Construction Physics.

Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem. We’ve looked at a variety of construction productivity metrics, both for the US and for countries around the world, and found that construction productivity almost always rises much less in construction than it does in industries like manufacturing; often, it doesn’t improve at all. We’ve analyzed trends in construction costs in the US and around the world, and noted that construction almost never gets any cheaper: construction costs almost always rise at or above the level of overall inflation. And we’ve considered the most obvious strategy for solving this problem — moving the construction process into a factory — and we saw that the cost savings from prefabricated construction are frequently much less than hoped, often never materializing at all.

Now that we’ve mapped the contours of the problem, we can begin to explore its deeper nature to understand why, specifically, construction productivity is so resistant to being improved, and why construction costs stubbornly refuse to fall.

Oil Tumbles On Deal ‘Breakthrough’ As US-Iran Reportedly Reach MOU, Pending Trump’s Final Approval

Trump has no way out on Iran — This edition of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. (Noah Berlatsky/Public Notice)

No Way to Make a Deal ??? The agreement that Trump wants to strike with Iran keeps eluding him. (The Atlantic)

Scoop: U.S. and Iran reach deal but need Trump’s final approval, officials say (Barak Ravid/Axios)

U.S. and Iran reach temporary deal ??? but Trump hasn’t signed off yet (Kevin Breuninger/CNBC

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The Fairfax County Police Department in Northern Virginia is investigating a swatting call at the residence of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett Wednesday night.

“Yesterday evening at approximately 9:02 p.m., officers responded to a swatting call at the residence of U.S. Supreme Court Justice in Fairfax County,” the department’s public information officer told the Daily Signal in a Thursday phone call.

“The call was received through the department’s non-emergency line,” the officer explained. “Officers immediately coordinated with Supreme Court police personnel assigned to the residence and quickly determined that the report was fictitious. No additional police resources were utilized.”

“Swatting” refers to the practice of calling police with a false report concerning a threat or violence, aiming to convince law enforcement to send a SWAT team to the targeted location. Since SWAT teams often enter houses with little notice and can cause confusion, these calls may result in unnecessary police violence.

When asked if the police department is investigating the call, the officer said, “That’s definitely part of it; every one of those calls is investigated.”

Read it.

Exxon Mobil shareholders on Wednesday approved the company’s plan to redomicile in Texas, marking a win for the top U.S. oil producer after two leading proxy advisory firms advised investors to strike down the proposal.

The oil producer is incorporated in New Jersey, but the company has been headquartered in Texas since 1989. It said moving its legal home to the state was logical and made more sense for the business.

Other companies, including SpaceX, Tesla, and Coinbase, have recently shifted operations to the Lone Star State. A Texas law passed last year enhanced legal protections for businesses in several ways, including reducing the threat of shareholder litigation by allowing companies to set stock ownership thresholds for lawsuits.