New Atlas.

The extraordinary Hadrian X bricklaying robot rocks up to a building site looking like a regular truck, then extends a 32-m (105-ft) boom arm and starts precisely laying up to 300 large masonry blocks an hour. It’s pretty remarkable to watch.

Watch it.

I found this video both fascinating and inspirational. Your Mileage May Vary.

Who so richly deserve it.

If you are not familiar with the 5 points of Calvinism (T.U.L.I.P.) read here before proceeding.

Then read the Babylon Bee analysis of Taylor Swift.

Read it.

Here’s a list of neglected but eminently useful words that visitors to this site — and we, to be downright honest — would like to bring back into fashion. You’re right — some never have been in fashion, but perhaps they deserve to be. Many submissions have been edited for content, grammar and especially for accuracy. Not all these words will make our list of top choices, but there’s a great deal of quality here, most are wonderful additions to anyone’s vocabulary, and all could use some exercise.

Steve Sailer.

The world-historical question at the moment is whether American Jews — who are, arguably, the single most influential politically mobilizable group in the modern globe — will figure out that Woke anti-white hatred is inherently anti-Semitic. Or will they assume the solution must be tripling down yet again on promoting racist anti-white hatred as the only way to unify the Coalition of the Fringes?

I could see it going either way.

Read it.

Four Republican presidential candidates are slated to attend a closed-door summit in Utah today sponsored by Sen. Mitt Romney and his 2012 presidential running mate, former House speaker Paul Ryan.

Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence, Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum are scheduled to attend the event in Park City where they can make their case to a network of “influential” donors, the Washington Post reported.

The usual second-tier suspects.

ZMan has some fun.

Since the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump swung through the walls of conservatism almost a decade ago, there has been a desperate attempt to either rebuild the wall or fill the void left by the old conservatism. The Never Trump project was mostly an effort to chase the barbarians out of the city so the good people can rebuild the wall and restart the old politics. For the most part, this project has failed as the massive hole in the wall remains.

A good recent example of this is this post by neoconservative writer Mathew Continetti in Commentary Magazine. He claims that the populists supporting nationalist policies and candidates are actually Marxists. This has become a popular theme with the East Coast Straussians, of which the neocons are a part. It is a hilariously insane line of thought, owing to the steep decline in the human capital we see everywhere in politics, but especially in the neoconservative subculture.

On the other hand, the project to recreate the old dynamic of Left and Right, has quietly plodded along with a new generation looking to create a New Right. Many are just the hucksters we have come to expect in this age. These are the people who live on social media and front-run whatever is happening at the moment. Others are rejects from the old conservative rackets hoping for a fresh start. These are the buzzards that arrive at the end of every movement.

Steve Sailer.

Back in 1992, East Palo Alto, CA briefly became the murder capital of America with 42 killings. So an enterprising Stanford professor invented a acoustics listening devices for triangulating where gunshots were fired: ShotSpotter.

Ever since, ShotSpotter has been accused of racism since it tends to find that the most gunshots are fired in black neighborhoods, thus leading to black residents being unfairly targeted by excessive policing. Of course, those are precisely the neighborhoods where the most people are murdered by guns each year, but you aren’t supposed to think about Occam’s Razor explanations like that these days.

What are you? A Razorist?

Popular Mechanics.

Every eye color links directly to the volume of melanin in the iris. Green eyes, even more rare than blue, marks a reduced level of melanin, thought not as reduced as blue eyes. It only takes a miniscule change to shift from brown to blue. “From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” Eiberg says. “They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.”

He refers to that that switch as a specific genetic mutation event, and believes that it only produced the first-ever blue-eyed human thanks to the mutation of the regulating HERC2 gene. The combination is the only known way eyes can turn blue (in contrast, red hair can happen for one of nearly a dozen reasons). That mutation remained in place for the next generation, meaning the reduced production of melanin in the iris allowed for the continued dilution of brown to blue.

Read it.

When you live under an empire that’s held together by lies, you’ll be asked to believe a lot of intensely stupid bullshit. Here are the top ten dumbest things the propagandists of the US-centralized empire try to get us to swallow.

Like North Korea, North Carolina is the part run by Communists. And don’t get me started on North Dakota….

How Elite are the New Elite?

“What would the Romans do?” is always a useful way to consider issues of public policy. This is not to say they got everything right – their views on women were a bit iffy while about their attitudes to slavery, the less said the better (even if, on both, the reality was more nuanced than is often assumed). On the other hand, a civilisation which built the largest ramp ever constructed by man just to mop up the remnants of a failed revolt would probably not take 20 years to build a train line.

The Romans invented decimation. ‘Nuff said.

For whereas Roman society started with aristocrats and forced them to become meritocrats, the New Elite is composed of self-described meritocrats who are trying to become aristocrats. Membership of the caste is often hereditary – Goodwin, perhaps flippantly, suggested one test for membership is whether one’s parents have a Wikipedia page –  and a range of signalling mechanisms have been developed to allow members to display their status – declarations of pronouns in one’s biography standing in for a coat of arms, knowledge of the latest progressive fashions replacing a familiarity with courtly etiquette.

Read it.

No need to sit in an exam hall, no fear of plagiarism accusations or concerns with students submitting essays generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Integrity is 100% assured, in a fair, reliable and authentic manner that can also be easily used to assess multiple individual or group assignments.

As services like ChatGPT continue to grow in terms of both its capabilities and usage – including in education and academia – is it high time for universities to revert to the time-tested oral exam?

NewsBusters.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley got to the heart of the government shutdown fireworks in her appearance on Fox News Sunday.

“Let’s be clear what the Freedom Caucus is really trying to do; they are trying to cut spending.”

That’s of course correct. One would be hard-pressed to find any Republican, Freedom Caucus member or not, who does not understand the gravity of the state of our federal budget and spending.

“Imagine the people of Portland taking over the whole country and that was Russia after the revolution.” — ZMan

BBC.

Nomad Cruise is the first mobile conference for digital nomads. It combines skill-sharing, networking and celebration while travelling through breathtaking corners of the globe. And German-born Voelkner, 40, says it’s achieving his aim.

“Once we arrive at the new destination, many people end up travelling together, and we organize reunions in beautiful destinations to build and foster this community,” he says. Tickets for the company’s upcoming 12th sailing – a 10-day transatlantic crossing from Spain to Brazil in December – start at around €1,000 ($1,073; £860). To date, upwards of 2,500 remote professionals from more than 80 countries have joined Nomad Cruise for work and wanderlust.

Beyond solving a problem, Voelkner is making money. His revenue comes from negotiating deals with cruise companies and adding travel experiences and onboard programming for new and established remote workers. A record 600 participants are expected on the upcoming transatlantic cruise, and his revenue to date nears €2m ($2.13m; £1.72m).

Read it.

We’ve had many meetings with NAR execs to explore compromises on the policies that would let us continue our support. Since a Redfin-wide initiative to join NAR in 2017, we’ve paid more than $13 million in dues, in an effort to influence NAR to advocate for an open, technology-driven marketplace that would benefit consumers. We’ll now explore other ways to advance those goals.

…

In the many marketplaces governed by its policies, NAR still blocks sellers from listing homes that don’t pay a commission to the buyer’s agent, and it blocks websites like Redfin.com from showing for-sale-by-owner listings alongside agent-listed homes. Removing these blocks would be easy, and it would make our industry more consumer-friendly and competitive.

‘Professional associations’, no matter what they claim, are all about protecting the financial interest of existing members rather than anything having to do with either the ‘profession’ or their customers.

ScienceAlert.

The animal footprint carvings you can find in the Doro Nawas Mountains of western Namibia are quite something: the artists have captured the tracks so accurately, they can reveal plenty of useful information about the animals they represent.

A team from the Heinrich Barth Institute and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, and the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Namibia, worked with Indigenous tracking experts from the Kalahari region to look at a total of 513 carvings.

For more than 90 percent of them, Indigenous experts could identify the species, sex, age group, and even which leg the carving was from. It’s like a wildlife compendium, written in rock.

Read it.

It took firms decades to adjust to electricity by redesigning factories, products, and workflows to take full advantage of the new possibilities. Similarly, the benefits of work from home start to come most profoundly when expensive offices can be shrunk, employers can draw from a much larger pool of workers and workers can adjust when and where they work, including the location of their homes. It’s not surprising, therefore, that with little time for either the workers or the firms to adjust and with few options to choose how much to work from home, productivity fell when COVID sent workers home. But, with more time to plan and more options for hybrid but extensive work (e.g. work from home Mondays and Fridays), work from home has large benefits. We are also seeing management redesign to take advantage of work from home in the same way we saw factory redesign to take advantage of electricity. Management, for example, is shifting from input metrics–do you show up?–to output metrics–did the work get done? Designing and validating new metrics takes time, but these changes are helping to increase the benefits of work from home.

Read it.

It has taken me years to answer my father’s question — in the form of my new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. In it, I argue that our preferences are now shaped not by markets but by machine networks — what I call “cloud capital”. Amazon’s Alexa, for example, is the portal to a totalitarian, fully centralised system of preference creation and satisfaction. First, it trains us to train it to dictate what we want. Second, it sells us what we now “want” directly, bypassing any actual marketplace. Third, it succeeds in making us sustain this enormous behavioural modification machine with our free labour: we post reviews, rate products. Finally, it amasses huge rents from capitalists who rely on this network of cloud capital, usually 40% of sale price. That’s not capitalism. Welcome to Technofeudalism.

Another seemingly bright person led astray by word-salad. One of these days I’m going to write an essay on the various mythologies of ‘capitalism’, both left and right.

*sigh* These kids today….

Read it.

It’s true that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find mutton—defined as meat from a sheep over two years old—in American grocery stores. “Mutton is not an accessible protein option in the US,” says Megan Wortman, executive director of the American Lamb Board, an industry group aimed at expanding the market for domestic sheep products. If you’re looking to get your hands on some mutton, “you’d have to go through a specialty butcher shop or directly to a special-order processor,” she says.

Mutton has less tender flesh and a stronger flavor than lamb, which comes from sheep that are less than a year old. (Meat from sheep aged one to two years is generally called “yearling” in the US, and “hogget” elsewhere around the world.) That stronger flavor lends itself to curries, stews and “value-added” products such as spiced sausages, says Wortman, “so most of our mutton goes into value-added products or into specialty ethnic markets at this point.”

America sucks so bad that everyone wants to come here.

Read it.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) went on strike on Sept. 15. The strike affected the “big three” in Detroit—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, maker of the Jeep. The union wants to increase average labor costs from $65 per hour, including benefits, which is already above market rates. Nonunionized Tesla, for example, pays “just” $45 per hour in labor, considering the cost of benefits.

The UAW’s demands would roughly double labor costs and, according to management, make the companies unviable. Where will the workers go when the automakers go bankrupt, further mechanize their assembly lines, or move yet more production to China?

Many workers in these companies who aren’t on strike are already getting fired. Striking unions attempt to inflict maximum pain on their own companies with as little effort and expenditure as possible. The companies are forced to let go of misguided workers, who they can’t keep busy because other misguided workers on whom they depend are striking. All the strikers and fired UAW workers are getting paid from union funds that came from dues imposed on workers, whether they like it or not. They’re getting paid by the union to halt production.

This ludicrous practice introduces massive inefficiencies into U.S. manufacturing, yet Americans over the decades have gotten used to the deadweight it attaches to the economy.

Read it.

On the left, those with a penchant for turtleneck sweaters, hatred of orange presidents and a lottery of genders can check out Colorado-based TruuBlue, which matches social justice progressives.

On the right, those who love long shoots at the range, not murdering unborn children, and woke-free zones can check out The Right Stuff.

Sounds very convenient. (It doesn’t surprise me that leftists can’t spell.)

Stanford-Medicine.

Tiny circles of DNA harbor cancer-associated oncogenes and immunomodulatory genes promoting cancer development. They arise during transformation from pre-cancer to cancer, say Stanford Medicine-led team.

Read it.

Here’s a story straight out of a “trigger warning” scenario for Vice President Kamala Harris’ new federal office of gun violence prevention: a murdered Ecuadorian cartel boss known as “El Fatal” has been buried with hundreds of guns in his coffin this past week, the NY Post reported.

Surrounded by hundreds of pistols, shotguns and rifles, the 39 year old was the leader of “Los Fatales”. He was getting a car wash last week when he was “suddenly ambushed by gunmen” and killed, along with his 20 year old daughter who was with him.

The murder was blamed on rival gang, the report says.

He’ll be well-armed in the next life.