Kothwin

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The first modern air conditioner wasn't built to cool people down. In 1902, a Brooklyn print shop kept ruining its color jobs because humid air made the paper swell and knocked the colors out of alignment. A 25-year-old engineer named Willis Carrier built a machine to dry the air out, and cooler air came along as a side effect.

So the tweet has it right. An air conditioner has never made cold out of nothing. It pumps heat and moisture from inside to outside, the same way the back of your fridge blows warm air into the kitchen while the food stays cold, and the motor doing the pumping adds a little heat of its own. A bit more goes out than came in. Scientists at Arizona State measured this across Phoenix and found all that waste heat pushed outdoor temperatures up by almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit at night in parts of the city, which pushed people to run their units even harder.

The name came from the opposite problem. In 1906, a North Carolina textile engineer named Stuart Cramer was trying to add moisture to his cotton mills so the threads wouldn't snap, and he called the process "air conditioning." Carrier borrowed the phrase. One was pulling water out of the air, the other was putting it in, and they landed on the same name.

For twenty years the machine stayed in factories. Then in 1925, Carrier put one in the Rivoli Theater in Times Square. Summer had always been the dead season for movies because nobody wanted to sweat through a film, so studios dumped their weak titles in July. Cool theaters flipped that. By 1930 more than 300 theaters were advertising "Cooled by Refrigeration," and summer slowly turned into the season Hollywood saved its biggest films for.

The window unit arrived in 1951 and homes caught up quickly. By 1973 more than half of American houses had one; today it's about 90%, and that single appliance redrew the country. Texas added 170% to its population between 1950 and 2000 as people found they could finally live and work through a desert summer.

A team of economists tracked heat deaths across the US for the whole 20th century and found the risk of dying on an extremely hot day dropped about 75%, almost all of it after 1960. Home air conditioning explained essentially the entire decline. That comes to roughly 14,000 Americans a year who no longer die in heat waves. About 2 billion of these machines are humming right now, and most of the people living in the hottest places on earth still don't own one.

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

The human brain makes approximately 35,000 decisions per day.

Around 200 of those are about food.

Fewer than 100 are genuinely conscious.

The rest are made on autopilot — habit, environment, emotion.

Every addiction, every habit, every impulse purchase happens in the 34,900 decisions you're not paying attention to.

The people who know this best aren't scientists.

They're advertisers.

SOURCE: Various cognitive science research, including Cornell / University of Leeds estimates.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Here is the most important thing to understand about the argument you are making.

It is not new.

Every generation of people who have benefited from the extraction of African wealth has produced a version of your argument to explain why the extraction is not the explanation.

In the 18th century it was: they are heathens, without Christian civilization they are nothing.

In the 19th century it was: they are savages, the white man's burden is to civilize them.

In the early 20th century it was: they are childlike, they need colonial administration to function.

In the mid 20th century it was: they are not ready for self-governance, independence is premature.

In the late 20th century it was: their cultures are incompatible with development, corruption is intrinsic.

In the 21st century it is: they choose not to educate themselves, they are savage toward the volunteers who try to help, look at the IQ map.

The conclusion is always the same: the people being extracted from are the explanation for their own condition.

The mechanism changes every generation.

The conclusion does not.

Because the conclusion is not the result of the analysis.

The conclusion is what the analysis is constructed to protect.

You are not making an observation about Africa.

You are participating in a long, self-serving, continuously updated tradition of providing intellectual cover for an arrangement that has worked very well for some people and very badly for others.

An arrangement that requires, in every generation, a new vocabulary for the same old story.

The story is old.

The vocabulary is yours.

But the function is identical.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

One official from Uruguay was on a routine FIFA video call, waited for the "any other business" slot at the very end, and read out a short prepared speech proposing to grow the World Cup to 64 teams, the biggest it has ever been. The room reportedly went silent. That was March 2025, and the idea still hasn't gone away.

The official was Ignacio Alonso, who runs Uruguay's football federation. His pitch: take the World Cup from 48 teams to 64 for the 2030 edition, to mark 100 years since the first one was held in Uruguay in 1930.

The birthday is the official reason. Two bigger ones sit underneath.

The first is hurt pride. The 2030 World Cup is the most spread-out one ever planned, running across six countries and three continents. Spain, Portugal and Morocco host most of it. South America, where the whole thing started, was given just three opening matches as a token. A 64-team field would have pulled far more of those games back across the Atlantic.

The second reason is money, and it is the bigger one. FIFA, the body that runs the World Cup, really sells one thing: a single month of football every four years. The 2026 tournament alone should bring in around $8.9 billion, lifting FIFA's four-year total to roughly $13 billion, up from $7.57 billion last time. The logic is simple. More teams is more matches, and more matches is more to sell: more TV slots, more tickets, more sponsor deals, more hospitality in more cities. Qatar 2022 had 64 games. The 2026 jump to 48 teams lifted that to 104. Sixty-four teams would mean 128, exactly double Qatar.

Across every World Cup since 1930, only 84 nations have ever made it to one. This single tournament would put 64 in at once.

A lot of people inside the sport think that wrecks it. The head of European football called it, plainly, "a bad idea." One FIFA source put it in plain business terms: too many one-sided blowouts, and you start hurting the product you are selling. At 64 teams, three of every four matches would be group games, and plenty would be mismatches.

For now, the pushback won. FIFA confirmed 2030 will stay at 48 teams. But the plan survived. It simply moved its target to 2038, the next World Cup still open for bidding. The "2038" in that headline is the giveaway. This is the same idea that already got knocked back once, now aimed at the next open date on FIFA's calendar.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your house works like a giant battery, except it stores heat instead of electricity. All day, the walls, floors, and furniture soak up warmth from the sun and the air. Once it cools off outside, all that stored heat starts leaking back into your rooms.

The reason is something engineers call thermal lag. Heat doesn't pass through a solid wall right away. It seeps in slowly. A brick wall can take 3 to 8 hours to move the afternoon's heat from the outside of the wall through to the inside, and a thick concrete wall can take 4 to 12. So the warmth in your living room at 9pm is the sun from earlier in the day, showing up late.

Brick and concrete also hold heat far better than air. A cubic foot of either one stores well over a thousand times more than the same amount of air. The walls are a heat sponge. The air is just along for the ride.

Then there's everything inside the house adding to it. Your own body gives off about 100 watts just sitting still, the same as one of those old bulbs that get hot to the touch. Every device you plug in does the same, because nearly all the power it uses turns into heat. A desktop computer can put out more than 100 watts, a big TV about the same. An oven is a 3,000 watt heater sitting in the middle of your home, and running it for an hour on a warm night warms the whole floor.

Insulation makes it worse. It slows heat down in both directions, so the same thing that keeps the cold out in winter now traps the heat inside after dark. Between your body, the lights, and the electronics, a closed-up room can run 5 to 10 degrees warmer than it would be otherwise. More than enough to keep a room 5 degrees warm long after sunset.

Builders have a trick for this called night flushing. Once the outside air finally drops below the temperature inside, open the windows and let the cool air pull the stored heat out of the walls. Then shut everything before the morning sun starts charging the battery again. Run the AC against warm walls and you're fighting heat the house soaked up six hours ago. Open the windows at the right time and the house lets all that heat out for free.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

You tell a friend you'll be ten minutes late, then add three full sentences about the traffic and the broken elevator, just so they don't think you're flaky. That little habit has a name, and for a lot of people it goes straight back to childhood.

Underneath, it's your nervous system trying to stop rejection before it happens, and it runs a bit deeper than just being called a liar. Therapists call constant overexplaining part of the "fawn" response. The three best-known stress reactions are fight, flight, and freeze; a therapist named Pete Walker added a fourth one in 2003 and called it fawn. The idea is simple: when a kid can't fight back and can't run, the nervous system tries another way, keeping the bigger, scarier person happy. Overexplaining is one of the main ways that shows up in adults. Give someone every reason and every detail upfront, and they can't be angry with you, and they can't leave.

The childhood version has a name too. Back in 1993, the psychologist Marsha Linehan described the "invalidating environment," a home where a kid's side of the story keeps getting brushed off, mocked, or punished. Kids raised that way, she found, stop trusting their own memory of what happened and start watching everyone else for signs of what's okay. Being accused of lying is one version of that. So is a parent whose mood changed the rules every day, so you could never tell what would get you in trouble. What a kid lands on is the same either way: explain everything in advance, and leave no gap for anyone to fill with the worst version of you.

In 2003, UCLA researchers put people in a brain scanner and had them play a simple online ball-tossing game, secretly rigged so the player got left out. The spot that lit up when they felt excluded was the same part of the brain that handles physical pain. Getting shut out of a group runs through the same wiring as a stubbed toe. That is why a hint of someone's disapproval can feel like an emergency, and why the words come out before you've decided to say them.

None of this means every long explanation is a wound. Sometimes you're just being thorough, and there's nothing wrong with that. The pattern only matters when it runs on autopilot, when you catch yourself justifying things nobody asked about. The tweet nailed the feeling. Underneath it is a kid who learned that being believed had to be earned, still earning it decades later.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

When you text a crying emoji, your phone never sends the picture. It sends a code, just a number, and the phone on the other end draws its own version of that number using the set of pictures built into it. Every phone agrees on the character. They each draw it differently, which is why your 😭 can reach a friend looking nothing like the one you tapped.

This goes back to 2008. Apple shipped its first emoji that year for the iPhone's launch in Japan, 471 tiny drawings made over three months by an intern and her mentor, with Steve Jobs signing off on each batch. The Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit in California that gives every text character a number, set the worldwide standard for emoji in 2010. It hands out the code and the official name. It draws none of the art. Each company paints its own.

Apple went detailed and glossy and has barely changed its style since. Android went somewhere stranger. Before 2013 its faces looked like little robots. Then Google swapped them for yellow blobs that had no chins, and kept them around until 2017. The trouble showed up the moment you texted someone on a different brand of phone, where a blob often landed as something you could not read. Google threw out the whole set for round faces built to look like everyone else's. Samsung ran its own oddball style for years too, with a ghost that came out closer to a ghoul, before sliding toward the same round look.

None of this is only about looks. A team at the University of Minnesota tested it in 2016. They showed people the same emoji across five phone brands and asked them to rate the mood, from very negative to very positive. Send one across brands and the sender and the receiver ended up about 2 points apart on a 10-point mood scale. The grinning face with smiling eyes scored slightly negative on an iPhone and clearly happy on every other phone. Same code, opposite feeling.

So the lineup in this post is a quiet story about everyone copying Apple. The 2008 columns look wildly different because each company started from its own drawing. The 2026 columns look almost identical because the rest of the industry gave up and settled on the iPhone's version. Your crying face survived the merge. The blobs got left behind.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A blood test can now work out how old your body really is, not just your age in years. Sometimes the two numbers match. Often they don't. And the wider the gap, with your body running ahead of your years, the higher your odds of getting cancer before age 55.

The finding comes from a study WashU Medicine published on June 22 in the journal Nature Medicine. Researchers pulled blood from more than 164,000 people, most in the UK and some in the US. They scored each person's biological age from inflammation, blood sugar, kidney waste, and white blood cell counts, all signs of how worn down a body is inside.

Then they sorted everyone by birth year. People born in the 1990s had bodies that looked older inside than people born in the 1960s did at the same age. Each generation came out a little more aged than the one before it.

The cancer link came next. People whose bodies were running ahead of schedule had an 8% higher chance of an early solid tumor, the kind that forms in an organ, mostly lungs, gut, and uterus. For the fastest agers, the jump reached 15% over the slowest, no matter their actual age.

Where the aging landed mattered too. An immune system that looked older than the person it belonged to lined up with early lung cancer. Fat tissue that looked old lined up with early colon cancer.

The study has one real limit. It watches people over time, so it can show that fast aging and early cancer go together, but it cannot prove one causes the other.

All of this sits on top of a rise that was already underway. Cancer in people under 50 rose 79% worldwide between 1990 and 2019, and forecasts have it rising another 31% by 2030. The same causes keep showing up in this research: extra weight, sitting all day, alcohol, poor diet, blood sugar creeping up.

Your birth year is locked. The number on that blood test is not. The things pushing it up are the same ones a doctor would already tell you to fix, and that part is in your hands.

[CooperBaggs 💰🍞 @edgaralandough]

🚨 BREAKING: Claude has a feature called Reading & Learning Mode. You can use it to learn anything faster than 99% of people. Here are 5 prompts to access it:

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A modern chip factory costs around $20 billion to build, and undergraduates are almost never allowed near the machines inside it. A group of students at IIT Bombay built their own versions of those machines for about ₹30 lakh, roughly $32,000, in ten months.

They call themselves HackerFab IITB, and they started in August 2025 with no fab of their own. Since then they have built three of the main tools that turn a bare silicon wafer into a chip. One prints tiny patterns onto the wafer using light. Another bakes the silicon at up to 1,100 degrees to grow a thin protective layer. A third coats it with a film of metal inside a vacuum.

The patterns are small. Their light-printing machine has made patterns about a micron wide. A human hair is around 70 microns wide, so that is roughly seventy times thinner than a hair. The vacuum chamber they built pulls the air down to about the pressure you would find in low Earth orbit.

The price tag is what people focus on, but money is not the hardest part. The people who actually know how to make chips are maybe a few thousand engineers spread around the world, sitting on top of a trillion-dollar industry. A lot of what they know never gets written down.

So the students put it together piece by piece. Some of it from their own professors. A surprising amount from Discord groups full of retired chip engineers, many in their seventies, who answer questions for free because they enjoy being asked. The whole idea traces back to a project at Carnegie Mellon, which itself grew out of an American teenager named Sam Zeloof building working chips in his parents' garage.

There is a nice full-circle to where this landed. The first transistors of this kind made at IIT Bombay came out of the same department in the late 1980s, printed at about three microns. HackerFab is printing at a few microns right now, except the people doing it are undergraduates who built the machines themselves. They expect their first complete working transistor within weeks.

None of this competes with the chip in your phone, which is built at a scale hundreds of times finer. That was never the goal. The wall around chipmaking was made of access, to the tools and to the knowledge. A handful of students just showed you can get past both for the price of one car and a willingness to ask strangers for help.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

That green band running across the middle of the map, through Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, and southern Russia, is the most fertile soil on the planet. It is called chernozem, Russian for "black earth," and a handful of it holds up to four times the organic matter of normal farmland.

It took thousands of years to build. Out on the open grassland, tall grass grew, died back every winter, and rotted slowly in the cold. Worms pulled the dead matter down. Microbes turned it into dark, rich soil. Bit by bit the black layer grew deeper, about a centimeter every hundred years. The deepest patches now go down a full meter, so a farmer can push a shovel in to the handle and still not reach the bottom.

Black soil like this covers less than 2 percent of the world's land. Ukraine alone holds about a quarter of the world's supply, and black soil covers roughly two-thirds of its farmland. That dirt is why a country smaller than Texas feeds so much of the world. Russia and Ukraine together supply close to a third of all the wheat traded across borders, and Ukraine sells more sunflower oil than any other country on Earth.

Armies have fought over this ground for centuries. When the Nazis planned their invasion of the Soviet Union, the black-earth region was one of the main targets. The plan was to seize Ukraine's farmland, push the people off it, and feed Germany from the soil. It failed, but the idea behind it was simple. Whoever holds this land holds a large slice of the world's bread.

The problem is how easily it disappears. The soil took thousands of years to build and can be stripped in one farming lifetime. Plowing too hard, wind, and planting the same crop year after year all tear through it. Ukraine now loses an estimated 500 million tons of topsoil a year to wind and rain, and for every ton of grain the land gives up, about ten tons of soil go with it.

On the map it looks like a thin green ribbon, a small corner of Europe. It quietly grows food for a big chunk of the planet, and it is far thinner and more fragile than it looks.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Japan just raised its tourist visa fee 400%, the first increase since 1978. If you hold a US, UK, EU, Australian, or Canadian passport, you will not pay a cent of it.

Those roughly 74 countries can still walk in for up to 90 days with no visa and no fee. The new charge, 15,000 yen (about $93) for a single entry, up from 3,000 yen (about $18), only hits travelers from the 100-plus countries that need a visa to get in, like China, India, and Vietnam.

The increase is mostly catch-up. That 3,000 yen fee had been frozen since 1978. The yen has since slid from around 110 to the dollar in 2019 to roughly 150 now, which quietly turned an already-cheap fee into pocket change. Even after the jump, $93 is low compared with other countries. To defend the increase, the government pointed to fees abroad, where some US visa charges run $400 to $470 and Germany's sit near $107.

The timing lines up with a tourism boom that has little to do with the people paying this fee. Japan drew a record 42.7 million visitors in 2025, about 10 million more than before the pandemic, and they spent 9.5 trillion yen, roughly $60 billion. The weak yen is the engine. It makes Japan cheap to visit, which packs Kyoto and the trails up Mount Fuji, and most of those crowds come from the visa-free countries that pay nothing at the border.

The money trail makes the goal clearer. Japan expects the higher visa fees to bring in about 116 billion yen, near $718 million, next year. The government has set it aside for processing a record 4.13 million foreign residents, paying for Japanese-language programs, and cutting about $43 off the cost of a passport for Japanese citizens.

The visa fee is one line on a longer bill. The departure tax baked into every plane and ferry ticket triples the same day, from 1,000 to 3,000 yen. Kyoto's hotel tax now reaches 10,000 yen a night at the priciest hotels, about ten times the old ceiling. Climbing Mount Fuji costs 4,000 yen. And a new online entry permit called JESTA, due around 2028, will finally charge the visa-free crowd a small fee too.

Japan's own government says it does not expect any of this to slow arrivals, and the track record agrees. Venice started charging day-trippers in 2024 and the crowds kept coming. The 400% headline is real. For most of the tourists it makes you picture, the cost at the border is still zero.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A peregrine falcon weighs about two pounds, dives at up to 240 mph, and costs nothing to build. The B-2 underneath it is the most expensive aircraft ever made, around $2.1 billion a copy. The meme has the cheap one and the masterpiece swapped.

And the shape didn't come from the falcon. It came from Jack Northrop, an engineer who spent the 1930s and 40s trying to sell the Air Force a bomber that was all wing, with no body and no tail. His reasoning had nothing to do with birds. Strip off the body and tail and you cut drag, which buys you more range. His flying wings flew in 1946 and 1947 with the B-2's exact wingspan, 172 feet.

They also kept trying to flip over. A tailless wing is unstable, and 1940s pilots couldn't hand-fly it, so the design sat on a shelf for 40 years. It came back in the 1980s for one reason. A smooth wing with no tail and no sharp corners barely shows up on radar, because radar works by bouncing radio waves off hard edges and flat surfaces, and this shape has almost none of either. Northrop knew that back in the 40s. Nobody cared until hiding from radar became the whole job.

So the resemblance runs the opposite way the meme suggests. The falcon folded into that streamlined shape to cut drag at 200 mph and catch a swerving bird. The B-2 took a similar shape to disappear from radar and fly 6,000 miles. Same silhouette, two unrelated problems, and a smooth low-drag body just happens to be the best answer to both.

Where the falcon does quietly match military hardware is harder to spot. A team at Oxford strapped tiny GPS trackers to diving peregrines and found they steer using proportional navigation, the same targeting math built into most guided missiles. The bird turns at a rate set by how fast its prey slides across its view, which keeps it on a collision course without oversteering. Engineers worked that math out for missiles around the 1950s. The falcon had been flying it for millions of years.

As for cheap, the B-2 is the opposite. The Air Force ordered 132 and the order got cut to 21 after the Cold War, so all the research money piled onto a handful of jets. One crashed in Guam in 2008, a $1.4 billion loss and still the most expensive plane crash on record. Nineteen are left.

The two-pound bird that hits 240 mph for free is the budget masterpiece here. The $2.1 billion jet is the expensive tribute.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Volkswagen spent around 1.2 billion euros turning its Zwickau plant into an all-electric factory and built more than a million EVs there. This week, that same plant landed on a leaked list of four the company now wants to shut down.

The job cuts are the symptom. The cause is money. In the first three months of this year, Volkswagen's profit fell 28 percent to 1.56 billion euros. Sales dipped to 75.7 billion, and US tariffs are now adding about 4 billion euros a year in costs. Then there is China, for decades the company's biggest and most profitable market.

For 25 years Volkswagen sold more cars in China than any brand on earth. In 2024, China's own BYD passed them. German carmakers as a group fell from 26 percent of the Chinese market in 2019 to 16 percent last year. A buyer there can get a high-tech electric car from a local brand for far less than a VW costs, and more than a hundred of those brands are fighting over the same driveway.

A senior Volkswagen executive said last year that some of the company's German plants run 25 to 50 percent over their target cost, which makes a few of them twice as expensive to run as a rival's factory. A Chinese carmaker can build a similar car for about a third less. Plants that expensive, in a market that crowded, are the first ones to get shut.

Eighteen months ago Volkswagen signed a deal with its unions to cut roughly 50,000 German jobs by 2030, with a written promise of no plant closures and no forced layoffs before then. The new plan, first reported by the German magazine Manager Magazin, would push that to as many as 100,000 jobs worldwide, around one in six of its workers, and shut four plants anyway. Two of the four, Zwickau and Emden, build nothing but electric cars.

The company poured billions into the factories meant to carry it into the electric future, and now it can't make those same factories pay for themselves. The board meets on July 9 to decide how far this goes.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Scientists put people in a brain scanner, played a song they knew well, then cut the sound at random moments. The music kept playing inside their heads. The auditory cortex, the strip of brain that handles sound coming in through your ears, stayed lit and filled in the missing seconds on its own. That was a 2005 Dartmouth study in Nature, and it worked for instrumental tracks too, not just songs with words. When they muted the Pink Panther theme, people's brains filled in the missing melody. So the beat and everything, exactly what the question asks, does play in there.

For most people this runs on autopilot. In a survey of more than 12,000 people, about 92 out of 100 had a song stuck in their head at least once a week, looping with no music playing anywhere. There is a name for it: involuntary musical imagery. And when researchers at UC Santa Cruz recorded people's stuck songs in 2024, almost half came back in the exact same key as the original recording. Your brain keeps the real pitch, not a rough sketch of it.

How loud and detailed that inner playback feels sits on a spectrum. Cognitive scientist Andrea Halpern built a scale that rates inner sound from 1, nothing there at all, to 7, as clear as hearing it out loud. At the vivid end, people hear the whole song, the vocal, the drums, the bassline. One of her tougher tests plays a familiar tune backwards with a wrong note slipped in, and trained musicians catch the fake note 80 to 90 percent of the time, working entirely in their heads.

Then there is the far other end. Around 1 in 100 people hear nothing at all. Ask them to imagine a favorite song and they get pure silence. Researchers at the University of Auckland named this anauralia in 2021, and it usually comes with aphantasia, the inability to picture anything in your mind's eye. Their inner world has no soundtrack and no pictures at all. A lot of people only find out they have it when they stumble across the research and realize everyone else has been hearing something all along.

None of this lines up neatly with musical skill. Halpern found that how vivid your inner sound is barely depends on how many years you have trained. Some working musicians have a completely silent mind and compose anyway, the way you can read sheet music off a page without hearing a note. So the song in your head is something your brain is actively doing, your auditory cortex lighting up on a scanner, and whether you hear a full studio mix or total quiet says surprisingly little about how musical you are.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A robot boat with no crew shot down a $50 million fighter jet over the Black Sea. The boat cost a few hundred thousand dollars, and the country that built it had lost almost its whole navy ten years earlier.

Ukraine started the war with seven companies making drones. It now has around 500, building 99% of them at home, in warehouses the size of city blocks, many dug underground to survive missile strikes. The small FPV drones a single soldier flies through a video headset went from a few thousand a year in 2022 to roughly four million in 2025, at $300 to $400 each. They now destroy more Russian tanks and armor than artillery does. The 2026 target is seven million military drones, against roughly a hundred thousand a year for the entire United States.

The naval side keeps breaking records. In February 2024, Ukrainian sea drones became the first uncrewed boats to sink a warship in combat. Within a year they had sunk eight Russian ships and damaged six more, pushing the Black Sea Fleet out of Crimea and back to a port on the Russian mainland. In 2025 one of those boats, carrying a missile that can hit aircraft, shot down two fighter jets. No navy had ever done that with a robot.

The hardware is only half of it. The part that matters most is speed. Ukraine built a system called Delta that ties drone feeds, sensors, and artillery into one live map, plus a marketplace called Brave1 where frontline units order drones straight from the makers and pay with points they earn for confirmed hits. What takes a Western defense company years can happen here in weeks, because the soldier flying the drone is the one telling the factory what to fix. More than 70 AI camera systems already run on the front, trained on millions of frames of battlefield video.

The jamming problem got solved with a spool of glass. Fiber-optic drones trail a hair-thin cable as they fly, so there is no radio signal to block. They are nearly impossible to jam, and Ukraine treats them as its biggest edge against Russian jamming.

Four years ago this was seven workshops. Today it is the most battle-tested weapons lab on earth, and it just started selling.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

France already made this the law. Any car park with 80 or more spaces has to cover half of it in solar panels, or pay a fine of 50 euros per space every month. The government said it could add as much power as ten nuclear reactors.

The hard part is building it. Carrefour, a French supermarket chain, is putting solar roofs over 180,000 of its parking spaces, enough to power the stores below. Disneyland Paris covered its main lot, which fits 11,200 cars. One car factory parks its staff under 64,000 panels that run about a third of the plant.

The reason people want this is land. If the US copied France, its parking lots could hold up to 800 gigawatts of solar. The whole US grid runs on about 1,144. A Yale study found that car parks in Connecticut could power more than a third of the state on their own.

Then comes the cost. Putting panels in a field is cheap, because they sit on simple metal racks near the ground. Putting them over a car park means a custom steel roof, strong enough to stand over moving cars and hold up in high wind, built without closing the lot. At that scale, a car park roof costs about $3.20 a watt. The same panels in a field cost closer to $1.90.

That price gap is why the rules keep getting weaker. France softened its own law in 2025, letting owners plant shade trees instead, though the biggest lots are still due by 2026 and the rest by 2028. The UK studied the idea for a year, then dropped it in May 2026, once it found that fitting an 80-space car park would cost around £140,000 and save about £28,000 a year.

The picture is right about one thing. Car parks really are the smarter place for solar: no farmland used up, shade for your car, and power made right where it is needed. The catch is that the smarter spot to build is also the more expensive one, which is why fields keep getting chosen.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Eighteen months.

That is how long it took for Wall Street bonuses to return to pre-crisis levels after the public absorbed the loss.

Eighteen months.

The homeowners who lost their houses in 2008 and 2009 did not recover in eighteen months.

Many of them never recovered.

The wealth destroyed in the foreclosure crisis, disproportionately concentrated in Black and Latino communities targeted by predatory lending, represented in many cases the entire intergenerational wealth accumulation of those families.

Gone.

Not recovered in eighteen months.

Not recovered in ten years.

In many cases: not recovered.

Meanwhile, the bonus pool at Goldman Sachs in 2009, the year after the crisis, the year they received public bailout money, was $16.2 billion.

$16.2 billion in bonuses.

In the year after the crisis they caused.

Paid for in part by public money.

While 10 million American families lost their homes.

If you described this sequence of events as fiction, as a plot in a novel about a corrupt dystopia, an editor would ask you to make it more plausible.

It is too on the nose, they would say.

The villains are too obviously villainous.

Real corruption, the editor would say, is more subtle.

It is not more subtle.

It is exactly this obvious.

It has always been exactly this obvious.

The only thing protecting it from consequences is the difficulty most people have believing that something this brazen could be this durable.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

They exported the ideology of the free market to the world with guns and structural adjustment programs and IMF conditions.

Liberalize. Privatize. Cut the public sector. Let the market determine outcomes. Trust the mechanism.

Meanwhile at home, the banks failed in 2008 and received $700 billion in public money within weeks.

The free market for thee.

Socialism for the institutions that own the political class.

The people who lost their homes in 2008, amid 10 million foreclosures in the United States, did not receive a bailout.

The people who created the instruments that caused the crisis, who collected bonuses in the years they were building it, and who collected bonuses again in the years after the public absorbed the loss:

Not one of them went to prison.

Not one.

The ideology of personal responsibility, applied with perfect consistency, would have produced criminal trials and institutional collapse for the people at the top.

Instead it produced: austerity for everyone else, lectures about dependency culture, and a return to bonuses within eighteen months.

This is not corruption in the sense of individual bad actors.

This is corruption as architecture.

The building is designed this way.

The people inside it are not breaking the rules.

They wrote the rules.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Researchers once set up this exact situation. An authority figure scolds someone for showing up late while five other people sit and watch. Then everyone takes a test. The five who only watched scored 20% worse on word puzzles and came up with about 30% fewer ideas on a brainstorming task. The people who got worse were the ones watching, even though no one had said a word to them.

Christine Porath and Amir Erez ran that study at Georgetown and the University of Florida. When someone was the target instead of a bystander, the hit was bigger: 33% worse on problem-solving and 39% fewer creative ideas. Helpfulness fell off a cliff too. Among people who watched a public scolding, those willing to lend anyone a hand afterward dropped from 51% to 25%.

Some of this is physical. In 2003, UCLA researchers put people in a brain scanner and quietly left them out of a simple ball-tossing game. Being left out lit up the same brain region tied to physical pain, the anterior cingulate cortex. The brain seems to handle that kind of rejection with some of the same wiring it uses for a stubbed toe.

Then comes the bill. Porath and Pearson surveyed 800 managers and employees across 17 industries. After being treated badly at work, 48% cut their effort on purpose, 66% said their performance slipped, 78% said their loyalty to the company dropped, and 12% left over it. A quarter admitted they took it out on customers. Customers notice too: people who saw an employee treated rudely were four times more likely to walk away from the business.

A public scolding looks like discipline pointed at one person. The numbers say it quietly taxes everyone in the room, drains the team's creativity and goodwill for the rest of the day, and follows people out the door. Praise in public, correct in private sounds like a tired cliche. It is also one of the cheapest ways a manager can stop losing money.