That “pollinator seed mix” might be planting a problem.
A University of Washington study grew out 19 wildflower seed packets and found something wild: Every single packet contained invasive species. Not one or two bad mixes. All 19.
Some had 3 invasive species. Some had 13. Eight contained plants considered noxious weeds in at least one state. A third of the packets didn’t list contents at all. And only 5 accurately listed what was inside.
The most common species? Bachelor’s button. Pretty? Sure. But absolutely harmful. It can spread into native grasslands and crowd out the plants local insects actually evolved to use.
That’s the trap.
People buy “wildflower” mixes because they want to help bees and butterflies. But vague seed packets can introduce aggressive nonnative plants that make the problem worse.
Better move: Buy region-specific native seed mixes. Use local native plant nurseries. Check with your state native plant society. Look for packets that list every species by name.
a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario.
a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose.
the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant.
he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests.
Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time.
GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead.
Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on.
Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for.
then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company."
GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing.
then he splits the users by income.
Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%.
18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time.
so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for.
it isn't recommending the best option for you.
it's reading the room. and the room is paying.
read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b
Derek Mobley applied to over 100 jobs. He was rejected from every single one. Several rejections came at 1am, within minutes of submitting.
He just became the lead plaintiff in the largest AI lawsuit ever certified.
May 2025, Judge Rita Lin granted preliminary certification of a nationwide ADEA collective in Mobley v. Workday. Workday's own court filings represent that 1.1 billion job applications were rejected through its software in the relevant period. The court discussed potential class size in the hundreds of millions.
If you're over 40 and you applied to a Fortune 500 in the last 7 years, your application was probably processed by Workday. You may be in the class.
The legal precedent matters more than the headline number. For decades, the vendor screening applicants for an employer was not directly liable under Title VII. The employer was the only defendant. In July 2024, Judge Lin ruled the AI vendor itself qualifies as an "agent" of the employer and can be sued directly. First time. The "we're just the tools" defense evaporated in a single ruling.
Same precedent now extends to every HR tech AI vendor in the pipeline. Greenhouse. Eightfold. HireVue. Paradox. None of it is priced into any of their valuations.
Combine that with the rest of 2024. Air Canada lost in February for $812 because its chatbot hallucinated a refund policy, killing the chatbot-as-separate-entity defense. iTutorGroup paid $365K to the EEOC, confirming the algorithm doing the discriminating moves liability nowhere. Gemini cost Alphabet roughly $90B in market cap in days for one weekend of bad image generation.
Every legal shield around AI in production got tested in court and lost. The AI PMs interviewing for foundation model roles can recite all four by month. Most engineers shipping AI at work cannot.
The year is 1950. Your doctor lights a cigarette and tells you smoking is fine. He read it in a study. He is telling the truth about having read it. He does not know, or is not saying, that the study was funded by the tobacco industry.
The year is 1958. Your doctor tells you to eat less fat. The evidence is contested. The contestation is not in the public messaging. The food industry has been helpful in clarifying which findings deserve attention. Some researchers who published contradictory data have been quietly defunded. Ancel Keys is on the cover of Time magazine.
The year is 1962. Your doctor prescribes thalidomide to your pregnant wife for morning sickness. It has been approved. The FDA gave it the green light in Europe. Twelve thousand children will be born with severe limb malformations before anyone in an official capacity acknowledges the problem. The families are told the drug was safe. The drug was approved. Both of these things remain true.
The year is 1972. Your doctor prescribes Valium. Britain is in the grip of a benzodiazepine wave that will last two decades. The dependency risk is known internally. It is not shared. Your doctor is not lying to you. He was not told either.
The year is 1999. Your doctor prescribes Vioxx for your arthritis. It is newer than ibuprofen, well-tolerated, and Merck has a study showing it works. Merck also has internal data suggesting it roughly doubles the risk of heart attack. This data will not reach your doctor for four more years. Fifty thousand people are estimated to have died in the interim. Merck eventually settles for 4.85 billion dollars. No criminal charges are brought.
The year is 2002. Your doctor prescribes OxyContin. Purdue Pharma trained its sales representatives to tell doctors the addiction risk was less than one percent. That figure came from a letter, not a study. The letter was about patients with terminal cancer on short-term doses in hospital settings. Your doctor is a GP with a patient who has a bad back. Nobody draws a distinction. Nobody is required to.
The year is 2008. Your doctor checks your cholesterol. Your LDL is elevated. You are prescribed a statin. Nobody mentions that the number needed to treat for primary prevention is approximately 250. Nobody mentions that the muscle deterioration you'll notice over the next two years is listed as a rare side effect rather than a documented pattern affecting a meaningful percentage of patients. The trial that informed the prescription was funded by the manufacturer.
Now it is today.
Your doctor has new guidelines. New studies. New consensus.
He is confident.
He has always been confident.
The confidence has never been the problem.
The confidence is, in fact, precisely the problem.
The U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels and U.S. Air Force’s Thunderbirds, two of the nation’s most elite flight teams, united Tuesday to perform an extremely rare formation flyover in “Super Delta” over Pensacola Beach, Florida.
I want to apologize for not responding to any of the 22 thousand comments my last post inspired. I’ve been filming all week and just noticed my observations about Jimmy Kimmel and a former plumber named Markwayne Mullin have gone viral. I've also noticed that many of the comments are from people who genuinely seem to believe that Jimmy wasn’t belittling plumbers at all, but was instead, simply trying to point out that Mullin is not qualified to lead the DHS. Here's a small smattering...
Roger Bicknell...
Mikey stop. Kimmel wasn't making fun of plumbers he was making fun of Mullin.
Rebecca Piatt Gonzalez...
Dearest Mike, it's not anything to do with his being a plumber. It's him NOT being skilled in Homeland Security.
Patrick Wise...
Being a plumber qualifies you to be a plumber. Period. The issue Jimmy and the rest of us at the adult table recognize is that jobs require certain training and experience and being a plumber does not qualify you to be Sec of DHS.
Had Roger, Rebecca, Patrick and all the others who rushed to Jimmy’s Kimmel’s defense actually read what I had written, they would see that I did not suggest - even remotely - that a plumber was inherently qualified to hold a cabinet position. What I said was that being a plumber should not disqualify a person from holding such a position. Big difference. Doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, fireman, and university professors are no more or less qualified to run the DHS than plumbers, electricians, or carpenters – but should they all be dismissed as “unqualified” simply because they made a living in some other vocation?
As I wrote in my original post, credentials and diplomas are great ways to bolster a person’s credibility, especially if we’re talking about mastering a specific skill. I think we can all agree that plumbers, accountants, mechanics, and surgeons should all have to prove themselves competent before hanging out a shingle. But what do their credentials and diplomas have to do with their actual competency? Are we not already surrounded by a legion of perfectly qualified experts who don't know what the hell they're doing? Moreover, what do credentials and experience have to do with wisdom, honesty, common sense, integrity, courage, the ability to lead, or any other virtue we’d like to have in our elected officials?
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to question Mullin’s suitability for this role. But there’s no legitimate reason to disqualify him simply because he used to be a plumber. Just as there was no legitimate reason to dismiss AOC because she used to tend bar. As for the joke itself, here’s an honest question. If Senator Mullin was a retired doctor instead of a retired plumber, do you believe he would have would made the same joke?
Roger, Rebecca, Patrick...be honest. Do you really think Jimmy would have said to his audience, "So, now we have a DOCTOR in charge of protecting us from terrorism? Hey – it worked for Dr. Suess – maybe it’ll work for Markwayne!"
Personally, I don't. Not in a million years. Why? Because no one would have found it funny, that’s why. Even though doctors are no more “qualified” to protect us from terrorists than plumbers are, Jimmy knows that doctors are widely respected in society, and that plumbers are not. He knows that medical degrees and doctorates are aspirational credentials, whereas plumbing certificates are not. The entire premise of his joke was based on a personal bias that he knew his audience shared – a bias that presupposes plumbers are uneducated, one-dimensional workers who never made it to college, and are therefore "unqualified" to do anything but plumb.
Jimmy is entitled to his opinion, along with anyone else who believes that Mullin is unqualified to lead the DHS. The Constitution, however, says otherwise, and so does the Senate. Likewise, reasonable people can disagree as to what is funny and what isn’t. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. What I do care about, is the extraordinary shortage of plumbers and electricians our country is facing, and the longstanding stigmas and stereotypes that continue to discourage people from considering a lucrative career in the skilled trades. Jimmy’s joke – and his audience’s reaction to it – is proof positive that those stigmas and stereotypes are alive and well.
PS. We have a lot of money set aside to help train the next generation of plumbers. Apply for a scholarship at https://t.co/vidLSYXCf6 Who knows? Could be the first step on your road to President..
Not trying to be a hater but she openly admitted that she cleared her skin with Accutane, Spironolactone, and thousands of dollars of esthetician treatments. The products she’s selling use the same active ingredients you can find at the drugstore. Just thinking about how my fellow girlies could spend the same price on actual quality medical grade skincare!
you see a toddler pass out mid-morning, gripping a tiny half eaten muffin, and when they wake up later, they just start eating the muffin again. this is real freedom. there are wild horses less free than this