The people stupid enough to need this are not people that should be anywhere near weapons.
The Army, Navy, and Air Force are once again requiring basic trainees to get vaccinated against influenza after the virus quickly swept through an Air Force base in Texas, sickening at least 222 recruits and hospitalizing four.
The outbreak flared just two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth abandoned a decades-long requirement for flu shots. The requirement was intended to keep armed forces healthy in their bases, which provide ideally tight conditions for a variety of pathogens, including influenza, to run rampant. Mandates stem from centuries of intertwining histories of militaries, war, and human pathogens that have firmly established the danger that infectious diseases pose to armed forces.
But in April, Hegseth claimed that flu shot requirements were "not rational" and said removing the requirement was "restoring freedom" to military members.
Because we don't live in a functioning democracy anymore
The health-focused news outlet STAT on Tuesday published a bombshell report that suggests President Donald Trump may have used his position of power to obtain a powerful new obesity drug not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration. According to the report, the FDA in April allowed one 79-year-old man to obtain Eli Lilly’s retatrutide, an experimental weight-loss drug…
There need to be some actual fucking consequences for mass death
Trillionaire Republican donor Elon Musk is threatening to sue California congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat, after Khanna mentioned the death toll associated with Musk’s actions at the Department of Government Efficiency. In an appearance on the “I’ve Had It” podcast, Khanna said that DOGE, the project launched by President Donald Trump and overseen for most of its existence by Musk…
Polymarket paid dozens of social media users to film themselves making fake bets for a promotion that aimed to convince people they can strike it rich on the prediction market, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation published on Saturday.
"In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like [George] Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance," the article said. "In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket."
Makihara, a college student, posted a video in January "that showed him winning $100,000 on a wager that President Trump would publicly say the word 'McDonald's' that month." But trade data showed that no one on Polymarket won such a bet in January, according to the Journal. This was one of 145 bets that Makihara appeared to place on Polymarket between January and May, but all of those bets were fake, the article said.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As Big Tech dumps billions of dollars into America's data center buildout, a slew of opportunities have opened up to the electricians wiring these massive facilities. In some cases, the scale of the projects and the demanding construction timelines are fueling talent wars for the industry's best and brightest. The US-based International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) has argued that its workers are "powering the AI Revolution," and a set of "Data Center Principles" published in March argues that union labor is "essential to the future of AI." Tech companies are trying to meet the moment: Meta recently announced a skilled trade academy program, and Google committed $50 million to help train people in skilled trades.
But amid growing national opposition to data centers, debates over the ethics of the massive buildout have started to pop up in some online pockets of the community. Threads about how AI will affect the economy now pepper r/electricians, a subreddit with around half a million monthly visitors. Some users wonder whether the work will eventually prompt widespread job losses. Others aren't sure if their labor makes them complicit in the damage done to local communities or whether it's unethical to take on data center work. For some, the answer is a firm no. Ultimately, they argue, work is work. An anonymous Midwest electrician who spoke to Wired acknowledged concerns about scams, corporate greed, and AI's impact on workers, but said he views data centers as an important source of career advancement. "This is most likely going to be a major part of our future. And if you can't beat them, join them," he said.
An electrician named Ryan, meanwhile, is strongly opposed to working on data centers because he distrusts the corporations and political environment driving AI development. Still, if the facilities are going to be built, he would prefer union workers construct them. "If they're going to get built, I'd rather they go union," he said.
Jesse, an IBEW electrician, sympathizes with communities negatively affected by data centers but does not believe the electricians building them should be blamed. In his view, opposition should instead be directed toward policymakers and the project approval process. "I think it's ridiculous if, to build a data center or any kind of a business, you're going to significantly impact the lives of that community in a negative way," he told Wired.
An electrician named Dante echoed some of those sentiments, arguing that data center work is no more ethically compromised than many other commercial construction projects. "We're almost always working for the worst possible people in the end, but we all need a paycheck," he said. He added that such projects are "essentially the same kind of work," typically performed for wealthy corporations seeking to become even richer.
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Meta has lobbied the U.S. Congress for legal immunity from child-harm claims tied to social media products such as Instagram, as it faces thousands of lawsuits from young users and their families, according to a source familiar with the matter and proposed legislative language reviewed by Reuters. If adopted by lawmakers and passed into law as part of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) under consideration in the U.S. Senate, such a provision could undermine thousands of lawsuits against Meta and other online platforms over harms to children. Meta and Google's YouTube face a combined $6 million in damages after they lost the first case at trial early this year. While legislators have given no indication of adopting the language, the lobbying effort shows the kind of legal protections Meta is seeking amid the biggest attempt to regulate online platforms in the U.S. since the 1990s. Meta has reportedly proposed the language in exchange for dropping its opposition to KOSA. Under the law, platforms would be required to mitigate harms to minors tied to features such as infinite scrolling, notifications, and appearance-altering filters.
The Trump administration is trying to help Elon Musk's xAI Corp. beat a Clean Air Act lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The US said the NAACP lawsuit threatens an xAI data center that powers Grok systems needed by the military.
The NAACP sued xAI and subsidiary MZX Tech in April, alleging that they violated the Clean Air Act by operating 27 gas turbines without an air permit in Southaven, Mississippi. The number of unpermitted turbines rose to 57 by mid-May and there were plans to install two more, the NAACP said in a June 12 filing.
"Defendants’ Colossus Gas Plant powers xAI’s nearby Colossus 2 data center, which in turn powers the chatbot 'Grok,'" the lawsuit said. The gas turbines have fueled both health concerns and noise complaints.
Of course it reeks of corruption, because it is corrupt.
When the US Department of Justice approved Paramount Skydance's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on Friday, a DOJ press release said "a rigorous eight-month investigation led by the [Antitrust] Division’s career staff" showed that the $111 billion deal would not harm competition or American consumers.
But according to The Wall Street Journal, the DOJ career lawyers who led that investigation "were leaning toward recommending a lawsuit challenging it on the grounds that the combination of the two movie studios would be anticompetitive and violate antitrust law." DOJ senior leaders closed the investigation "before career staffers who were concerned about the acquisition had an opportunity to object, according to people familiar with the matter," the WSJ reported.
Commenting on the report that the decision to allow the deal surprised staff investigators, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote that "the American people need to know if this merger was approved as a political favor. This reeks of corruption."
Fuck no. Getting rid of this as soon as it goes through. AppleTV needs to land yesterday.
Fox Corporation has agreed to buy Roku Inc. for $160 per share, an approximate enterprise value of $22 billion, the firms announced today.
The acquisition would unite Fox’s broadcast channels, including Fox, Fox News, Fox Business, and FS1, as well as its streaming businesses, including Tubi, a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platform that Fox bought in 2020, with Roku’s own FAST service, The Roku Channel, and Roku’s streaming hardware business, including its streaming sticks and smart TVs. Roku says it has 100 million households using its platform.
The most valuable part of Roku’s business isn't its hardware, which lost $19.1 million in the quarter ending March 31, 2026, but its the operating system (Roku OS) and advertising business. In that same quarter, Roku’s advertising and subscriptions business posted a gross profit of $584.1 million, with the advertising business pulling in $371 million in revenue. The COVID-19 pandemic helped Roku become profitable in 2021, but the company didn’t see annual profitability again until 2025.
A decade ago, AMD added a protection to its high-end CPUs to protect them against cold boot attacks and other types of physical exploits that siphon sensitive data out of the connected memory chips. Short for Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, TSME encrypts the entire contents stored in memory, making the data useless to physical attackers.
Over time, AMD added TSME to lower-end processors, including the consumer version of its Ryzen chips, a CPU that costs less than the Pro version. Over the years, users of these lower-end chips have gotten used to the added security. Recently and without warning or notice, this lower-end line of AMD chips suddenly dropped the protection, and did so in a way that was impossible to detect on Windows machines and required a fair amount of technical work when using Linux.
Now you see it, now you don't
AMD has yet to say why TSME worked on these CPUs, or even to confirm the change. AMD declined to answer questions sent by email other than to say TSME "is a security feature only applied to PRO CPUs as part of AMD PRO Technologies." The statement is the first known time the chipmaker has explicitly made this restriction public.
Anti-abortion protestors gather outside the U.S. Supreme Court. | Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
About a year ago, the Supreme Court handed down a baffling decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025). In Medina, South Carolina committed an obvious violation of federal Medicaid law, but the Court’s Republican majority seemed to bend over backward to prevent the patients affected by this legal violation from suing to enforce their rights. Among other things, the Court’s opinion in Medina was at odds with a decision the justices handed down just two years earlier in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski (2023).
As I wrote at the time, the best explanation for Medina was not legal; it was political. South Carolina broke federal law specifically because it illegally cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. The Republican justices appear to have bent the rules to ensure that an abortion provider would be defunded.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court handed down a new opinion in FS Credit Opportunities v. Saba Capital Master Fund, which only adds to the mystery about why Medina came down the way it did. The facts of FS Credit are quite different from the issues in Medina — FS Credit is a securities law case asking when investors may sue investment funds, while Medina concerned when patients may sue states for violating Medicaid law. But the legal issues in FS Credit and Medina are very similar. They both involve a legal doctrine known as “implied causes of action.”
Although Medina is the Court’s most recent case (prior to FS Credit) that deals with implied causes of action, the FS Credit decision does not cite Medina anywhere. Instead, it quotes heavily from decisions that the Court refused to follow in Medina. And it explicitly embraces a legal rule that the Court seemed to reject in Medina.
The rules governing implied causes of action are complicated enough to reduce even experienced lawyers to tears. But, if you bear with me, it will be difficult to avoid a simple conclusion: The Court appears to be manipulating these rules to achieve outcomes preferred by the Republican justices and the anti-abortion movement.
What is an implied cause of action?
Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion in FS Credit begins with a simple declarative sentence: “Congress, not the Judiciary, decides who may enforce the law.” Not all federal laws may be enforced through lawsuits, and not all people who may want to sue under a particular federal law are allowed to do so.
In some cases, a federal law explicitly states that it authorizes private lawsuits against violators of that law, or it states who is allowed to bring those suits. In other cases, a right to sue may be implied from statutory text that does not explicitly provide for such suits. These implicit rights to sue are known as “implied causes of action.”
Before Medina, the question of whether a particular federal law creates an implied cause of action was governed by the Court’s decision in Gonzaga University v. Doe (2002), which held that “for a statute to create private rights [to sue], its text must be phrased in terms of the persons benefited.”
Thus, for example, a hypothetical statute stating that “no sweaty person may be denied access to a shower” may be enforced through private lawsuits, because that law is phrased in terms of who benefits from it (sweaty people). A similar statute which provides that “states may not impede access to showers” would not be enforceable through private lawsuits, because that statute lacks the person-focused language demanded by Gonzaga.
Prior to the Medina decision in 2025, the Court repeatedly reaffirmed Gonzaga’s rule. It did so most recently in Talevski, which held that a federal law creates an implied cause of action when it is “‘phrased in terms of the persons benefited’ and contains ‘rights-creating,’ individual-centric language with an ‘unmistakable focus on the benefited class.’”
Under the Gonzaga framework, Medina should have been an open-and-shut case. The case involved a federal law that permits Medicaid patients to choose their health providers. South Carolina violated this law by refusing to allow Medicaid patients to choose Planned Parenthood as their health provider. Here is the relevant statutory text:
A State plan for medical assistance must … provide that … any individual eligible for medical assistance (including drugs) may obtain such assistance from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required (including an organization which provides such services, or arranges for their availability, on a prepayment basis), who undertakes to provide him such services.
This law contains the very kind of “individual-centric language” demanded by cases like Gonzaga and Talevski. It extends a right to “any individual,” providing that these individuals “may obtain” medical care from their chosen provider. It also concludes with a pronoun (“him”) that refers back to the individuals who benefit from the law.
And yet, in Medina, the six Republican justices rendered this statute unenforceable. And they did so in an opinion that didn’t even quote the relevant legal rule. The words “phrased in terms of the persons benefitted” appear nowhere in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion.
Gorsuch’s Medina opinion is very difficult to parse, but it appears to create a new rule establishing that no statute may create an implied cause of action unless that statute includes the magic word “right” — as in: an individual’s rights.
FS Credit relies on the same Gonzaga rule that the Court seemed to abandon in Medina
Barrett’s majority opinion in FS Credit, however, offers no hint that Medina even happened. Barrett does not at any point suggest that a statute must use any specific magic words in order to authorize private lawsuits. Instead, it relies on the pre-Medina framework established by cases like Gonzaga.
FS Credit holds that “to create a private right, a statute must use ‘rights-creating language’ aimed at protecting ‘a particular class of persons.’” It then quotes the key line from Gonzaga, which states that “statutes create private rights when they are ‘phrased in terms of the persons benefited.’” So Gonzaga is back, baby.
But, if the Court wanted to dispel the impression that Medina was a one-off decision that simply came up with an excuse to deny relief to abortion providers and their patients, Barrett’s FS Credit opinion needed to explain why the new rule that the Court seemed to apply in Medina does not apply in FS Credit. Instead, Barrett’s opinion does not include a single citation to Medina.
One possibility is that the two cases are different because Medina involved Medicaid, which is a federal spending program, while FS Credit involves a statute regulating private businesses. Gorsuch’s opinion in Medina says that “spending-power statutes like Medicaid are especially unlikely” to contain implied causes of action. So maybe the magic word rule that Gorsuch appeared to rely on in Medina only applies to Medicaid and other cases involving government spending programs.
But Talevski, the Supreme Court case decided two years before Medina, didn’t just reject the argument that there are different rules for federal spending programs; it outright mocked this argument. The losing party in Talevski, that decision explained, “urges us to reject decades of precedent” and to “rewrite” a key federal law to exempt federal spending programs from the Gonzaga rule. But Talevski “reject[s]” this “invitation to reimagine Congress’s handiwork (and our precedent interpreting it).”
Another possibility is that Medina is different from FS Credit because Medina involved a “Section 1983” lawsuit — a lawsuit brought under the federal law permitting individuals to bring civil rights claims against state governments and state officials — and FS Credit does not. Gorsuch’s Medina opinion describes the specific issue before his Court in that case as “whether the plaintiffs before us may maintain a § 1983 suit to enforce Medicaid’s any-qualified-provider provision “
But the problem with this distinction is that Gonzaga — the precedent behind the Court’s reasoning in FS Credit — was itself a Section 1983 case. So, for as long as Gonzaga has been the law, the Court has held that its rule applies to cases brought under Section 1983. Medina is the only exception.
Perhaps there is some other way to distinguish between Medina and FS Credit. But, again, the Court did not provide such an explanation in the FS Credit opinion.
And, without such an explanation, it’s hard to escape the same conclusion that I reached a year ago, when Medina was first handed down. Medina was not decided in good faith. The actual holding of Medina is that abortion providers and their patients cannot enforce their rights, because the Republican justices say so.
The central rule in any nation governed by the rule of law is that similar cases must be treated similarly, regardless of whether a group that individual judges dislike — or even view as morally repugnant — benefits from that rule. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 1989 essay, “when, in writing for the majority of the Court, I adopt a general rule. … I not only constrain lower courts, I constrain myself as well.” Because “if the next case should have such different facts that my political or policy preferences regarding the outcome are quite the opposite, I will be unable to indulge those preferences.”
Medina fails the Scalia test. There cannot be a special carve out for abortion providers or abortion patients that denies them the same right to sue enjoyed by any other litigant.
A massive societal failure. No trillionaire should ever exist
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Few business leaders have been as deeply embedded in popular culture as Elon Musk, the ambitious entrepreneur who has become a central figure in internet culture and amassed a fortune that has made him the world's first trillionaire. At a time when concerns about inequality are high and public attitudes toward the ultra-wealthy have soured, Musk has managed to retain a loyal following despite his stratospheric net worth and without the folksy persona that endeared other tycoons such as Warren Buffett to the masses.
While admirers view Musk's no-filter style as part of his appeal, critics have accused him of wielding oligarch-like power, raised concerns about governance at his companies and objected to his increasingly partisan political interventions. Still, SpaceX, the sprawling rocket, satellite and AI company that together with electric-car maker Tesla form the center of Musk's empire, raised a record $75 billion in its initial public offering on Thursday, highlighting investor enthusiasm for his business ventures. Prior to the share sale, Forbes pegged his net worth at roughly $780 billion, far ahead of the man next in line, Alphabet co-founder Larry Page.
"The second richest person has been hovering around $300 billion, so about less than one-third of what Musk can potentially be worth tomorrow," said Matt Durot, deputy editor at Forbes Wealth. "And only one other person, (Oracle founder) Larry Ellison, has ever been worth $400 billion." Most of Musk's wealth now rests with SpaceX, where he holds a stake worth roughly $866 billion. Along with Tesla and the rest of his properties, his net worth will exceed $1.1 trillion when the stock begins trading Friday, according to Forbes and Reuters calculations based on company filings.
Pokemon Go players' optional location scans reportedly helped train Niantic Spatial's visual positioning system, which uses camera imagery and 3D maps to navigate when GPS is unavailable or jammed. According to DroneXL, that technology is now being paired with Vantor's drone navigation software for military and intelligence use, raising questions about whether gamers understood that footage collected for in-game rewards could eventually support defense systems. From the report: The pipeline runs from a mobile game to the battlefield in three steps. Players scanned the physical world. Niantic Spatial turned those scans into a 3D map that lets a machine locate itself by sight when satellite signals fail. And in December 2025, Niantic Spatial announced a partnership with Vantor, the defense and intelligence firm formerly known as Maxar Intelligence, to fuse that ground-level system with Vantor's aerial navigation software for use in GPS-denied operations.
I have spent years covering how drones lose their way the moment an electronic warfare unit switches on a jammer, a problem that has spread from the battlefield into civilian airspace, from Ukrainian workshops cycling through navigation generations to American programs scrambling for alternatives. The unsettling part of this story is not the technology. It is where the training data came from, and whether the people who supplied it would have agreed had anyone explained the destination. "Now as part of Scopely (the Saudi-owned company that acquired Niantic last year for $3.5 billion), Pokemon GO data is not shared with Niantic Spatial," a company spokesperson said in a statement to Kotaku. "AR Scans collected through Pokemon GO were submitted voluntarily by players who opted into the feature and were subject to the applicable Terms of Service and Privacy Policy at the time. The discontinuation of AR scanning and the end of data sharing with Niantic Spatial were part of the transition planning associated with Pokemon GO's move to Scopely."
Good. This whole "no one's responsible for AI output" is not sustainable.
A Munich regional court has ruled (PDF) that Google can be held directly liable for false claims in AI Overviews. The case involved AI Overviews falsely linking two publishers to scams and shady business practices, with the court rejecting Google's argument that users could simply check the sources themselves. The Decoder reports: Google's AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results, the court argues. The AI rewrites and judges results "in its own words and according to its own structure," the ruling says. In the case at hand, for example, it opened with confident claims like "Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices," then built its own structure with a summary, red flags for the alleged scam, and tips for users. The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements." Google built the AI, Google offered it to users, so Google owns what it produces, "because it alone has influence over the AI's offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates."
The court also examined existing rulings from Germany's Federal Court of Justice (BGH), which gave traditional search engines and autocomplete limited liability. The BGH had argued that search engine operators were only liable as indirect infringers because they merely made third-party content findable. A proactive duty to check results would threaten how search engines work. The Munich court found that this reasoning doesn't apply to AI overviews. A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate "independent, new, and substantive statements" by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites. And only Google can check those statements, the court said, "at least by comparing the underlying third-party websites with its own statements based on them." The court also noted that the AI overview is "by no means absolutely necessary" for using the internet. Traditional search results already help users sort through information, the AI overview is just an extra feature. At the hearing, Google argued that users could check the linked sources themselves to verify if the AI summary was correct. It also said that these users knew "that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted." The court rejected this.
"When Hugo Parra was arrested last year on felony charges, his pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears," reports the Times of San Diego:
San Diego police had a description of the Alfa Romeo car he was riding in [but no license plate number] and a witness who identified him during a curbside lineup as the man who brandished a handgun in Golden Hill. They had also checked the city's automatic license plate camera system, run by the private company Flock, and got a "hit," substantiating the claim. The problem, says attorney Alex Coolman, was that Parra was five miles away from Golden Hill at the time of the crime, and the so-called hit from the license plate reader was captured before any police pursuit began. "This Flock hit was obviously the wrong car, as it could not have been in both places simultaneously," said Coolman, who represents Parra and the driver, 23-year-old Ariel Beltran.
Despite the signs pointing to it being a different Alfa Romeo, police arrested Beltran and Parra... [An officer had informed dispatch that one of the men "matched the victim's description, other than having a different-colored hooded sweatshirt."] Parra spent nearly one month behind bars, missing Thanksgiving and other special events with his family, before the assault with a firearm and evasion charges were dropped.
Parras says he was incarcerated with actual murderers, according to the article, and Parra and Beltran are now preparing to sue the city, seeking $1.5 million each in damages for civil rights violations and negligence. Their claim notes they'd driven past several other Flock cameras which officers could've used to corroborate their story (not to mention location data on their cell phones).
Meanwhile, the article also notes that last month the Institute for Justice "identified at least 17 cases in the United States of officers allegedly using Automated License Plate Reader technology to keep tabs on partners, exes, and strangers who had caught their eye..."
Damn right. The product failed and harm resulted. Pay up.
The injured teenage survivor of a January 2025 shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee high school recently sued the manufacturer of an “AI gun detection” system that failed to detect the handgun that left two dead, including the shooter.
According to the lawsuit, which was filed in Davidson County court last month, the security company Omnilert either knew or should have known that there were “significant operational limitations in its gun detection system that could result in detection failures during actual emergencies, including limitations based on camera placement, proximity of the weapon to camera sensors, camera angle, lighting, and weapon visibility.”
Omnilert cofounder Ara Bagdasarian declined Ars’ invitation to answer questions about the lawsuit. System Integrations, the other defendant in the case, which resold the Omnilert system, also did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.
Five leading scientists were ousted from the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) in New Orleans on Friday. Their crime: handing out copies of an editorial, published in the journal Diabetes Care on April 29, sharply criticizing the Trump administration's ongoing attacks on scientific research.
Those ousted were Steven Kahn, professor of medicine at the University of Washington and editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care, who co-authored the published editorial; former ADA President Desmond Schatz of the University of Florida, Gainesville; Aaron Kelly, pediatrics professor at the University of Minnesota; Justin Ryder of Northwestern University; and Irl Hirsch, also of the University of Washington. The five were handing out reprints of the editorial outside a room where NIH director Jay Bhattacharya had been scheduled to speak. Bhattacharya canceled and another NIH official spoke in his stead.
"They physically grabbed us, forced us out of the conference center, and now are telling us we can no longer attend this meeting," Kelly told MedPage Today, which first reported the incident. "They're taking our lanyards. It really has come to this in America. Censorship is real. America needs to stand up. Scientists, stand up. Physicians, stand up."
Thank goodness someone is holding the line against this lunacy.
SpaceX has requested unusually swift entry into several leading stock market indexes as a condition of its historic stock market debut. But the S&P 500 stock market index representing many of the largest profitable US companies has surprised market analysts by refusing to bend the rules for Elon Musk’s space and AI company.
The June 4 decision by S&P Dow Jones Indices—the company that creates and manages stock market indexes such as the S&P 500—means that SpaceX will not gain accelerated access to potentially billions more dollars through passive investment funds that automatically purchase shares of S&P 500 companies. Modifying the rules in response to SpaceX's request could have also allowed leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to gain entry not long after their own expected initial public offerings (IPOs). That possibility has now been shuttered.
The news will likely come as a relief to people concerned about passive investor money and people’s retirement savings plans having greater exposure to the market risks associated with SpaceX’s big bet on AI and speculative orbital data center plans. AI companies are generally facing more challenges in funding and building expensive AI data centers, even as they shift more of the subsidized costs of running AI services onto shocked customers through usage-based pricing.
Scott Pelley, one of the most well-known journalists on the CBS News roster, revealed that the pro-Trump management now leading the network has pressured him to inject bias and lies in news stories. On Tuesday night, Pelley was fired from CBS. In a statement released via social media, Pelley said the current management of CBS is casting the “legend” of CBS News aside, “apparently to curry a…
Republican Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Here’s a familiar story. On Tuesday night, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that will almost certainly give the Republican Party an additional seat in the US House of Representatives. Not all of the justices disclosed how they voted, but the decision appears to have come down 6-3 along partisan lines — that is, the six Republican justices voted to give the GOP another House seat, while the Court’s three Democrats dissented.
In fairness, the GOP justices’ most recent decision in Allen v. Milligan fits a broader pattern in this Supreme Court’s gerrymandering cases that can be explained without accusing those Republican justices of deciding election cases solely on the basis of partisanship. The Court has spent the past seven years dismantling all federal safeguards against gerrymandering.
Allen fits this pattern. On its face, the Republican justices’ brief opinion in the case is just the next iterative step toward a legal regime where states can draw maps however they want, regardless of whether those maps are drawn to favor one political party, or whether they are drawn to lock nonwhite voters out of power.
But the Republican justices’ new decision stands out because, while the Allen opinion is consistent with the Court’s broader trend toward redistricting anarchy, its actual legal arguments are inconsistent with things the same justices said as recently as one month ago. The decision is also inconsistent with previous orders that the Court’s Republican majority handed down in the Allen case itself.
If you want the full rundown of all of these inconsistencies, go read Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in this most recent decision. There are so many of them that it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Court’s Republicans aren’t being honest about their true motivations. The simplest explanation for Tuesday night’s decision is that the Court’s Republican majority is bending the rules because they want the Republican Party to hold a majority in the House.
The decision in Allen breaks a rule that the Supreme Court announced one month ago
At the end of April, the Court’s Republican majority handed down Louisiana v. Callais, which completed a project that at least one member of that majority began more than four decades ago.
When this bill was being debated in Congress, however, there was a conservative faction within the Reagan administration that opposed it, and which unsuccessfully urged Reagan to veto it. Future Chief Justice John Roberts was a member of this faction, and as a fairly junior lawyer wound up doing much of the granular work that is often assigned to young attorneys. Among other things, Roberts wrote about two dozen memos opposing the 1982 amendment, and he drafted speeches and talking points for senior lawyers who also opposed it.
Although Roberts’ faction failed in 1982, Roberts held onto his grudge against the Reagan amendments to the VRA, and his faction eventually took over the Republican Party. All six of the Court’s Republicans joined Callais, which repealed the 1982 amendment and imposed a new rule requiring voting rights plaintiffs challenging a gerrymandered map to show that state lawmakers acted with racist intent.
In the Allen case, however, a three-judge panel that included two Trump-appointed judges determined that “we cannot understand [Alabama’s new congressional maps] as anything other than an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians’ voting strength.” The panel reached that conclusion in an astonishingly thorough 571-page opinion handed down in 2023. After Callais, the Supreme Court ordered that panel to reconsider its ruling, and the panel did not change its mind — concluding again that Alabama engaged in intentional race discrimination.
Among other things, the panel pointed out that the 2023 Alabama law drawing the new maps achieved its racial goals by holding together a majority-white area of the state known as the Gulf Coast, while dividing a Black-majority region known as the Black Belt. Incredibly, the 2023 state law said that the Gulf Coast “shall be kept together to the fullest extent possible,” in part because Alabama lawmakers wanted to preserve its “distinct culture stemming from its French and Spanish colonial heritage.”
The state legislature, in other words, wrote into the statute itself that it wished to preserve a European American region of the state’s ability to elect its preferred representative, while the same law also broke up an African American region of Alabama. If that doesn’t give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred, nothing does.
The Republican justices’ latest opinion in Allen, meanwhile, is only four pages long. And it spends only a single sentence responding to the hundreds of pages of evidence the lower court compiled, which shows that Alabama engaged in intentional race discrimination. According to the Republican justices, the lower court “did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith” that judges are supposed to apply to state lawmakers who are accused of race discrimination.
So, to summarize, just over one month after the Court’s Republicans declared in Callais that racial gerrymandering plaintiffs could still prevail if they can show that a state’s legislature engaged in intentional race discrimination, those same Republicans appear to have abandoned that rule. And the upshot is that the Republican Party gets an extra seat in the US House.
The GOP justices’ Allen opinion isn’t even consistent with their previous decisions in the same case
As Sotomayor explains in her dissent, there are several other examples of the Republican justices taking one position in previous decisions, then abandoning them in order to hand a victory to Alabama Republicans.
The most galling is that, in Callais, the Republican justices explicitly stated that “we have not overruled Allen,” a reference to the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in this very same case, where the Court struck down Alabama’s maps and ordered it to draw new ones. It’s now clear that the Republican justices were lying when they said that in Callais. The Court’s 2023 ruling in Allen held that Alabama must draw maps with at least two Black congressional districts, while its 2026 ruling in Allen holds that Alabama does not need to do so after Callais. So Callais overruled the 2023 opinion in Allen.
Sotomayor also spends much of her opinion warning that the Court’s latest Allen decision is likely to cause “chaos” in Alabama’s upcoming congressional election, because the primaries in that election are supposed to take place on August 11, leaving the state with very little time to complete the time-consuming task of going through each voter’s record to make sure they are assigned to the correct district.
According to Sotomayor, after a federal district court first struck down an earlier version of Alabama’s maps in 2022, the state told the Supreme Court that it needed to block that decision because the district court handed it down four months before a primary election, and “four months was not enough time to change congressional maps.” Sotomayor’s Republican colleagues appear to have agreed with that claim. Indeed, when the Court agreed to block the 2022 decision, two justices warned that the lower court’s order “would require heroic efforts by . . . state and local authorities in the next few weeks—and even heroic efforts likely would not be enough to avoid chaos and confusion.”
So, when a lower court handed down a decision that would have benefited the Democratic Party by requiring Alabama to draw a map that would elect an additional Black Democrat, the Republican justices appear to have concluded that four months wasn’t enough time for Alabama to comply with that decision. Now, however, those same justices have decided that the state can pull off the same “heroic efforts” in just two months.
In fairness, the Court’s Republicans have occasionally ruled against their political party when that party presents particularly weak arguments. In 2020, for example, the Supreme Court famously rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his loss to former President Joe Biden.
As I wrote at the time, handing a victory to Trump would have required herculean efforts by the justices, because Biden won by a wide enough margin that the Court would have needed to overturn the election results in three different states. That was too much even for this Supreme Court.
But this is still the same Supreme Court which held in 2024 that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. So the Republican justices are willing to do extraordinary favors for their political party and its leadership, even if they don’t do the GOP’s bidding in literally every case that comes before them.
It is safe to say, in other words, that the Republican justices are putting a thumb on the scales of the 2026 midterms. That’s not the same thing as putting a one-ton sack of concrete on those scales. But the most reasonable explanation for the GOP justices’ behavior is that they want to give an advantage to the Republican Party and are willing to contradict their own past decisions in order to do so.
Bill Pulte speaks to reporters outside the West Wing of the White House on January 9, 2026. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is putting an unqualified loyalist in charge of US spy agencies.
What’s happening? On Tuesday, Trump announced in a social media post that he was appointing Bill Pulte, who is already director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as acting director of national intelligence.
Pulte will replace former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in the role after Gabbard announced her resignation last month, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis. (Gabbard has a few weeks left on the job, though: Her resignation will take effect June 30.)
What does the DNI do? As acting director of national intelligence, Pulte’s job — ostensibly — is to oversee and coordinate the 18 agencies that make up the US intelligence community, including the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency. It’s a powerful role, though one that has been sidelined for much of the second Trump administration because of Gabbard’s conflicts with the White House.
What’s the context? As my colleague Andrew Prokop reported last year, Pulte has spent his time in government to date freelancing as Trump’s attack dog, including digging up flimsy accusations of mortgage fraud against Fed governor Lisa Cook, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), and New York Attorney General Letitia James (only one of which resulted in an indictment, which has since been dismissed). He also pushed Trump to fire former Fed chair Jay Powell.
Why does this matter? Gabbard’s tenure as DNI was by turns bizarre, alarming, and ineffectual — but it could well pale in comparison to what Pulte might do with the role.
Pulte has no background in national security or intelligence, so his sole qualification for the DNI job is seemingly his relentless, bottomless loyalty to Trump. As FHFA director, that looked like trumped-up schemes to indict Trump’s enemies; at the head of the intelligence community, with power over domestic and foreign intelligence collection, it could be a far more serious threat.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
Hi readers! Here’s a story from The Atlantic making the case for inviting people over on a spontaneous, low-stakes basis. It’s great advice — we’ve echoed it in the pages of this newsletter before! — and spending time with friends is a guaranteed way to feel better about the state of the world. You can read it with a gift link here. Have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!
Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac will reportedly drop into "reduced functionality mode" on July 13, 2026, when a license-validation certificate expires, leaving perpetually licensed apps able to open files but not edit or save them. Slashdot reader joshuark shares a report from OSnews: "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (2026) is a scheduled remote degradation of perpetually-licensed Microsoft Office software for macOS and iOS, set for July 13, 2026 when a license-validation certificate used by the Office apps expires," reports the Consumer Rights Wiki. "After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft assured customers their installed apps would 'continue to function.' The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined 'reduced functionality mode,' in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved. By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the 'continue to function' clause was removed."
Microsoft's advice to the users they're stealing from is to keep using the applications as mere viewers, switch to the free Office 365 web applications, pay for a 365 subscription, or buy a brand new regular copy of Office 2024. None of these make any sense, and clearly, all of this should be illegal, but it's not because the software industry is a clown show.
Federal energy efficiency rebate programs will no longer cover a switch from fossil fuels to electricity for heating, according to long-awaited guidance from the Department of Energy.
The department published an update on how it will implement consumer programs with $8.8 billion in funding. The new provisions include eliminating use of diversity, equity and inclusion considerations, among other changes.
This follows legal challenges after President Donald Trump issued an executive order last year, upon returning to office, canceling the release of funds from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, including rebates for home energy efficiency. A coalition of states successfully sued to restore the funding, obtaining an injunction in March 2025.
Good, looks like those terminations may have been premature. Good luck with what comes next.
In April, GitHub announced that it was moving subscribers from request-based billing to a usage-based model for its AI-powered Copilot service. As that new pricing model goes into effect today, many GitHub Copilot users are reporting some extreme sticker shock as they realize just how quickly their previous "normal" usage is burning through their newly limited monthly allotment of AI credits.
That's a big change from previous months, when GitHub Copilot subscribers were allocated a certain number of "requests" and "premium requests" based on their payment tier. GitHub said that the old system meant that "a quick chat question and a multi-hour autonomous coding session [could] cost the user the same amount," forcing Copilot itself to "absorb much of the escalating inference cost behind that usage." Indeed, some Copilot users have been sharing estimates from GitHub's own tool showing that their previous monthly usage would rack up bills in the thousands of dollars under the new pricing plan.
For many years (ten now, about which, more soon) McMansion Hell has featured many prominent and diverse atrocities from all over these great United States and sometimes beyond them. However, most of these posts have consisted of houses built during the McMansion Era proper – from the 80s up through around the early 2010s.
This is for a number of reasons. First of all: I like these houses because they are insane. Second of all, they are indeed quite different from one another – they represent the owner’s idiosyncratic if poorly rendered desires and fantasies. They are heavily psychologically loaded buildings. One family dreams endlessly of Tuscany, another wants to recreate the mall. All interiorize previously exterior forms of consumption.
These houses were also very expensive to build compared to their contemporary iterations: all real, solid wood cabinetry and trim, wrought iron railings, marble floors, elaborate murals - none of this is cheap. This is not to say that I’m nostalgic for the classical McMansion (though many are) only that it, like, most other facets of architectural and everyday life, have become progressively cheaper and more bland.
The McMansion never truly goes away. It merely changes shape over time. One of the shapes it currently takes is a particularly loathsome imitation of contemporary high architecture (specifically the kind of houses architects love to build for celebrities in California) executed in the most wretchedly parsimonious manner possible. It feels cheap to use the word ‘slop’ but their indiscriminate nature - the way they have no regard for why or how the things they imitate even work - allows it. Of all the building forms that could be generated with AI, this is the most likely. At any rate, behold:
Yes this is a real house. Yes you can buy it for $6 million in, yet again, Barrington, IL. It has 5 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms totaling 11,600 square feet. But most importantly, it looks like dogshit, and that’s with ten layers of Photoshop have been used to gussy it up which, by the way, also makes it appear entirely not of this world. Were it not for the photos of the empty interiors, I myself would have trouble trusting my own eyes. Part of the reason it looks so unreal is because the design itself is absurd, as though someone created four equally ugly vessels and threw them up one by one.
In 2017, in a now-deleted essay for Curbed (RIP - they destroyed the archive) I called these types of houses McModerns, simply because they were McMansions dressed up in modernist garb, which they wore no differently than they would Neo-Tudor or Mediterranean (broadly construed.) These houses don’t warrant a new neologism, but they do feel like a degraded or perhaps even gonzo version of even that old concept. Slop works fine too, especially because half of what’s in these images isn’t real.
Much fascinates me about these houses, however one of the most unique elements vis a vis the last 30 years of building is how overtly and almost hostilely masculine they are. Anything that can be construed as feminized - color, softness, ornament - has been ruthlessly purged. They also rip off tech industry minimalism which only ads to their bro-ey nature. While previous iterations of McModernism (think new builds in Colorado with fake wood exteriors) scream dads with IPAs, these houses scream Reddit to me. They are Elon Musk-adjacent in sentiment.
By the way, this is what that room looks like without the fake furniture. It’s basically a sunroom.
Whole Foods would like to call in a robbery.
Because these houses are designed by men, for men, no one involved has learned how a kitchen works. Many are calling this setup the “grindset tiktok video kitchen.” This is the kitchen you see in those day in the life of an AI startup founder videos your algorithm forces you to watch against your will.
Virtual staging is actual literal slop. In fact, one can say that it was an early harbinger of the ontological crisis we now face, one of the first instances where one is forced against one’s will to question reality, what one sees with one’s own eyes. Beyond that, I think virtual staging is literally a form of lying. You can use it to make a space look bigger or smaller than it is. In this – lying to impress – it also has a lot in common with AI. This dining room has nothing to do with the world I’m living in. These chairs are not my problem.
It’s actually AMAZING how much of what’s in this house, beyond the furniture, is fake. Every single material is fake. The stone is aluminum paneling. The plants are plastic. The concrete is printed on some kind of surface (as evidenced through its repetitive pattern), though it’s hard to say from just pictures. I don’t even trust the floors!!
Ok if you haven’t read Kelly Pendergrast’s amazing essay “Merchandizing the Void” about how houses are all like stores now, HERE IS THE LINK. Some ideas never die, they just evolve, king. Like you.
Please, I’m very cold.
Unfortunately there are no pictures of the rear exterior of this house, so this is where we will have to conclude for today. That being said, these houses and their antecedents are developing a design language all their own that will, in time, be as culturally rich to us as the houses of yore. The problem is they are less visually interesting. They are houses made to scroll in and scroll right by. Expect to see more of them here, but only if they have something, anything to say.
An updated analysis comparing healthcare systems across 20 countries finds once again that the US system is an outstandingly poor performer, summarized as being a "persistent failure" for its high costs, poor health outcomes, and premature deaths.
"Americans pay more for health care, get less in return, and remain far more exposed to illness, debt, and insecurity than their peers," the report concludes.
The report comes from The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation focused on healthcare system performance, which periodically conducts such comparative analyses. The new report is based on 2024 data and compares the US to 19 countries, including many in Europe, as well as Australia, Canada, Chile, Israel, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
Robinhood is launching beta support for a new feature that will let AI agents make payments and trade stocks on users' behalf. The company is also rolling out a virtual credit card for AI agents, with spending limits and approval controls. TechCrunch reports: Robinhood said users on its platform can now create a separate account for their AI agents and connect them to a dedicated wallet. While these agents would be able to read and analyze users' portfolios to come up with trading strategies and suggest investments, they'll only be able to access the pre-loaded balance in the dedicated wallet to place orders.
Users will get notifications of all trades their AI agent makes and will be able to monitor their activities within the Robinhood app. For some trades, agents will show a preview that users may have to approve before the order is executed. The company said it has also built in fraud detection protection, in which a team from Robinhood would review suspicious trades and help users resolve disputes.
Robinhood says users can connect their AI agents to its Model Context Protocol (MCP) service to do things like analyze concentration risk and sector exposure, execute trades, or look through analyst notes to identify new investment opportunities across various sectors. The agentic trading feature is launching in beta and only allows stock trading right now. The company says it plans to add support for options, crypto, event contracts, futures, and prediction markets soon.
