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As an explosive diarrhea outbreak splatters across the country, Taco Bell is preparing for the worst.This week, the fast food chain — or at least its locations in Michigan — began temporarily pulling some of its staple ingredients to help stop the spread of cyclosporiasis, a foodborne parasite that causes sufferers to go running to the toilet even more often than a standard Taco Bell meal might.Many of your favorite menu items, like the Crunchwrap Supreme and the Cantina Chicken bowl, may be imperiled.“We are currently unable to sell Lettuce, Cilantro Onion, Pico de Gallo, and Guacamole due to a…
The soaring popularity of sports betting apps and prediction markets has alarmed researchers, who’ve observed a spike in risky gambling behavior and addiction. It’s practically impossible to watch a game of any sport without being bombarded with ads for the controversial services — in large part thanks to a major regulatory vacuum following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling — making it a thorny and pervasive social issue.And sports betting companies are going to extreme lengths to keep addicts hooked. While they’ve long attempted to distance themselves from traditional gambling, the similarities are overwhelming and impossible to ignore. As the Philadelphia…
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has long heavily relied on selling science fiction to investors.He wants to pollute our planet’s orbit — already brimming with junk — with gigantic orbital data centers. Then, he wants to settle on the surface of the Moon. Ultimately, he wants to make humanity an interplanetary species by building a city on Mars with the help of an enormous fleet of Starship spacecraft, leaving a planet reeling from a climate crisis behind.It’s the kind of lofty — and, according to his many critics, delusional — thinking that turned him into an (almost) trillionaire. And, as SpaceX…
As the World Cup enters its final stages, soccer-themed AI slop is proliferating on X-formerly-Twitter.Sure, it’s no secret that X has suffered some major brain drain under the Musk regime. But the latest deluge of World Cup drek is so ridiculous, it makes the app’s crypto scammers look like Pulitzer finalists. First spotted by Out Sports, the deluge of AI engagement bait mostly revolves around semi-erotic scenarios playing out in the grandstand.In a clip with over 7 million views, one clickfarm account shared an AI-generated clip apparently playing on the distracted boyfriend meme: a woman’s boyfriend looking on jealously as…
During a speech commemorating the 250th anniversary of American independence last week, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani took aim at the richest person in the world to make a salient point about growing inequality.“We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry, while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more,” he said.Elon Musk, who temporarily became a trillionaire following his company SpaceX’s IPO last month, didn’t take kindly to the slight. “Mamdani has built nothing,” he tweeted angrily in response. “He is a taker, never a maker.”
SpaceX has radically reduced the cost of reaching space thanks to its reusable rockets, a revolutionary capability that has greatly set it apart from its competitors.But its dominance in the domain is seriously being challenged by China. Footage shared by the Chinese state-run CCTV shows a Long March 10B rocket booster being caught by an offshore recovery platform. Engineers can be heard cheering on the slowly descending rocket as it confidently sets down.As Engadget reports, that makes China only the second country to have pulled off such a feat, following the United States — a “historic breakthrough” that could have…
Donald Trump is now the first president to have an airport named after him while still in office. And what better way to commemorate this high honor than with lazy AI slop?Until a few days ago, the Palm Beach International Airport in South Florida was still called the Palm Beach International Airport. Now it’s the President Donald J. Trump International Airport, after a law that his pal and governor of Florida Ron DeSantis signed back in March took effect. Its old logo looked like a riff on Disney’s. Its new one, first revealed by Eric Trump in May, is clearly…
President Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump, cofounded a crypto mining venture called American Bitcoin Corp last year — and it’s already in deep trouble.As the Bitcoin community reels from a major downturn — the digital currency has plummeted by over 40 percent year to date — the company’s shares have plummeted right along with it, crashing over a whopping 95 percent compared to their peak.On Wednesday, its stock price hit an all-time low of well under $6, down from a high of $140 last autumn.That means Eric Trump’s six percent stake in the company has lost more than $600 million…
The massive surge of fossil fuel-powered data centers cropping up across the country are emitting an enormous amount of pollution, a pulsing indication that we’re headed in the wrong direction in the midst of a climate crisis.The extent of the this polluting activity is confounding. As climate action group Floodlight found in a recent investigation spotted by Wired, Texas has become the epicenter of the United States’ current obsession with constructing AI data centers. Companies are exploiting regulatory loopholes as they construct new facilities powered by pollutant-spewing onsite gas plants.The rate of growth of this “shadow grid” of custom power…
Flock surveillance cameras are blanketing the country, and to no one’s surprise, innocent people are being caught in their dragnet.At our sister publication The Drive, automotive journalist Joel Feder reports how he was suddenly swarmed by armed cops while test driving a Range Rover with his wife in Minnesota. The police used four squad cars to box him in in a coordinated maneuver; when he demanded an explanation, the officers said that they had been tracking him for days using Flock’s AI-integrated cameras, which had tagged his car as stolen — erroneously, as it turned out.It was a startling example…