Author: publisher
For director Neill Blomkamp, “District 9” must feel like an eternity ago. The 2009 sci-fi action film used a quasi-documentary style to tell a thrilling tale of a man fighting for survival against government-backed mercenaries while his body fused with alien DNA — even if, let’s be real, it was an extremely clunky allegory for Apartheid. The heaps of body horror and gritty special effects definitely helped, on top of a breakout performance from Sharlto Copley who conveyed a palpable sense of desperation. It was nominated for four Oscars and made loads of money: by the standards of the film…
Shares of Elon Musk’s embattled carmaker Tesla slid over 13 percent Thursday morning after posting dismal second quarter results the night before.The stock is hovering at around $324 at the time of writing, down over 15 percent over the last five days and about 28 percent year to date.The company missed Wall Street expectations, despite its core automotive segment generating just over $20 billion in revenue, up 23 percent from a year ago. However, the company’s gross profits dropped as operating expenses climbed far quicker than revenue, in large part thanks to AI-related capital expenses and other research and development…
Over four months after the deadly US bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Southern Iran, which killed 120 children and dozens of teachers and parents, questions still remain over how the horror unfolded.All available evidence suggests that the US military was behind the bloodbath. Images that show fragments of US Tomahawk missiles on the site, leaked commentary from military analysts, and operational profiles of the military forces involved in the region make a pretty air-tight case that the Pentagon bears responsibility for the horrific attacks.Adding to the mountain of evidence is a new in-depth analysis conducted by Sky…
Consumers and agricultural workers rejoice: the Trump administration has killed a key regulation meant to keep toxic human and industrial waste sludge from our food supply, because toxic sludge is apparently not a threat to public health.On Monday, the Guardian reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is tossing out a major body of research that formed the basis for regulations which would have effectively limited the amount of sewage byproduct we’re allowed to spray into the environment. The research, published not even two years ago, was conducted in order to study the consequences of toxic PFAS “forever chemical” compounds in…
President Donald Trump has a major problem with explosive diarrhea on his hands.On Tuesday, HHS secretary Robert Kennedy Jr declared that the ongoing outbreak of cyclosporiasis — a non-lethal but extremely unpleasant gut infection caused by the Cyclospora cayetanensis parasite — was “under control.”“We’ve identified the source of the outbreak, and the companies that are involved have implemented a recall,” he said, without elaborating any further or naming the companies.But considering that cases are still rising, the situation is very much not looking under control. According to a Tuesday update by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been…
Last week, a new lawsuit accused ChatGPT of encouraging the suicide of a young mother. The 29-year-old Christian Faith Madison died after walking into traffic, with her family arguing that the OpenAI chatbot had fueled her religious delusions during their extensive interactions, pushing her over the edge by romanticizing death.The story clearly struck a nerve. News of the wrongful death suit has sparked a furor online, with many horrified at how OpenAI kept its product online despite the clear risks it posed to some users’ mental health.“It is unconscionable that ‘ChatGPT-assisted suicide’ is becoming a recurring cause of death. a…
AI companies are pouring untold billions of dollars into enormous data centers in their efforts to sustain increasingly complex and resource-intensive AI models.It’s an extremely costly undertaking built on seemingly bottomless hype — and a mountain of debt. As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia found in a recent investigation, just five US tech giants — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — are hiding an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. That’s even more than the $1.35 trillion in debt the five companies officially reported in their financial data for the most recent quarter.Meta alone…
As shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX continue to dip, short sellers betting against the company are making an absolute fortune.As Reuters reported last week, short sellers had already made a whopping $8.7 billion in profit — and that was when the company’s stock was trading around $135. Since then, shares have cratered, dipping all the way down to an all-time low of $118 by Wednesday.As a result, even more short sellers are throwing themselves at the chance to bet against the company, as CNBC reports. According to estimates from financial software company S3 Partners, around 206 million shares are being…
Is it possible to not like a movie in a normal way? Can it simply not be “your thing” without being transposed onto some intangible, ever-raging culture war?It certainly isn’t if you’re an anti-woke crusader like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Like a lot of very online right wingers who are suddenly qualified classicists, he’s very upset about the new Odyssey adaptation directed by Christopher Nolan.Nolan, according to Musk, “desecrated Homer and groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar.” That’s because his movie dares to do stuff like cast Black women and a…
Shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX are continuing their weeks-long decline, hitting a new all-time low of around $115 by Wednesday afternoon.The scale of the accumulating losses since the company’s hotly-anticipated IPO last month is staggering. The company has wiped out over $1.1 trillion in market value since hitting an all-time high of $225 last month, and it’s possible that its decline is just getting started.The rocket company has given investors little to grasp onto, apart from an ever-optimistic Musk claiming that it could one day be worth more than the entire Earth. On Thursday, the company was forced to scrub…