ECP NetHappenings Humans are going back to the moon in 2 days

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BITCOIN

Fed Chair Jerome Powell warns US national debt is growing “substantially” faster than the economy and says it’s not sustainable. “It will not end well if we don’t do something fairly soon.”
video https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/2038650848931193203

“it will not end well” is the closest thing we have to a fiscal plan.

And what should we do about it? Buy Bitcoin

The decline in uncertainty following the Covid-19 panic peak helped fuel a ~10x Bitcoin rally (from $7k to $70k)
The World Uncertainty Index just hit 105,000, the highest level in recorded history. Higher than Covid. Higher than 9/11. Higher than the Iraq War and the Global Financial Crisis combined.

People fleeing the Middle East had gold — couldn’t move it.

Bitcoin’s cypherpunk values finally make sense when you might need to leave fast.

War makes the Bitcoin case clear — @_dsencilsays when you need to leave fast, BTC beats gold.

“Bitcoin is based on energy: you can issue fake fiat currency, and every government in history has done so, but it is impossible to fake energy.” – 2025

“I’ve been trying to get my mid-60s dad to buy Bitcoin for his small business for 4 years.
He was resistant.
But this morning, he called me and said he’s putting half his cash into $STRC.
Why?
• The bank pays him basically nothing. $STRC currently yields 11.50%.
• It has low volatility and deep liquidity, so he can access it when he needs it.
• The cash reserve alone covers 2+ years of dividends.
• The Bitcoin reserve implies roughly 50 more years of dividend coverage.
In the end, pure BTC exposure wasn’t appropriate for his needs.
Instead, he bought Bitcoin in a form that gave him the comfort and flexibility he needs running a small business: $STRC.
If my dad figured it out, the trillions of capital searching for stability, liquidity, and yield will follow.
This is how Bitcoin grows over the next few decades.”

The http://Strategy.com dashboard gives you an early warning system for $STRC – just check the cash reserves and bitcoin coverage. Annually harvesting some ATH blow-off top profits from growth stocks into STRC grows your dividend distribution to compensate for inflation. https://www.strategy.com/strc

Jack Dorsey’s Square to automatically enable Bitcoin payments for millions of merchants from today. Starting today, eligible U.S. @Square sellers will begin having Bitcoin payments automatically enabled. Sellers who accept bitcoin will receive USD as default. This is how bitcoin as everyday money begins.

THE MOON

Humans are going back to the moon in 2 days and nobody is talking about this. On april 1st, NASA is launching 4 astronauts around the moon for the first time since 1972.
Let that sink in. the last time humans went this far into space, the internet did not exist. smartphones did not exist. most people reading this were not born yet. And now we are going back.
The mission is called Artemis II.
– 4 astronauts.
– 10 day journey.
– flying around the far side of the moon and coming back.

> Reid Wiseman. commander.
> Victor Glover. first person of color to travel beyond low Earth orbit.
> Christina Koch. first woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit.
> Jeremy Hansen. first non-american to travel beyond low Earth orbit.

this is not just a moon flyby. it is the beginning of something much bigger.

Artemis III will land humans on the moon in 2028. after that NASA plans to build an actual base on the lunar surface. a permanent human presence on another world. the first in history.

and after that. MARS.

we spent 50 years not going back. now we are building a road there.

april 1st. 6:24 pm EDT, mark the DATE.

space exploration is soo back

Twitter turns 20.

@BravoCoolee Twitter the only place where well articulated sentences still get misinterpreted.
You can say “I like pancakes” and somebody will say “So you hate waffles?”
No bitch. Dats a whole new sentence. Wtf is you talkin about.
61.4K Retweets 146K Likes

THE LAW

A federal judge just ruled that videos of DOGE staffers must stay up
— and they are devastating.
Under oath, they couldn’t define DEI. They admitted they never reduced the deficit. And they wiped out $100 million in humanities grants — including a Holocaust documentary — using ChatGPT. The regime tried to bury this. It didn’t work.
https://www.dworkinsubstack.com/p/shut-it-down-the-may-1-general-strike

Ex-SEAL says thinking US can just land and beat Iran is crazy Matt Bracken, a former US Navy SEAL: “The Iranians don’t mind dying for their cause, especially if we’re the ones invading, Anybody who thinks that the US has a technological upper hand, and that American marines are somehow tougher than the Persian Revolutionary Guards is really crazy. What they’re going to do is… let the Americans in. They’re going to turn off radar, turn off defenses… And then they’ll close the trap.”

If the only cost for breaking the law is a fine, then laws only apply to poor people. Every bank that touched Epstein’s money has settled. JPMorgan: $290 million. Deutsche Bank: $75 million. Bank of America: $72.5 million.
Banks wouldn’t be paying out $437 million in settlements if what was in the Epstein files was a hoax. The woman who sued Bank of America over Epstein is of Russian origin. She says BofA enabled Epstein to traffic and control her life from 2011 to 2019. The bank settled for $72.5 million. No banker has been charged. Reuters confirmed.

Karoline Leavitt: “President Trump wants to end dual citizenship.”

Note: Melania Trump and Barron Trump have dual citizenship: the United States and Slovenia.

 

Addressing thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Leo said
God “does not listen” to leaders who start wars and have “hands full of blood,” warning Jesus cannot be used to justify conflict.

The Surveillance Empire That Tracked World Leaders, a Vatican Enemy, and Maybe You
Inside the hidden world of First Wap, whose untraceable tech has targeted politicians, journalists, celebrities, and activists around the globe.

WHITE HOUSE ‘NEWS’ APP HAS CHINA-LEVEL BIG BROTHER PERMISSIONS
White House launched new app today claiming to let citizens to get news from source.
What they didn’t tell you was that it logs your location, notifications, biometrics & more.
We pay for this 1984.

AI

LIFE IS A LAZY SUSAN OF SHIT SANDWICHES

Every AI company spending billions on large language models is wasting their money.

 

LINKRicardo @Ric_RTP
https://x.com/Ric_RTP/status/2038613197737869457
The man who INVENTED modern AI just made a billion dollar bet that ChatGPT, Claude, and every AI company on earth is building the wrong technology.

Yann LeCun won the Turing Award in 2018 for creating the neural networks that made AI possible.

He spent a decade running AI research at Meta. Oversaw the creation of Llama and PyTorch, the tools that half the AI industry runs on.

Then he quit.

And raised $1.03 billion in a seed round.

The LARGEST seed round in European history. $3.5 billion valuation before generating a single dollar of revenue.

Bezos wrote the check. So did Nvidia. Samsung. Toyota. Temasek. Eric Schmidt. Mark Cuban. Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who invented the internet).

His new company is called AMI Labs. And it’s built on one thesis:

Every AI company spending billions on large language models is wasting their money.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok. They all work the same way. They predict the next word in a sequence. See “the cat sat on the” and predict “mat.” Scale that to trillions of words and you get something that sounds intelligent.

But LeCun says it doesn’t UNDERSTAND anything.

It can’t reason. It can’t plan. It can’t predict what happens when you push a glass off a table. A two year old can do that. GPT-5 cannot.

That’s why AI hallucinates. It doesn’t have a model of how the world actually works. It just predicts words.

His solution? Something called JEPA.

Instead of predicting words, it learns how the PHYSICAL WORLD works. Abstract representations of reality. Not language but physics.

Think about what that means.

Current AI can write your emails. LeCun’s AI could design a car, run a factory, operate a robot, or diagnose a patient without hallucinating and killing someone.

The CEO of AMI said it perfectly: “Factories, hospitals, and robots need AI that grasps reality. Predicting tokens doesn’t cut it.”

And here’s what’s really crazy to me…

LeCun isn’t some outsider throwing rocks. He literally built the foundations that ChatGPT runs on. He knows exactly how these systems work because he helped create them.

And after watching the entire industry sprint in one direction for three years, he raised a billion dollars to run the OPPOSITE way.

No product. No revenue. No timeline. Just pure research. He told investors it could take YEARS to produce anything commercial.

But they funded it anyway in just four months.

Meanwhile OpenAI just raised $120 billion and still can’t stop their models from making things up. Anthropic is building AI so dangerous they’re afraid to release it. Google is burning billions trying to catch up.

And the guy who started it all says they’re all solving the wrong problem.

Two Turing Award winners raised $2 billion in three weeks betting AGAINST the entire LLM approach. LeCun at AMI. Fei-Fei Li at World Labs.

The smartest people in AI are quietly building the exit from the technology everyone else is betting their future on.

Either they’re wrong and the trillion dollar LLM industry keeps printing.

Or they’re right and every AI company on earth just built on a foundation that’s about to crack.

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ECP NetHappenings Happy ThanksGiving 2025

HAPPY THANKSGIVING 2025

Oct/3/1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation:
Americans, “set apart & observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving & Praise to heal the wounds of the nation & restore it to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility & Union.”

THE TOP 1%

→ The top 1% increased their wealth to $52 trillion.
You cannot have a functioning economy when so few people at the top hold so much of the nation’s wealth. It’s not sustainable.

→BlackRock CEO Larry Fink on stage at a major conference just dropped the mask:

Watch the Video
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1993541958631899136/vid/avc1/320×568/YeknUR_fEwxfOQn5.mp4

Camus @newstart_2024
He called both gold and Bitcoin “assets of fear” – things you only buy when you’re scared of currency debasement, financial instability, or even “physical insecurities.”

Then, in the same breath, he got visibly excited about the real future: tokenizing BlackRock’s entire $5.3 trillion ETF empire (and eventually all financial assets) onto blockchain.

His exact vision:
– Every stock, bond, and fund sitting on “a singularity of a blockchain”
– You hold everything in a digital wallet
– Swap instantly from stablecoins <-> bonds <-> stocks <-> cash with virtually no fees and no middlemen
– “This is going to happen sooner, not later.”

Watch him say it himself https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1993541958631899136/vid/avc1/320×568/YeknUR_fEwxfOQn5.mp4

Critical reality check:
The same Larry Fink who dismissed Bitcoin as an “index of money laundering” a few years ago, whose firm owns massive stakes in nearly every S&P 500 company, sits at the heart of the WEF’s corporate network, and manages $11.5+ trillion, now wants to control the rails of the tokenized financial system.

Decentralization in theory, BlackRock custody in practice?

The biggest asset manager on earth becoming the plumbing owner of the next financial era isn’t exactly the “trustless” future many early crypto believers had in mind.

You tell me – revolution or the most elegant power grab ever dressed up as innovation?

(No investment advice, just verbatim quotes from a public conference appearance)

Crypto Corruption

→ Tether, “The Stable Company” just saw S&P cut its assessment rating from 4 to 5 – the lowest rating possible – citing persistent gaps in disclosure and high risk assets being held in its reserves.

Only in crypto would the bedrock stablecoin of crypto trading be viewed as so fundamentally risky. S&P notes

– high risk reserve assets
– persistent gaps in disclosure
– lack of robust regulatory framework
– no asset segregation
– limitations on primary redeemability

→ Calvin Ayre, a prominent financier of BSV,
a fork of bitcoin (BTC) that has lost 99% of its BTC value, is the subject of a new investigation by Tagesschau, a TV program of Germany’s largest public broadcasting network.

→ Trump, Crypto and a New Age of Corruption
Report on how Trump profits from crypto deals (World Liberty Financial, memecoins, Trump Media etc) and $ from foreign actors & corp interests, while regulations scale back, from @HouseJudiciary
https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2025-11-24.hjc-dem-staff-report-trump-crypto-corruption-small_0.pdf

HEALTH

Medicare for All is the answer.

Australia just recorded zero cervical cancer cases in women under 25 – for the first time since records began in 1982. This is what happens when a country commits to HPV vaccination and screening. We protect our girls and save lives.

@RobertKennedyJr has unilaterally brought back both measles and whooping cough, killing at least 5 children since January. Every senator who voted to confirm this lunatic should resign.
MEANWHILE THIS ASSHOLE is TOTALLY okay with forever chemicals being sprayed on our food.

RFK Jr on WiFi “I think it degrades your mitochondria. And it opens your blood brain barrier.” Just gibberish He just makes stuff up to sound scientific But it’s absolute horseSHIT

Dr. Ralph Lee Abraham promoted discredited treatments like ivermectin and, as Louisiana’s surgeon general, halted the state’s vaccination campaign. He’s just been quietly promoted to second in command at the CDC.

→ Daryl Fairweather, PhD | Chief Economist @FairweatherPhD
The expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies have me worried about more than just healthcare—I’m concerned about the housing market.

Before becoming Redfin’s chief economist, my first job in economics was at the Boston Fed in 2009, at the height of the foreclosure crisis. My task was to call homeowners facing foreclosure and ask survey questions about how they ended up in that situation.

The answer I heard most often was they had an unexpected medical expense.

Without affordable insurance, a sudden illness forced families to choose between their health and their mortgage. Harvard researchers backed this up, finding that nearly half of foreclosures at the time were linked to medical issues.

If ACA subsidies expire, we risk returning to that reality. Families could face skyrocketing premiums or go uninsured entirely. When a medical emergency strikes, the out-of-pocket costs can be devastating—draining the funds needed to keep a roof over their heads.

When healthcare isn’t affordable, people have less money left over for other necessary expenses, like housing.

Let’s hope we find a way to keep healthcare affordable for Americans.

LAW

OpenAI says dead teen violated TOS when he used ChatGPT to plan suicide — OH YEAH, sure thing, doesn’t that kid know to read the terms and conditions? geeze…..
Facing five lawsuits alleging wrongful deaths, OpenAI lobbed its first defense Tuesday, denying in a court filing that ChatGPT caused a teen’s suicide and instead arguing the teen violated terms that prohibit discussing suicide or self-harm with the chatbot.

I mean really if the fucking president can’t be bothered to read the constitution then why should a kid read the TOS !@!!!

Blow for Trump as Supreme Court reinstates fired copyright chief

→ Nick Szabo @NickSzabo4 Nov 16
Anarcho-capitalism is a wonderfully abstract ideal that can inspire innovation. It helped inspire me to help invent cryptocurrency.

But real-world cryptocurrencies are not trustless — they are trust-minimized. Each cryptocurrency has a legal attack surface, representing the kinds of ways governments and/or private entities can practically use law to disrupt their operations. The layer 1 of a good trust-minimized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin can withstand much more interference than centralized technologies could or can, but the technology still has its limits.
The kinds of attacks that come from financial law have largely proven to be manageable, due to a combination of the trust-minimized (not trustless) technology, which requires diligent attention from developers motivated to keep it a trust-minimized form of money, and a large army of cryptocurrency industry lawyers who specialize in financial law.
The legal attack surface from arbitrary data is far larger and far less predictable. The crypto industry does not have the legal expertise to deal with it.
Thinking that Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency or blockchain protocol, is a magical anarcho-capitalist Swiss army knife that can withstand any kind of governmental attack in any legal area is insanity.

→ Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro has started serving his 27-year prison sentence.
FUCKING ASSHOLE Merrick Garland says, “Perhaps Brazilian authorities rushed things. They needed to be more deliberate. “

→ The Epstein emails call Trump the “dog that hasn’t barked.” He’s silent because he knows what’s inside. It’s time to release the files.

→ Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein
BREAKING: 11th Cir. upholds $1M penalty on Trump & Habba for frivolous suit v. Hillary Clinton, Comey, DNC, etc. over Russia claims. ‘Trump & his attorneys committed sanctionable conduct,’ per Judge W. Pryor (GWB) w/Brasher (Trump) Kidd (Biden) Doc: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca11.80225/gov.uscourts.ca11.80225.251.1.pdf

→ DOJ said tonight that it was DHS Secretary Kristi Noem who made the call to proceed with the deportation of more than 100 Venezuelan men to El Salvador, despite a judge’s order seeking to block the transfer.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/25/kristi-noem-made-call-to-hand-over-deported-men-to-el-salvador-doj-says-00669461

→ Sen. Elissa Slotkin @SenatorSlotkin
This idea of illegal orders is not hypothetical.

→ Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance
Unavoidable conclusion: SCOTUS has put 1 man in America above the law & created a king. Not the first time a case has been decided wrong. The fix for democracy lies, as it did in Dred Scott, with fixing a broken decision. Hopefully this one won’t require a civil war.

The prosecutor appointed to replace Fani Willis in Georgia moved to dismiss the election fraud conspiracy case against Trump & others. Judge McAfee just granted that motion. Case over.

→ The DOJ is seeking sensitive voter data which it has no authority to collect, including driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers. This is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to undermine Americans’ trust in our elections.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/tracker-justice-department-requests-voter-information

→  Smart meter data can reveal intimate details inside your home. A court just ruled police can’t run dragnet surveillance on that data.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/victory-court-end-dragnet-electricity-surveillance-program-sacramento

→  Donald Trump should be in Prison for the rest of his life.

ECP NetHappenings Copyright protects you from AI use against the law

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ECP NetHappenings News Headlines

U.S. Announces China Trade Deal in Geneva
LEFT: Trump says they’ve agreed to a trade deal with China.
RIGHT: China says they’ve “reached an agreement” to talk more.

Will we see Bitcoin go up to $110,000 tomorrow!

The OCC says it’s OK for your bank to embrace Bitcoin.
US BANKS CAN NOW CUSTODY #BITCOIN
OCC-regulated banks may buy and sell assets held in custody and are permitted to outsource bank-permissible crypto-asset activities, including custody and execution services.

FORMER PAYPAL PRESIDENT SAYS AI AGENTS WILL BUY, SELL, AND TRADE #BITCOIN “WITHOUT HUMAN INVOLVEMENT”
BTC WILL BE THE “NEUTRAL ASSET OF THE AI ERA.”

MISSOURI HOUSE JUST PASSED A BILL TO EXEMPT CAPITAL GAINS TAXES ON #BITCOIN AND CRYPTO
THIS IS MASSIVE!!!

Bitcoin officially surpasses Amazon to become the 5th largest asset in the world by market cap. Well over 1 MILLION BTC has been accumulated via the ETFs in just over a year!

“Trump on Jerome Powell: “I know much more than he does about interest rates. Believe me.”

“Laughter is a force for democracy.”
– John Cleese

SCIENCE

This is what it looks like when an explosion creates gold in space
“The 2016 event was very exciting at first. It was nearby and visible with every major telescope, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. But it didn’t match our predictions–we expected to see the infrared emission become brighter and brighter over several weeks,” said Eleonora Troja, study author and associate research scientist in the University of Maryland’s Department of Astronomy.
The first observation of a collision between neutron stars, detected in August 2017, created gravitational waves, light and heavy elements like gold and platinum. But astronomers have realized they also witnessed a kilanova, the kind of explosion that creates gold and platinum, the year before as well.

“We’ve never had a breach” often means “We’ve never looked hard enough.”

LAW

The Copyright Office report yesterday affirms what our members – and the broader creative community – have long contended: that the wholesale ingestion of copyrighted works to train gen AI models without consent or compensation is NOT fair use under current law. Here is a full statement from DCN along with the very important and thorough analysis from the Copyright Office
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-3-Generative-AI-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf

Via email, Trump fires head of Library of Congress
President Donald Trump fired the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, via email, a move that immediately drew sharp condemnation from her supporters.
“President Trump’s ignorant decision will impact America’s libraries, our copyrighted economic interests, and service to the American people by threatening support for Congress,” Rep. Joe Morelle, a New York Democrat, posted to social media shortly after Hayden’s firing became public late May 8. “His decision is a complete disgrace.”
Added Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat: “Donald Trump just fired my dear friend Dr. Carla Hayden — the Librarian of Congress — via email. This is disgraceful. The Library of Congress represents some of the best America has to offer. Equal access to learning for all.”

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition. There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind . . . Alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” ~Frank Wilhoit

Republicans Silent as Trump Refuses to Commit to Upholding Constitution

Rolling Stone reached out to all 53 GOP senators after the president said he didn’t know whether he needs to honor the nation’s founding document. None replied

Judges have a warning about Trump’s rapid deportations: Americans could be next

How Pablo Escobar Hid His Billions From the FBI

The pay off
Who holds Trump Coin? Here’s where the top backers are likely based.
The majority of top holders of Donald Trump’s memecoin have used foreign exchanges that say they ban US users, suggesting many purchasers are based abroad

President Trump is poised to accept a luxury jet costing $400 million as a gift from Qatar. It’s to be used as Air Force One and then transferred to the Trump administration poised to accept ‘palace in the sky’ as a gift for Trump from Qatar: Sure appears to be corruption in plain — and plane — sight.
Last week Donald Trump announced that a $5.5 billion golf course and Trump resort would be built in Qatar. This week Qatar gifts the President a luxury jet that he can keep when he leaves office. This is corruption in its rawest form. It’s not only breathtakingly corrupt, it’s manifestly illegal, no matter what permission is received from a cowardly and compromised Department of Justice.
It has to be retrofitted to match Air Force One’s safety and security standards, so that it can’t be shot down by a surface-to-air missile. It’s unlikely they’ll be able to retrofit this plane before Trump’s third term. Good luck to the intel agencies with dismantling every panel in the 747 that Qatar is giving Trump to check for bugs and trackers.

Qatar: Same country that bankrolled bailout loan to Kushner family. Unearthed records show that AG Pam Bondi, who authorized Trump’s luxury plane gift from Qatar, was previously a lobbyist for Qatar, receiving over $100,000 monthly.

The jet worth $400M will be overhauled by L3Harris, used as Air Force One and later transferred to Trump’s presidential library foundation
WH & DOJ claim this is not a bribe

How can you call for 20 percent of Generals to be fired for lack of efficiency in the Pentagon and then ask for $150 billion MORE for a Pentagon budget that is now over $1 trillion?

Rep. Rob Menendez @RepMenendez May 10
No matter what this Administration tells the American people, the law is very clear: Members of Congress have a legal right to enter any DHS detention facility to conduct oversight without prior notice – something I’ve done twice this year without issue.

Gen Z’s ‘conscious unbossing’ should be a wake-up call for businesses
https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-consciously-unbossing-avoid-management-roles-preserve-mental-health-2025-4

NY lawmakers add disclaimer to AI chatbots: They aren’t human
https://gothamist.com/news/ny-lawmakers-add-disclaimer-to-ai-chatbots-they-arent-human

Massachusetts voters approved a 4% surtax on the ultra-wealthy in 2022.
Since then, the number of millionaires in Massachusetts has jumped by 38.6%.
Wealth taxes don’t kill innovation or drive the wealthy away.
NOT taxing the wealthy costs us all.

Judges have a warning about Trump’s rapid deportations: Americans could be next
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/10/donald-trump-immigration-deportations-due-process-00339319

The ranking member of the House Oversight Committee is investigating whether the GSA has given preferential treatment to a tech startup linked to some of President Donald Trump’s most influential Silicon Valley allies, including Peter Thiel.

Google to pay Texas $1.4 billion in data privacy settlement

Former Palantir workers condemn company’s work with Trump administration

Could Apple Exist Without Its Ties to China? Probably Not.
The world’s most valuable company has become so reliant on Chinese suppliers and sales that it would be worth half as much or less without them.
Published May 1, 2025 Updated May 2, 2025
Several years before Donald J. Trump entered politics, Apple and its partners built massive factories across China to assemble iPhones. Mr. Trump first campaigned for president by promising his supporters that he would force Apple to make those products in America.
Nearly a decade later, little has changed. Instead of bringing its manufacturing home, Apple shifted some production from China to India, Vietnam and Thailand. Almost nothing is made in America, and an estimated 80 percent of iPhones are still made in China.
Despite years of pressure, Apple’s business is still so dependent on China that the tech giant can’t operate without it. Moves by the Trump administration to change Apple’s behavior risk damaging the world’s most valuable publicly traded company. And any serious effort to move Apple’s production to the United States — if that is even possible — would take a titanic effort by both the company and the federal government.
In the four days after President Trump announced taxes on Chinese exports of 145 percent last month, Apple lost $770 billion in market capitalization. It regained some of those losses after Mr. Trump gave consumer electronics manufacturers in China a temporary reprieve.
On Thursday, Apple reported $24.78 billion in quarterly profit, a 4.8 percent increase from a year ago, a result of strong sales of apps and services and a new, lower-priced iPhone, which the company introduced in February. China was the only region where it didn’t increase sales during the quarter.
An Apple spokesman declined to make any company executives available for this article. During a call with Wall Street analysts on Thursday, Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, said Apple had more than 9,000 suppliers in the United States and planned to open a factory in Houston to make artificial intelligence servers.

The 6 strongest materials on Earth are harder than diamonds https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/strongest-material/

The Architect Trump’s Agenda Is Shaped by Project 2025 Author, Not Elon Musk
the Trump loyalist – Vought spent several years working for a Gramm protégé, Jeb Hensarling, then served as executive director of the Republican Study Committee, a right-wing caucus. It was the “center of conservative gravity in the House,” Hensarling says. He recalls Vought as a “true believer” with a “mastery of details of really arcane budget processes.” Vought left Congress in 2010 and went to work as vice president of Heritage Action for America, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation. There he took up another of Gramm’s favorite pastimes: calling Congress gutless. A current CFPB staffer, testifying in a court affidavit, described conversations with senior officials at the bureau who said Vought’s plan is to turn the agency into a single room with “five men and a phone.” (Administration lawyers have denied this was the goal and said the downsizing effort has been lawful.)
In a series of essays for Red State, the commentary site run by conservative radio host Erick Erickson, Vought railed against congressional Republicans for, as he saw it, failing to block President Barack Obama’s agenda. This position played well during the heyday of the Tea Party, when many conservatives suddenly became deficit hawks. Vought was ready to make the case for big changes. “We are past the point of incrementalism,” he wrote in 2011. “We don’t have the time to fiddle at the edges. We need elected officials free of calcified political assumptions of what is possible that reveal only their own level of accommodation with the liberal welfare state.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-russell-vought-doge-musk-trump/

Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer

Apple Hits Google’s Battleship

HEALTH

The Acid King Inside Story of LSD Chemist William Leonard Pickard
For more than two decades, authorities believe, Leonard Pickard was a major player in the LSD underground. In 2001, while sitting in a federal prison, he told his story for the first time

Psychedelics may boost mental health by dampening inflammation
Psychedelic drugs like MDMA and psilocybin may help treat depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions by reducing the number of inflammatory cells around the brain
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2479069-psychedelics-may-boost-mental-health-by-dampening-inflammation/#Echobox=1746748855

How Being Watched Changes How You Think
​We live in an era of constant surveillance. Psychology research shows how this might change how we perceive the world—even unconsciously

Structural knee MRI findings are already frequent in a general population-based birth cohort at 33 years of age. To evaluate the incidence and severity of knee magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings and their associated lifestyle and health factors in a relatively healthy subset of a general population-based birth cohort.

Groom of the Stool – The worst job in history?
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Groom-of-the-Stool/

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ECP NetHappenings software that disrupts law fundamentally

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@stephendpalley
seriously, though, Gabe is a visionary and if there’s any lawyer out there who can build software that disrupts law fundamentally, he’s at the top of the list.

@lex_node
there’s only one elite lawyer willing to make less money to put the power of law directly into the people’s own hands–me
there’s mostly no reason you should have to hire some law firm and have them running around on your behalf and racking up tons of hours you find out about a month later
most of what they’re doing is very simple and can be put into an algorithm
technology can do it, it’s just that lawyers have no incentive to build that technology (in fact have anti-incentives)

Got to get the infrastructure in place dont we lex
@nullpackets
Since July of last year @LexisNexis – the worlds largest database of legal/public records – has deployed 120 Chainlink oracles on mainnet to begin bringing their massive amounts of data to #web3
All ready to be connected to #CCIP
#AllTheChains
#AllTheWorldsData

@LexisNexis uses Chainlink to begin providing over 2PB of Legal Data On-Chain

Will be made available to every #multichain dApp thru #Layer0 (hint everyone – #EIP3668 #ENS)

Chainlink $LINK #LINK #CCIP #LegalTech #AI #web3
@ArtificialLawya
@fttechnews

Rick McFarland: Using Chainlink to Get LexisNexis’ Legal Data On-Chain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30hwL4rNzRs

@chainlink
In this piece, @LexisNexis Chief Data Officer Rick McFarland explains how #Chainlink oracles bring trusted intelligence to #blockchain networks, enabling smart contract innovation across industries such as insurance, travel, law, and gaming.

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