Powderhorn

I'll skip to the salient quote:

“The problem isn’t Trump. The problem is the U.S.,” writes Lars Christensen, a Danish economist who runs the financial advisory firm Paice. “When the outside world observes Trump’s insane behavior and his threats against allies, and we at the same time observe that there is no real action from the U.S. public, Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, or the U.S. media about this insanity, we will all have to conclude that the U.S. accepts this behavior.”

The rest of the world isn't stupid. They can see what's happening here.

Donald Trump may, of course, be the Republican candidate for president in 2028, the US Constitution notwithstanding. Although it is clearly written in the 22nd Amendment that “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” it may well be a majority vote of the Supreme Court that determines whether that applies to Trump.

In the past, that court has gotten around the Constitution without a single word of it being changed. Rather, its judges have let an innovative interpretation prevail. In 1896, for instance, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the court ignored the unambiguous language of the 14th Amendment that demanded “equal protection” and so upheld racial segregation by creating the fiction of “separate but equal.” It would take 58 years before that lie would be overturned.

Harvard law professor and Trump legal whisperer Alan Dershowitz has told the president that “it’s not clear” if it is constitutionally settled whether he can serve another term, even if elected. Reportedly, Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer is working on a book on the subject to be published in March 2026. And MAGA world—from the White House to members of Congress to far-right media figures—is stirring the pot on Donald Trump’s potential fourth bid for president.

...

With Trump a distinct question mark and while the Trumpian current ebbs and flows, another wave is pushing the 2028 candidacy of Vice President JD Vance. Trump found his avatar in 2024 when the junior senator from Ohio and former harsh Trump critic joined the crew of Republican senators fighting to be the most sycophantic to the party’s new Führer. Like his compatriots Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio, there were no morals or principles that superseded Vance’s ambition and lust for power. Under the circumstances, that “JD” could easily have stood for “just as dangerous.”

As Vance confirmed at the recent Turning Point USA gathering, not only are white nationalists like Nick Fuentes and unrepentant conspiracists like Candace Owens not denounced, but they are welcomed and embraced. Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with Fuentes roiled MAGA, but before that he was interviewed by Owens on her podcast. Again, there are no discernible objections from GOP leaders, including Vance.

Nobody would ever call Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney a charismatic speaker. A former central banker and hedge fund manager, Carney can be as dry as an insurance salesman explaining an actuarial life table. Inexplicably, he has difficulty with both of Canada’s official languages. When speaking French, he drones in an affectless monotone that can charitably be described as a brave effort by a remedial student. But even in his native English, he stammers when reading from a teleprompter. By contrast, Justin Trudeau, Carney’s immediate predecessor as prime minister and former Liberal Party leader, was a natural politician. Trudeau has star power comparable to John F. Kennedy’s or Barack Obama’s: He is handsome, bilingual, photogenic, and unfailingly charming in his interactions with voters. Trudeau speaks with an effortless fluidity and grace, perhaps acquired during his previous career as a drama teacher. It’s entirely fitting that he is currently dating the singer Katy Perry.

Yet, for all his celebrity aura, Trudeau never gave a speech that made any kind of lasting impact during his near-decade in power. His stolid successor, however, has done just that after less than a year in office. In an address at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, Carney delivered a stark warning about the crisis of the liberal world order that earned a standing ovation and global attention.

Carney’s speech was a product of an existential crisis for the country he leads. Donald Trump’s second term in office has created anxiety among many US allies, but perhaps none more than Canada, whose economy and national security are unusually tightly integrated with its southern neighbor. The US is far and away Canada’s biggest trading partner, making up 62.2 percent of trade. (The next largest trading partner, China, makes up less than 8 percent.) And since World War II, Canada’s entire national security umbrella has been intertwined with US-led institutions such as NATO and NORAD.

Well, the moral degradation of this once-great country shows no signs of slowing down. One day, people suddenly start insisting on “warrants” before letting federal agents into their homes, and the next an entire state may allow dancing without a license. Appalling.

As you know, dancing surged in New York City a few years ago when that Sodom and/or Gomorrah repealed a 1926 law making it illegal to operate any “public dance hall” or “cabaret” without a license. Not that those libertines waited until the repeal actually took effect. See “Stop That Dancing! Unlicensed Cabarets Are Still Illegal in New York” (Nov. 6, 2017). Well, predictably, now everybody in the state wants the same sort of freedom. This is what leniency breeds. See, e.g., ABC News, “Lawyers allege DHS is denying legal counsel to Minnesota detainees” (Jan. 18, 2026) (quoting attorney who claimed an ICE agent told him “if we let you see your clients, we would have to let all the attorneys see their clients, and imagine the chaos.”).

Still, New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, who is up for reelection this year, openly pandered to the pro-dance lobby in her recent “State of the State” address. Among the pie-in-the-sky proposals Hochul outlined was the repeal of a similar state-wide restriction, saying she supported “dancing by default.”

As Moore's Law slows to a crawl and the amount of energy required to deliver generational performance gains grows, some chip designers are looking to alternative architectures for salvation.

Neurophos is among those trying to upend Moore's Law and make good on analog computing's long-promised yet largely untapped potential.

The Austin, Texas-based AI chip startup says it's developing an optical processing unit (OPU) that in theory is capable of delivering 470 petaFLOPS of FP4 / INT4 compute — about 10x that of Nvidia's newly unveiled Rubin GPUs — while using roughly the same amount of power.

Neurophos CEO Patrick Bowen tells El Reg this is possible in part because of the micron-scale metamaterial optical modulators, essentially photonic transistors, that the company has spent the past several years developing.

Sure, but it only runs at 56GHz.

She stocks 50 vol, which is not fucking around. I never went above 40.

And when we were together, I never paid for haircuts. She did mine just as the boys and her own. A Nr. 6 was long for her.

So I sit with blond hair at a Nr. 6, which has been my standard since 1997 but fell by the wayside during Covid, sitting next to my ex-wife without talking as she watches a TV show and I peruse the internet.

It is a strange thing to graduate to that portion of your life where staying with friends means, for the most part, you self-entertain. Sure, meals, a bit of TV or games, but it's nothing like crashing somewhere in your 20s.

I have clean clothes, and this time I'll be headed back to Austin tomorrow wearing my own. Ahead of fighting possibly hourslong lines at HEB ahead of the deep freeze forecast for most of Texas starting Friday night.

I have a motel for the week already booked, so tomorrow will be rather busy. She's already paid for my Lyft back to the van, then I need to hit up HEB and hopefully can time things to be aligned for it not being frosty by the time I'm checking in.

I made dinner last night for the first time since 2023, cobbling together a red curry soup and mushroom tortelloni (with much garlic and pepper) into a very satisfying dinner. It felt really good to provide nourishment for someone else again.

A lot of "days since" signs have been reset to zero over the course of my visit, with some having previously resided in the four figures.

If I didn't know my own history, I'd be inclined to think this is a totally reasonable way to live. But we can't work right now. It's likely we'll never be able to.

This said, she told me off in 2004 on my first attempt at communication, we finally met via other accounts in 2009, got married in 2011 and divorced in 2016. If nothing else, this relationship scales in years. Not having resolution in a couple of months is not a concern.

She invites me up and into her bed, and then complains in the morning that she's been single for so long that it's difficult for her to sleep with someone else in bed ... even though when we met, sleeping alone was her hell.

I appreciate that she's restored my appearance to residual self-image. But we are back to "there's no fucking way this is over yet." I'm not going to repeat prior posts, but my gut has been telling me she's mine for more than 16 years.

There is a tattoo to that effect, in my handwriting, on her mons.

We make for an interesting couple. Pretty much the only thing we have in common is our last name.

Half the world’s 100 largest cities are experiencing high levels of water stress, with 39 of these sitting in regions of “extremely high water stress”, new analysis and mapping has shown.

Water stress means that water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available supplies, often caused by poor management of water resources exacerbated by climate breakdown.

Watershed Investigations and the Guardian mapped cities on to stressed catchments revealing that Beijing, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Delhi are among those facing extreme stress, while London, Bangkok and Jakarta are classed as being highly stressed.

Separate analysis of Nasa satellite data, compiled by scientists at University College London, shows which of the largest 100 cities have been drying or getting wetter over two decades with places such as Chennai, Tehran and Zhengzhou showing strong drying trends and Tokyo, Lagos and Kampala showing strong wetting trends. All 100 cities and their trends can be viewed on a new interactive water security atlas.

Which way, western man?

That was the title of a racist tract published in 1978 by William Gayley Simpson, a former leftist Christian pastor turned one of the most influential neo-Nazi ideologues in American history. The book helped radicalize an entire generation of white supremacists in the US, with its vicious antisemitism, opposition to all forms of immigration and open praise for Hitler. The purpose of the book, wrote Simpson, was “to reveal organized Jewry as a world power entrenched in every country of the white man’s world, operating freely across every nation’s frontiers, and engaged in a ruthless war for the destruction of them all”.

In recent decades, Which way, western man? has become a popular meme – but only on the far-right fringes of the internet.

Until, that is, the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Last August, the X account of Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted an ICE recruitment poster featuring an Uncle Sam figure holding a “law and order” sign while standing by a crossroads post featuring arrows reading “invasion” and “cultural decline”. The DHS caption? “Which way, American man?”

Shocking? Yes. Coincidence? Nope. Earlier this month, the official White House Twitter account posted a cartoon of Greenlandic huskies with Danish flags on their sleds facing a choice between the White House on one side and China’s Great Wall and Russia’s Red Square on the other. The White House’s caption? “Which way, Greenland man?”

An airport made of bamboo? A tower reaching 20 metres high? For many years, bamboo has been mostly known as the favourite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it’s time we took it seriously as a building material, too.

This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called for architects to be “bamboo-ready” as they published a manual for designing permanent buildings made of the material, in an effort to encourage low-carbon construction and position bamboo as a proper alternative to steel and concrete.

Bamboo has already been used for a number of boundary-pushing projects around the world. At Terminal 2 of Kempegowda international airport in Bengaluru, India, bamboo tubes make up the ceiling and pillars. The Ninghai bamboo tower in north-east China, which is more than 20 metres tall, is claimed to be the world’s first high-rise building made using engineered bamboo.

In the broadest sense, this is news, but there's too much opinion in this to throw it there.

Do you still want to cling to this pretense, Trump supporters? Do you still want to pretend ICE efforts are targeting “the worst of the worst?” Are you just going to sit there and mumble some incomprehensible stuff about “respecting the laws?”

Go ahead. Do it, you cowards. This is exactly what you voted for, even if it now makes you a bit queasy. Just sit there and soak in it. You are who you support, even if you never thought it would go this far.

“Worst of the worst,” Trump’s parrot repeat on blast. “This one time we caught a guy who did actual crimes,” say spokespeople defending whatever the latest hideous violation of the social contract (if not actual constitutional rights) a federal agent has performed. “Targeted investigation/stop” say the enablers, even when it’s just officers turning white nationalism into Official Government Policy. “Brown people need to be gone” is the end game. Full stop.

Donald Trump has stepped up his demand to annex Greenland but said the US would not use force to seize it during a rambling, invective-laden speech at Davos where he once again lashed out at Europe’s political leaders.

The address to thousands of business and political leaders at the World Economic Form in the Swiss ski resort indicated that while the US president was renouncing the use of military force – for now at least – to wrest control of Greenland, he still intended to wield America’s economic and diplomatic power to bend European allies to his will.

He said he was “seeking immediate negotiations to once again discuss the acquisition of Greenland by the United States”.

“I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force. All the US is asking for is a place called Greenland,” he said. “You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no and we will remember.”

Ever the orator, Trump later offered this:

Trump at moments sought to needle his global audience, saying it was “stupid” for the US to cede Greenland to Denmark after the second world war, and that “without us, now you’d all be speaking German, or a little Japanese perhaps.” Davos is in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.

I will say that all the coverage of Davos has my back up because no one seems to know how to pronounce it. The "a" is very nearly a schwa, and the stress comes on the second syllable.

Because that's what the world needs. Spicier ChatGPT.

OpenAI says it has begun deploying an age prediction model to determine whether ChatGPT users are old enough to view "sensitive or potentially harmful content."

Chatbots from OpenAI and its rivals are linked to a series of suicides, sparking litigation and a congressional hearing. AI outfits therefore have excellent reasons to make the safety of their services more than a talking point, both for minors and the adult public.

Hence we have OpenAI's Teen Safety Blueprint, introduced in November 2025, and its Under-18 Principles for Model Behavior, which debuted the following month.

OpenAI is under pressure to turn a profit, knows its plan to serve ads needs to observe rules about marketing to minors, and has erotica in the ChatGPT pipeline. That all adds up to a need to partition its audience and prevent exposing them to damaging material.