Powderhorn

The U.S. has been quietly building up a set of state-level laws that push operating system providers into the age verification plague.

California's AB 1043, signed in October 2025, requires OS providers to collect age data at account setup and pipe it to apps through a real-time API. It kicks in on January 1, 2027.

Colorado is working on something nearly identical. SB26-051 (which we covered when it was still a proposal) passed the state Senate 28-7 on March 3, 2026, and is now waiting on a House vote to become law there too.

However, these are just state-level laws. A new federal bill, H.R.8250, introduced on April 13, 2026, by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, with Rep. Elise M. Stefanik signing on as cosponsor, has us intrigued.

I cut my teeth as a telecom reporter, so I spent a lot of time writing about how broadband monopolies and cable TV giants rip off consumers with sleazy, misleading fees. I also spent a lot of that time writing about how lobbying and regulatory capture have ensured that big companies see no meaningful penalties should they falsely advertise one price, then sock you with a bunch of spurious surcharges.

The Biden administration, for its faults, at least tried to tackle some of this. The Biden FTC considered new and popular rules outlawing “junk fees”. The Biden FCC also implemented rules that didn’t ban sleazy fees (unfortunately), but forced broadband ISPs to clearly list them out at the point of sale (something recently dismantled by the Trump administration).

The Trump administration (and its courts) has taken an absolute hatchet to U.S. consumer protection on regulatory autonomy, ensuring that the problem of predatory fees is much worse across every sector you interface with. So it was funny to see Wall Street Journal reporters recently openly wondering why there are so many shitty fees all of a sudden.

The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth’s past.

Climate scientists use dozens of different computer models to assess the future climate. However, for the complex Amoc system, these produce widely varying results, ranging from some that indicate no further slowdown by 2100 to those suggesting a huge deceleration of about 65%, even when carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning are gradually cut to net zero.

The research combined real-world ocean observations with the models to determine the most reliable, and this hugely reduced the spread of uncertainty. They found an estimated slowdown of 42% to 58% in 2100, a level almost certain to end in collapse.

That's right, folks, it was Church Night again.

I had all sorts of ideas for this story, but I increasingly believe that absolutely everything is said in confidence.

The guy who introduced me to the burner scene actually came out for once. We chilled in the parking lot, with his former garage dweller.

So, we're all drinking beers and passing around a joint. Said ex-housemate has gone full-on MAGA, which basically led to me remaining silent. If it's racist or misogynist, he said it.

After spinning our wheels awhile, we joined the group. I spent the better part of two hours accidentally chatting with someone who lived in a van for three years and is looking to do so again.

My friend drives me back to my van with a ladder, and climbs up himself to put my roof vent back on its track. Then, it's back to the warehouse.

All of it was pleasant ... but these nights remind me of what I don't have the other six nights of the week.

In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.

They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.

Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden.

With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.

Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?

ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.

ProPublica's reporting frequently comes up in this story, but they're on my shitlist right now for their anti-union tactics, so you get this link instead.

Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, spoke candidly years ago about why Republicans like tax cuts so much. In his 1986 book, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, he confided that tax cuts served the purpose of creating budget deficits that could then be used to justify spending cuts on government programs.

Typically, administrations had only cut spending for a program if it was no longer necessary, and the resultant surplus would then be used as a tax cut to stimulate the economy. However, Stockman turned this on its head by using the tax cuts to create a budgetary crisis that would then require cuts in spending regardless of whether the programs were necessary or not.

In other words, Stockman used tax cuts to create a revenue problem that the Reagan administration could then mask as a spending problem. This is known as “starving the beast.” The administration starves the beast—important government services—of important tax revenues in order to then justify slashing government spending.

Stockman himself admitted the failure of this strategy, since budget deficits during the Reagan administration did not bring down public spending in a meaningful way. This failure, however, didn’t stop the next generation of conservatives from making it a key part of their larger political project. In 2001 and 2003, for instance, George W. Bush pushed through massive tax cuts meant to impose a “fiscal straitjacket” on Congress. This then prompted Bush’s Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 to gut government programs.

There is nothing new under the sun.

I ’m doomscrolling on Facebook — past puppy photos, Paul Schrader recounting his ayahuasca journey, hopeful dispatches from second and third marriages — when a post stops me.

Someone says that he asked Pete Hegseth to drop a bomb on Iran in the name of my dead father.

The past is the present again.

IT’S NOVEMBER 1979. I’M AN eighth-grader in Oak Harbor, Washington state, folding and rubber-banding copies of the Seattle Times and counting the days. My father, Cmdr. Peter Rodrick, leads VAQ-135 — the Black Ravens — an electronic-warfare squadron flying EA-6B Prowlers out of NAS Whidbey Island. His hangar is five miles from our house. But he isn’t here. He’s never here.

He’s deployed on the USS Kitty Hawk, and I haven’t seen him in six months. He missed my 13th birthday and a fairly disastrous year at Oak Harbor Junior High marked by paddlings, not asking a crush to dance with me to “Reunited,” and a school reputation entirely built on my ability to eat five ice-cream sandwiches for lunch every day. But that’s about to change. I’m flying to Honolulu on Dec. 10 to meet him and ride the carrier with him back to San Diego. I know it’s happening because the “Welcome Home” signs have been already painted. They are right here in the garage, next to his shrouded MGB convertible.

Donald Trump has always struggled with the concept of letting stuff go. No matter how absurd, the president can’t seem to give up the need to try to persuade people that his version of events is the reality. So it’s no surprise that after drawing widespread condemnation for his unholy self-comparison to Jesus Christ earlier this week, Trump is doubling down on his holiness.

Trump spent Tuesday night regaling the public with another Truth Social posting spree, capping it off Wednesday morning with a screenshot of an X post featuring an AI-generated image of Jesus Christ embracing Trump. The image caption read: “I was never a very religious man .. but doesn’t it seem, with all these satanic, demonic, child sacrificing monsters being exposed … that God might be playing his Trump card.”

In his own caption, Trump added: “the Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!! President DJT”

Anything to cover up the Epstein files.

Back in 2005, a bug report was filed by Kjetil Kjernsmo, then running KDE 3.3.2 on Debian Stable. He wanted the ability to have each connected screen show a different virtual desktop independently, rather than having all displays switch as one unit.

Over the years, over 15 duplicate reports piled onto the original as more people ran into the same wall. And that's not a surprise, because multi-monitor setups have become increasingly common.

The technical reason why this issue stayed open this long comes down to X11. Implementing it there would have required violating the EWMH specification, which has no concept of multiple virtual desktops being active at the same time.

The KWin maintainer Martin Flöser had said as much in 2013, effectively ruling it out for the entire KDE 4.x series. The only realistic path was through Wayland, and that path needed someone willing to actually walk it.

Someone finally did. The feature has now landed in KWin's master branch and is set for a Plasma 6.7 introduction.

Travellers going through some European airports are reportedly waiting up to three hours at border checks because of the EU’s new entry-exit system (EES).

Passengers in airports in countries such as France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Greece are waiting several hours at border checks, the Airports Council International (ACI) body has said.

Olivier Jankovec, the director of the ACI European division, told the Financial Times: “This situation, in the coming weeks and certainly over the peak summer months, is going to be simply unmanageable.

“We are seeing those queueing times now, at peak times, when traffic is just starting to build up.”

The EES came into effect on Friday in the Schengen countries – 25 of the EU’s 27 states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. It requires passengers from non-EU countries, such as the UK, to register their personal information and biometrics at the border.

Kinda makes "papers, please" seem quaint.

If you’ve never seen Jim Carrey’s 2007 psychological thriller The Number 23, then congratulations. It is a film about a man who sees the number 23 so many times that he ends up going bonkers. I used to think this film was stupid. However, now I appear to be living it.

My own personal number 23 is a rhetorical device: “It’s not X, it’s Y.” Everywhere I look, there it is. Whenever I hate myself enough to scroll through Facebook’s wilderness of algorithmically suggested posts, I find myself being smacked in the face with sentences such as: “Self-improvement isn’t a trend, it’s a lifestyle shift,” and “The small wins aren’t just moments, they’re the majority of your life.” Once you notice it, it becomes impossible to ignore. This weekend during a Peloton class (I know, shut up), I heard an instructor bark a variation of “this isn’t X, it’s Y”. Yesterday, a character did the same during a TV show I was reviewing, and I dropped a star from its score in retaliation.

You know where this is coming from, don’t you? “It’s not X, it’s Y” is an AI mainstay. It’s one of ChatGPT’s most insidious tells. No matter how innocuous a prompt you enter, AI will always find a way to sneak it into its response. Ask it if you should put more ham in your pasta, and it will tell you: “Ham doesn’t just taste good – it makes everything else taste better.” Ask it if you should chase a bee around your garden and it will say: “Bees aren’t stupid – they’re hyper-specialised”.

It's beyond irritating to me that because LLMs were trained on writing that uses such constructions, being competent at writing now makes me get accusations of using one to create a post or comment.

This isn't really the case on Beehaw, but head over to Reddit, post a cogent, well-reasoned comment, and the knives are out.

I think the most infuriating part is that instead of engaging with the content (I'm there mostly for debate, anyway), they attack the structure and lob accusations. That's not a conversation.

The former US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen has attacked Donald Trump’s push for lower interest rates, comparing it to the actions of a “banana republic”.

The US president has repeatedly urged the central bank to slash interest rates, in the hope of cutting the government’s borrowing costs on its $39tn (£29tn) debt.

In a post on his Truth Social platform in January, Trump wrote: “We should be paying the LOWEST INTEREST RATE OF ANY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.”

Speaking at an HSBC investor summit in Hong Kong, Yellen said: “How often does the president of a developed country express the view that the interest rate should be set to reduce the debt service cost? This is what you hear in a banana republic.”

She argued that inflation can get out of control if central banks fall under the control of politicians whose aim is to borrow more cheaply.

I don't think Trump gives a shit about Treasury debt. He just wants to be able to grift for cheaper.