Not a hit piece ...

 Photo-illustration: Wired Staff; Getty Images

Not a hit piece as Wired has it covered but rather, the article's a testament to to understanding how compromised values can impact a man't persona in ways defying the imagination.

Dialog, the private network cofounded by Peter Thiel, grades its event attendees on a hidden scale, ranking them by wealth and fame, tracking their relationships, and using algorithms to help decide who they should meet, who they should sit with, and who no longer belongs, WIRED has learned.

The records are part of a trove of internal data received by WIRED from a confidential source, containing the personal information of nearly 200 prominent people scheduled to attend the group's annual retreat this summer. The data includes home addresses, private phone numbers and email accounts, dates of birth, photos, and emergency contacts, as well as food allergies and the political leanings volunteered by some members.

Dialog assigns people grades before they join. Of the 192 dossiers examined by WIRED, 130 are tagged as members. The rest are prospects with files bearing markings like “First Time Dialoger” or “Warm.” Everyone—members and prospective invitees alike—is assigned a grade of A, B, or C. The “C” grade appears reserved for the most famous and influential; only one in seven received it. Most people—141 of 192—received a “B.” The final tier, “A,” appears primarily assigned to older, established members whom the graders consider less notable.

In reading this, what ranking is JD Vance's as he's a creation of Thiel. Something to think about don't you think?
Read the entire Wired piece. You will learn a lot. I know I did.

Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary

Excellent film, Rocky rules and the science is not bad but the interesting part is the fact life does not have be carbon based as authors like Arthur C. Clarke and Olaf Stapleton wrote about this possibility with passion and precision. Add Johnathan Wheeler's It from Bit analysis of existence being an information appliance and transaction mechanism 24/7 and one readily sees the three are onto something very profound in this writer's opinion. For starters. Rocky's life form is something else altogether. :)

As are others.

False-color Cassini radar mosaic of Titan's north polar region;
the blue areas are lakes of liquid hydrocarbons.

"The existence of lakes of liquid hydrocarbons on Titan opens up the possibility for solvents
and energy sources that are alternatives to those in our biosphere and that might support novel life forms altogether different from those on Earth."—NASA Astrobiology Roadmap 2008[1]

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism.
Source: Tom Brenner For The Washington Post via Getty Images; Google

The element silicon has been much discussed as a hypothetical alternative to carbon. Silicon is in the same group as carbon on the periodic table and, like carbon, it is tetravalent. Hypothetical alternatives to water include ammonia, which, like water, is a polar molecule, and cosmically abundant; and non-polar hydrocarbon solvents such as methane and ethane, which are known to exist in liquid form on the surface of Titan.

“But was even this the end? A few mystically inclined biologists went still further. They speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions, that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, men had called “spirit.” And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God.”

― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

“In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night.

And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.

And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.”

― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 a Space Odyssey

And then, immediately beneath him, Bowman noticed something which was surely new, since he could hardly have overlooked it if it had been there before. Moving across the ocean of glowing gas were myriads of bright beads; they shone with a pearly light which waxed and waned in a period of a few seconds. And they were all traveling in the same direction, like salmon moving upstream; sometimes they weaved back and forth so that their paths intertwined, but they never touched.

There were thousands of them, and the longer Bowman stared, the more convinced he became that their motion was purposeful. They were too far away for him to make out any details of their structure; that he could see them at all in this colossal panorama meant that they must be scores—perhaps hundreds—of miles across. If they were organized entities, they were leviathans indeed, built to match the scale of the world they inhabited.

  Perhaps they were only clouds of plasma, given temporary stability by some odd combination of natural forces—like the short-lived spheres of ball-lightning that still puzzled terrestrial scientists. That was an easy, and perhaps soothing, explanation; but as Bowman looked down upon that star-wide streaming, he could not really believe it. Those glittering nodes of light knew where they were going; they were deliberately converging upon the pillar of fire raised by the White Dwarf as it orbited overhead.

― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 a Space Odyssey

“In this world, as in our own, nearly all the chief means of production, nearly all the land, mines, factories, railways, ships, were controlled for private profit by a small minority of the population. These privileged individuals were able to force the masses to work for them on pain of starvation. The tragic farce inherent in such a system was already approaching. The owners directed the energy of the workers increasingly towards the production of more means of production rather than to the fulfilment of the needs of individual life. For machinery might bring profit to the owners; bread would not. With the increasing competition of machine with machine, profits declined, and therefore wages, and therefore effective demand for goods. Marketless products were destroyed, though bellies were unfed and backs unclad. Unemployment, disorder, and stern repression increased as the economic system disintegrated. A familiar story! 

― Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker 

“I shall describe one example of this kind of world, the greatest planet of a mighty sun. Situated, if I remember rightly, near the congested heart of the galaxy, this star was born late in galactic history, and it gave birth to planets when already many of the older stars were encrusted with smouldering lava. Owing to the violence of solar radiation its nearer planets had (or will have) stormy climates. On one of them a mollusc-like creature, living in the coastal shallows, acquired a propensity to drift in its boatlike shell on the sea’s surface, thus keeping in touch with its drifting vegetable food. As the ages passed, its shell became better adapted to navigation. Mere drifting was supplemented by means of a crude sail, a membrane extending from the creature’s back. In time this nautiloid type proliferated into a host of species. Some of these remained minute, but some found size advantageous, and developed into living ships.

― Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker 

“In the outer layers of young stars life nearly always appears not only in the normal manner but also in the form of parasites, minute independent organisms of fire, often no bigger than a cloud in the terrestrial air, but sometimes as large as the Earth itself. These "salamanders" either feed upon the welling energies of the star in the same manner as the star's own organic tissues feed, or simply prey upon those tissues themselves. Here as elsewhere the laws of biological evolution come into force, and in time there may appear races of intelligent flame-like beings. Even when the salamandrian life does not reach this level, its effect on the star's tissues may become evident to the star as a disease of its skin and sense organs, or even of its deeper tissues. It then experiences emotions not wholly unlike human fright and shame, and anxiously and most humanly guards its secret from the telepathic reach of its fellows.

― Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker 

Everything's alive. It from Bit applies.

The Exploding Whale returns. :)

The exploding whale

Back in 1970, an historic event took place. Man tried to remove a sperm whale carcass using modern technology, dynamite, a noble effort that unfortunately went sideways. :)

Why relive this paean to human ingenuity? Because the SpaceX IPO and the exploding whale are truly complementary if one takes a little time to see why. :)

To whit.

The hairs of one's neck rising with accompanying chills applies when facing something ominous and this feeling applies to both events. With the whale, the explosion came from without when dynamite tossed out chunks of same 800 feet into the air with an end result of one particularly large chunk crushing the roof of a car located in a parking lot several hundred yards away. With SpaceX,  the explosion will come from within because investors are beginning to pucker as the assumptions of untold profitability are beginning to be questioned in earnest as we speak. 

Liu Yanan / Xinhua via Getty Images; Futurism

The SpaceX IPO has been a windfall for investors — or most of them, at any rate.

But there’s a fear at the back of their minds that they just can’t shake off. What if a significant number of buyers turn tail and become sellers, dumping their SpaceX stock and leaving the most loyal Elon Musk fans holding the bag?

It hasn’t happened yet, since the vast majority of investors for the time being are locked into their shares. Nonetheless, top venture capitalists feel then need to assure that there won’t be a mass selloff when selling opens, betraying a persistent anxiety beneath the bonanza.

“That is the bet now facing the market,” writes Edward Ludlow in Bloomberg’s Tech In Depth newsletter. “Not whether investors want to own SpaceX, but whether the people who already own it will keep owning it.” 

The pucker ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism.
Source: Tom Brenner For The Washington Post via Getty Images; Google

While it’s still far too early to tell if Musk’s space AI behemoth is headed for a prolonged downturn — we’re fully in uncharted and almost purely speculative territory here — its ongoing dip has once again reignited fears that the stock may be massively overvalued. As many critics have pointed out, SpaceX is far from demonstrating a path to profitability, instead burning through billions of dollars per year.

The merger with Musk’s AI startup xAI, in particular, has raised eyebrows. The firm’s losses mounted considerably over the last couple years, with SpaceX’s IPO filing showing that the startup had lost a whopping $6.4. billion in 2025 — and that’s without getting into the AI venture’s seemingly endless PR headaches.

Musk’s grand vision for a million-strong megaconstellation of enormous data center satellites has also been met with plenty of skepticism. SpaceX still has to prove that it’s financially feasible — or even practically possible — to run solar-powered data centers in the Earth’s orbit.

And we haven't even discussed Colossus and it's connect to the The Black Body Problem.

Regarding the whale ...

The explosion

A widely reported case of an exploding whale occurred in Florence, Oregon, in November 1970, when the Oregon Highway Division (now the Oregon Department of Transportation) blew up a decaying sperm whale with dynamite to dispose of its rotting carcass. The explosion threw whale flesh up to 800 feet (240 metres) away, and its odor lingered for some time. American humorist Dave Barry wrote about it in his newspaper column in 1990 after viewing television footage of the explosion, and later the same footage from news station KATU circulated on the Internet. I 

Yours truly laughed to tears seeing this cosmic event unfold back in 1990. Investors may cry if the IPO for the ages does the same thing. One never knows, do one? - Fats Waller

Dressing down for the occaision

Hegseth showed up in Nike dunks to a NATO conference. Department of Defense/X

Yours truly is anything but a clothes horse. Frayed collars, cargo shorts and tees is the uniform worn in the summer. When doing the drill, being a designer, a suit was not part of the equation but neither were the threads worn by Pentagon Pete, seen when he exited the plane, as the look isn't even cool. It's like white guys wearing a baseball back backwards, very few can pull it off while black guys inherently look cool.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been called out for wearing a casual outfit to a NATO meeting.

Upon landing in Brussels, Hegseth was seen sporting a red and blue vest over a plaid flannel, athletic pants, Nike sneakers, and a trucker hat. Government officials, when conducting official business as Hegseth is doing, typically wear suits or more dressy attire, even upon landing.

“Dressed like a frat boy,” one user said.

“Any particular reason he’s dressed up like a teenager from the 90s,” another person quipped.

“Ask him why is he not wearing a suit?” another person said, apparently referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky getting accosted at the White House last year for not wearing a suit.

Other users said he looked like he was going to deliver a pizza for Domino’s. Another person said, “He looks like he is about to catch ’em all,” a reference to Ash Ketchum from Pokémon.

Ash Ketchum Journeys

Way cooler without exception. 

Through a glass, darkly

This immortal jellyfish danced "like a tornado", says photographer Jialing Cai
(Credit: Jialing Cai/ Ocean Photographer of the Year)

Something wondrous and most mysterious happens every night on planet earth,
the largest migration of the tiny, largely invisible, until now.

Dance of the immortal jellyfish

This mature immortal jellyfish "looked like a lightbulb in the night of the ocean", says Cai. The immortal jellyfish gets its name from its ability to "revert itself back into its baby stage, its polyp stage" on sensing danger, such as pathogens in the water, she explains. "It can restart its lifecycle again and again." In theory, immortal jellyfish can live forever. 

A juvenile fish has captured a jellyfish in its mouth and uses its tentacles as a weapon
(Credit: Jialing Cai/ Ocean Photographer of the Year)

The diel vertical migration crew is a crowd jostling with both predators and prey. "These little critters form the basis of the food chain," says Hobbs, "so they're really important for everything from fish to whales." To survive being eaten by larger predators – or each other – many of these animals have developed ingenious defence strategies to protect themselves.

These tiny animals face a gauntlet of predators as they migrate to the surface
(Credit: Jialing Cai/ Ocean Photographer of the Year)

"Here you can see a juvenile trevally, a kind of jack fish, sitting on the bell of a jellyfish," says Cai. Inside the jellyfish, you can see a baby octopus is being digested. "Its soft, blood-tinged eyes are visible within the gelatinous stomach. For the baby octopus, this jellyfish is brutal." For many small zooplankton, said Cai, the jellyfish's gut becomes their final resting place. For others, like the jack fish, the jellyfish offers refuge.

Cai's images, says Hobbs, offer a fascinating insight into the diversity of life at this scale in the ocean. "These huge migrations are happening as part of a complex three-dimensional environment, where tiny zooplankton move towards the surface to feed whilst simultaneously running the gauntlet past a variety of predators. It's amazing to think that each of these species is following their own strategy, shaped by its preferred prey, potential predators, and reproductive needs."

As larvae, crabs drift in the water column undergoing multiple stages of metamorphosis (
Credit: Jialing Cai/ Ocean Photographer of the Year)

Backgrounder

When Cai was studying marine biology at the University of Virginia in the US she thought exploring the deep sea would be as ambitious going to outer space. Then, one day, her lecturer explained the phenomenon of diel vertical migration (DVM). 

Every single night, he explained, trillions of tiny zooplankton rise from the deep sea to feed in the relative safety of the cover of darkness. They swim for hundreds of metres to shallow waters, some even making it to the surface. During this nightly migration, the ocean hums with an "evening chorus". This is the chatter of countless fish, shrimp, jellies and squid making their way to the surface. 

Then, just before sunrise, they return to the abyss.

Green with envy

Photograph: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Green with envy applies as the Lincoln Reflecting Pool should be blue but isn't, something
most disquieting as the nation moves toward the 250th.

On Wednesday morning, workers poured hydrogen peroxide into the
Lincoln Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.

The treatment is the latest attempt by the Interior Department to control an algae bloom that has turned the pool bright green, despite President Donald Trump's costly renovation to make it “American flag blue” in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary. Hot temperatures and climate change are among the risk factors that could be driving the outbreak.

The Trump administration spent more than $14 million to update the pool ahead of celebrations
across the US capital. The work was done under a no-bid contract by a company that has never worked for the federal government. (It has, however, worked on President Donald Trump’s golf courses,
according to The New York Times.)

Resurfacing of the Reflecting Pool, April 2026

One of the issues appears to be the water source. The Reflecting Pool usually draws water from the nearby Tidal Basin, which is often filled with algae. During periods with high amounts of algae, the water supply switches to municipal drinking water. The US Interior Department didn’t immediately respond to questions from WIRED about which water source is currently feeding the pool.

Beyond the hydrogen peroxide, the Interior Department is “deploying high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” to keep algae at bay, an agency spokesperson tells WIRED in an email.

Trump has touted the work on the pool, which includes painting it blue and fixing leaks,
while also saying the company the government hired would be able to do repairs
“in much less time, for much less money.”

People spend their afternoon by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool
in Washington D.C., on June 21, 2020.

Crews clean up algae that began to grow in the Reflecting Pool days after the Trump administration’s $14 million renovation project that repainted the surface “American Flag Blue” on Monday, June 15, 2026.

Josh Morgan, USA TODAY

Time keeps on slippin', slippin' slippin' into the future - Steve Miller

This is a bull shit question! :)

Everybody looking to invest in the SpaceX IPO should look at this hilarious but incredibly insightful clip of Mona Lisa Vito, in My Cousin Vinny, showing in-depth knowledge of why something does not compute at deep level. This is
The Mythical Man Month writ large. Priceless because this blows away tulip mania and reckless bloviation in a nanosecond. :)

Pigs fly, right?

 Chris Graythen / Getty Images; Futurism

Yours truly waxed "poetic" about SpaceX's IPO in 1634-7 = 2026??? as the parallels of Tulip Mania in 17th century Holland and today are too similar to ignore save if this play goes sideways, the impact on America will be far direr than that of Holland as tulip mania toasted the investors, not the economy in general.

Musk’s SpaceX went public on Friday, exploding onto the scene with a valuation 
that quickly eclipsed $2 trillion.

Things went swimmingly for a while, with shares steadily rising from a debut $150 — a premium of 11 percent over the original asking price — on Friday to well over $200 on Tuesday. But after peaking at $222 Tuesday morning, SpaceX started its first sustained decline of its nascent stock market career, demonstrating that regardless of its starry-eyed hype, investors are in for a chaotic ride on the terrestrial markets.

By the close of the day, the company’s shares were hovering around the $200 mark. It’s far too early to tell where the ticker will move in the coming weeks or months — or, let’s face it, even days — but it’s an interesting inflection point after SpaceX’s IPO finally opened the floodgates.

Slowing investor enthusiasm could have a litany of reasons. The overall bear case is hard to miss, as SpaceX painstakingly pointed out in its original Securities and Exchange Commission filings ahead of its IPO. Despite having a market cap of over $2.6 trillion at the time of writing, which puts it within earshot of Amazon,
the company has been burning through billions of dollars, particularly following its merger with Musk’s AI startup xAI, which itself has been incinerating cash at an extraordinary rate.

In its SEC filings, SpaceX also admitted that Musk’s plan to place one million enormous data centers in Earth’s orbit may not be economically feasible, let alone physically possible, casting a long shadow over the now-trillionaire‘s infamously overambitious aspirations.

Put simply, we’re in uncharted territory, with Wall Street firmly standing behind Musk’s bold vision
— albeit without any clear sense of a realistic business model or road to profitability.

Duh

A tulip, known as "the Viceroy" (viseroij), displayed in the 1637 Dutch auction catalogue Verzameling van een Meenigte Tulipaanen ("Collection of a set of Tulips") by Pieter Cos.[1] Its bulb was offered for sale between ƒ3,000-4,200, depending on weight (gewooge). A skilled artisan at the time earned about ƒ300 a year.[2]

So 10 times the monies earned by a skilled artisan was the deal for the tulip bulb depicted above.
Seems people were even paying astronomical sums for pictures of same, which channels this.

Any questions?

Access to permanent desks ...

 

Chris Graythen / Getty Images; Futurism

Angry white man comes to mind with this pix, appropriately tinted blue, showing an erstwhile Master of the Universe being pissed off at the world as his AI dreams go up in smoke while employees seethe with good reason.
Words cannot describe how remarkably tone deaf this "human" truly is.

Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again
After Brutal Layoffs Culled Their Colleagues

"I’m not sure that this company supports a hackathon culture anymore."

It gets better ...

Morale at Meta has seemingly hit rock bottom.

Employees have been roiling from multiple rounds of major layoffs. Last month alone, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company laid off a whopping 8,000 workers, roughly ten percent of its workforce, as part of its chaotic refocusing efforts around AI.

Many of those who remain are now forced to perform the grunt work to train AI models, weekly busywork that’s already driving some of them up the wall, as Wired reports.

Better still ...

Zuckerberg offered employees access to permanent desks, a symbolic gesture that unintentionally illustrated how expendable many of them had become. Many employees at Meta have been working from “hot desks,” a controversial scheme involving multiple workers sharing the same desks.

Question are they solid oak and near a window? No one knows, do one. - Fats Waller

Dismantling/Phase 1

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent the past two decades villainizing autism.Raphael Liy/Zuma

Seems Secretary Brain Worm will now oversee Disabilities Education, a key responsibility formerly managed by the Department of Education, due to his unmatched qualifications dealing with all things related to health including his novel idea of Autism being curable, a condition able to be treated in similar fashion to measles, mumps or chicken pox as needs warrant. 

On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced that it would move two key functions of the Department of Education—disability education oversight and the department’s Office for Civil Rights—to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, respectively, in a move that would give HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. oversight over the nation’s disability education system.

In a press release, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who is overseeing the Project 2025–mandated dismantling of the department, said without elaborating that the decision was made after “careful deliberation and collaboration with stakeholders.” Many disability and other equity-focused organizations have been afraid since President Trump resumed office that he would go through with threats to eliminate the department, long a target of right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation.

Even setting aside who runs them—Kennedy at HHS, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at the Justice Department—the new agencies aren’t appropriate choices to oversee those functions, experts say. “HHS and DOJ have important roles, but they weren’t built to replace the Department of Education’s school-specific expertise,” said Robyn Linscott, The Arc’s director of education and family policy, in a statement. “Moving [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] oversight into HHS pushes students with disabilities toward a medical model, where disability is treated as a diagnosis to manage instead of a natural part of human life.”

Ah, don't worry about it. RFK Jr. has it covered. Just look at his record regarding vaccines.
That should warm the cockles of your heart without question, right?