If you were waiting to upgrade your Mac until you could get one with the latest CPU, the wait is over. Apple's 6th-gen M-series processors are finally trickling down to its 14-inch MacBook Pro and iMac family early next month.

Available in either "space black" or silver, Apple's base-model MacBook Pro is largely unchanged from last gen. This is a mid-cycle refresh and so most of the improvements are under the hood. It sports the same high-res mini-LED display, chiclet keyboard, and port selection as its predecessor.

Most of the improvements come from the silicon itself. Announced alongside a refreshed Mac mini in August, and fabbed on TSMC's 2nm process tech, the M6 features a refreshed CPU with 12 CPU and 12 GPU cores, and is now complemented by a dual 16-core Neural Engine (what Apple calls its NPUs) which promises better performance for the slew of Apple Intelligence features now baked into macOS Golden Gate.

The M6 MacBook Pro comes standard with 16 GB of unified memory, good for 153 GB/s of bandwidth. Memory can be specced up to 24 GB or 32 GB, boosting bandwidth to 170 GB/s for those with more demanding workloads or, as is more often the case, an aversion to closing Chrome tabs.

Compared to the outgoing M5, which for the moment is still available in the MacBook Air, Apple says the M6 delivers significant performance gains thanks to the addition of two more cores. In Xcode, Apple boasts up to 30 percent higher performance versus a similarly equipped M5 MacBook Pro.

The GPU enjoys similar gains in Blender ray tracing, local AI inference, and image processing, delivering 1.3x faster prompt processing and 1.3x faster rendering, and 1.2x faster performance in the Affinity creative suite.

Despite higher performance, Apple boasts the same 24-hour battery life as the outgoing M5 model. Pricing also remains unchanged. A 16 GB model with 1 TB of solid state storage will set you back $1,999.

One area of improvement not related to performance is connectivity. The M6 finally brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity to the 14-inch MacBook Pro.

The majority of these improvements also come to Apple's most colorful of all-in-one desktops: the iMac. Here the performance jump is even larger, owing to the fact the machine never got the M5. Apple claims 1.5x faster performance in productivity apps like Excel, 2x faster graphics performance and 5x faster in local AI.

Continuing the trend of better connectivity, along with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, certain iMac models also gain 2.5 Gbps Ethernet. As with the MacBook Pro, pricing remains unchanged, with iMacs starting at $1,499.

Both the M6 MacBook Pro and iMac are available for preorder starting tomorrow with availability beginning Friday, Nov. 6. ®

America is a politically polarized country. But one topic has both the left and the right in full agreement: Flock cameras suck. No one likes the government spying on them.

To make matters worse, police and 911 staff enjoy using Flock cameras to stalk their exes. — Read the rest

The post Police and 911 staff have used Flock cameras to stalk their exes appeared first on Boing Boing.

A man and his wife were taking a relaxing poolside vacation when suddenly a monkey jumped into his lap. Instead of being afraid, the man decided to cuddle the monkey back. The monkey had already decided that this man was her new best friend, and what happens next is unbelievably sweet. — Read the rest

The post A mama monkey picks a vacationing man as her safe place to rest with her baby appeared first on Boing Boing.

Often, the coolest art comes from simple, often unnoticed materials. When reimagined into a new context, everyday household materials can be the base for wonderful works of art. I've always loved watching people transform everyday materials into new ideas.

This aluminum foil piece, Cats and Mice by artist Dean Millien, fills me with joy. — Read the rest

The post An artist sculpts magical cats and mice out of aluminum foil appeared first on Boing Boing.

This fascinating animation clip is from a film called Renaissance, made in 1963 by Walerian Borowczyk. The stop-motion animation shows a destroyed room that slowly puts itself back together. It suggests that a ghost is moving everything around and reconstructing each broken item. — Read the rest

The post In this 1963 stop-motion film, a destroyed room puts itself back together appeared first on Boing Boing.

Coastal communities across California were preparing for days of flooding amid potentially 'record-breaking tides' this week, as water levels began rising on Monday.

• Coastal California braces for flooding amid forecast of 'record-breaking tides'

TL;DR: Use GPT-5.5 Pro, Claude 4.6 Sonnet, and Gemini 3.1 Pro in one app with a 1min.AI Advanced Business Plan for a one-time $69.97 (reg. $540).

Every few months, a new chatbot is declared the winner in the ChatGPT versus Claude debate, and testing them yourself usually means paying $20 a month for each. — Read the rest

The post Settle the ChatGPT vs. Claude debate yourself for $70 appeared first on Boing Boing.

There are details, but the whole story is in the headline. Conspiracy theorist weirdo RFK Jr. says a racist thing and is immediately wrong.

Campaigning in Michigan for Mike Rogers, the Secretary of Health and Human Services took a break from spreading falsehoods about good health practices and instead turned to racist lies trying to undermine an excellent Senate candidate. — Read the rest

The post RFK Jr. says Arabs don't win Nobel Prizes. Last year's chemistry winner was born in Jordan appeared first on Boing Boing.

It wasn't until after immigration officers started murdering US citizens that the Trump administration finally agreed to do anything about it. First, Trump turfed Kristi Noem, setting her up with a "special envoy" dead end job (which has also now come to an end). Then it elevated Markwayne Mullin, who first insisted his priority was to tone down things a bit to keep ICE from generating negative press on a daily basis.

Pressure was applied to outfit ICE officers with body cameras. Hilariously, DHS officials claimed there simply wasn't any money to do this, despite ICE now commanding the most money of any federal law enforcement agency. More money was given to ICE to handle this fake budgetary shortfall, which then led to a lot of things, none of which did much to rein in ICE's tendency to abuse its power, violate rights, and engage in violence.

First, the rollout was slow-walked. The deadline for deployment kept being pushed back. When full deployment finally arrived, it was pushed back even further by vague claims about delays in training. Then the DHS made it clear body cam footage would be almost inaccessible by the public. Finally, the cameras were being worn by officers but somehow never seemed to be rolling when officers violated rights, abused their power, or engaged in violence.

The Government Accountablity Office was asked to look into ICE's body cam program. The resulting report [PDF] noted that while this was better than not having cameras, it left a lot to be desired.

The report, requested by congressional Democrats, comes as they have fumed about slow deployment of the cameras as well as ICE officers' failure to activate them in a string of shootings, including during multiple fatal interactions. ICE officers have killed six people since President Trump took office.

"ICE has not implemented controls to help ensure compliance with activating cameras when required by policy," GAO concluded in its report.

First of all, while ICE has promised to outfit all field officers with cameras, it has continued to delay the rollout because it is continually onboarding new hires. This is a problem that's never going to go away — not when the administration is constantly demanding more officers and more arrests and the agency isn't able (or willing) to throw more money and personnel at training programs to ensure new hires are both trained and outfitted with these mandatory recording devices. According to what's stated in the GAO's report, ICE has decided the best stop-gap solution is to… just stop buying more body cameras.

[A]s of June 2026 ICE has not updated its plans to reflect changes stemming from an increase in the total number of cameras scheduled for deployment and schedule delays caused by the pause in further camera deployment. Further, ICE, like CBP, is at least one year behind its 2024 plan.

Additionally, ICE's overall deployment needs have increased. Specifically, according to ICE program officials, the component intends to provide cameras to all personnel, including planned future hires. In July 2025, ICE initiated a hiring surge of about 12,000 additional personnel. However, the number of cameras scheduled for deployment documented in its 2024 plan has remained relatively stable as of April 2026.

While both CBP and ICE have policies that state officers must start recording at the beginning of "encounters," only CBP seems interested in actually making this happen. It does have some auto-record options deployed. The GAO recommended ICE do the same thing. And despite both agencies being housed by the DHS, ICE has affirmatively stated that it won't implement auto-activation features in cameras worn by ICE officers.

ICE disagrees that it is necessary to implement additional controls or procure the accessories required for automatic activation, which triggers upon the drawing of a firearm or TASER. Specifically, automated activation presents significant operational risks, including inadvertent or false activations during routine movements.

ICE then goes on to list the possible "harms" of auto-activation, which include recording discussions with "informants or victims," as well as the "inadvertent" documentation of First Amendment activities. This might mean something if (1) ICE didn't control the recorded footage, (2) allow officers to record people engaged in protected First Amendment activities, and (3) ICE officers didn't routinely leave their cameras off when engaging in violent acts.

In the end, this is nothing more than ICE telling everyone — the people it serves and the people it answers to — that the body cameras are nothing more than expensive lip service. These devices aren't going to be used to hold officers accountable. If they're used for anything at all, it will be to find more charges to throw at arrestees or selectively released to support the government's preferred narratives.

The big Meta settlement with a bunch of states got most of the headlines, but state AGs have gone all in on suing tech companies of late, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Last week things went ballistic when the judge in New Mexico's case (New Mexico being one of the few states that refused to join the others in settling) ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion penalty. As Daphne Keller points out, a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that $15 billion of that judgment covers the same claims that all the other states together settled for just $459 million (though Meta has said it will fight the ruling).

As we discussed earlier, TikTok also settled with Alabama in a separate case. But the cases just keep coming. Rhode Island just sued Meta (again), this time claiming it allowed scam ads to run rampant on the site. And a group of state AGs (mostly using the same outside law firm) sued OpenAI separately (same basic lawsuits filed individually in each court). TikTok, Snap, YouTube, all face additional similar lawsuits as well.

Many people are cheering these lawsuits on, and you can understand why. These are some of the most hated companies on the planet right now. No one trusts the big Silicon Valley companies and their broligarch CEOs who seemed willing and eager to fall in line (literally) behind the fascism of Donald Trump. Not to mention the enshittification. Oh so much enshittification. And then add the relentless attempts to force AI tools into places people clearly don't want them.

People were understandably and reasonably fed up. And they wanted blood. Massive verdicts deliver it.

But as I've warned, we shouldn't be too quick to celebrate these kinds of things. Indeed, we may quickly be learning exactly why I was so concerned with those early verdicts against Meta earlier this year. As I noted at the time, some of those cases were the kinds of lawsuits that Section 230 was supposed to protect against — and for good reason. Other cases (like the latest New Mexico ruling) do involve statements by the company (thus they're not Section 230 issues) but are still equally problematic, as we'll discuss below.

First, most of the product liability, negligent design, and kid safety cases really shouldn't even exist under Section 230. Effectively all of them are predicated on the fact that some people do bad things, some (not all) of which were loosely connected to the internet services that are being sued, under the theory that the internet companies should have prevented the bad things from ever happening. But the entire premise of Section 230 was that if you hold internet platforms liable for every bad thing that happens on them, they will massively crack down on speech online, to avoid facing liability. It turns the internet from being a global communications network… into a bland "broadcast" tool, where only approved content gets shared.

It also makes it almost impossible to run an online platform that allows third party speech unless you have massive resources and a building full of lawyers. In other words, it means that only the largest internet companies can survive, while making it way harder for there to be any new entrants in the market.

There's a reason that State Attorneys General spent many, many years pushing Congress to amend Section 230 to carve out the enforcement of state laws. They never actually got that. But they may have gotten something better. A bunch of judges who decided that state AGs and the courts can simply ignore Section 230 and hold internet companies liable for things their users do, so long as you claim the bad things were due to "product design" or "negligence." The Ninth Circuit recently eviscerated the key part of the law that was supposed to stop exactly these kinds of cases.

It's the "get around 230" trick that collapsed the entire law.

As for the New Mexico case (and some of the new Rhode Island case), they are, in theory, predicated on statements by the company. But when I look at the New Mexico ruling (even setting aside the size of the judgment), I can't figure out how it makes any sense. The jury verdict is based on the claim that public statements by Meta and some of its executives were "willfully deceptive." And, as someone who doesn't trust Zuckerberg or Meta at all — and who has called out some of his willfully deceptive statements in the past — I was primed to side with the jury.

But look at the "statements" in question. I'm having trouble seeing how any of them are actually deceptive in any meaningful way. I'm not going to post them all, but they all seem mostly true, even if the public believes otherwise. Take for example:

"We don't sell your data and we don't tell advertisers who you are. What we do is allow advertisers to reach people interested in their products."

This statement (by Sheryl Sandberg in this case) is… accurate. I know that, broadly, people often claim that "big tech sells your data" but that's never actually been true. Their business model has always been based on selling advertisers access to your feed based on your data. That's a very different thing. What the company does is allow advertisers to target you based on the data Meta has about you, but the advertiser never gets or sees any identifying information from you or data about you. There are data brokers out there that do sell that kind of data (and those should be wiped off the earth, as far as I'm concerned), but that's never been any of the big tech companies' business. Indeed, one of the statements the jury found deceptive was Mark Zuckerberg accurately describing this dynamic:

"There are other internet companies or data brokers or folks that might try to track and sell data, but we don't buy and sell."

That's an accurate statement! But the jury found that this one statement alone generated 1,386,648 violations of the law! What?!? How that and all the other "violations" (almost 44 million of them!) came about is also highly questionable. It assumes that each New Mexico resident who might have come across one of the statements counts as an actual violation under the law:

It assigned 2.1 million violations to each of 11 statements that appeared in major news outlets and 1,386,648 to each of 15 statements made through company channels, including its newsroom, executives' Facebook posts, earnings calls and a developer conference, for a total of 43,899,720.

According to reports, 2.1 million was the population of New Mexico in 2020. 1.4 million was the number of New Mexico residents with active Facebook accounts at the time. So basically the jury claimed that each person who could have seen one of those statements because they appeared in a major news outlet… equals a violation of the law. And for the statements made on Facebook/Meta properties themselves, they assume every person with an account could have seen it, making it another violation. That calculation seems… bizarre. Lawyers are already saying they doubt it will hold up on appeal.

Even worse, Meta execs also got dinged for general statements about how they try to take down misinformation and don't profit from misinformation:

"Well, if we see harmful misinformation on the platform, then we take it down. It's against our policy. So the 18 million number that I shared is the number of pieces of content that we've seen on the platform that we take down. Now, do we catch everything? Of course there are mistakes that we make or areas where we need to improve, but that's the best number that we have in terms of what we've seen and what our systems have been able to detect."

That's Zuck again, and that statement is also… pretty accurate? They certainly do miss some harmful content, but that is the nature of content moderation, especially when you have billions of users around the globe. I don't see how that claim can be deceptive.

In court, New Mexico apparently argued that this was deceptive because of Meta's Xcheck program. But as we were just discussing last week, there was a perfectly valid reason for Xcheck. It was the program that was put in place to deal with high profile accounts. Those were the accounts where Meta recognized that if they made a mistake, and took down those accounts incorrectly, it would make the company look really bad. So they created a system where no action would be taken on those accounts without a secondary human review. Given the situation, this sounds reasonable. It's what most companies would do facing similar challenges (and, it is, in fact, what most companies have done).

But when Frances Haugen released the details of this program, it was reported on (misleadingly) as "Meta allowing the elite to violate its rules." But that's not what the program was for. It was to make sure there was additional human review, even if that review sometimes took too long.

But New Mexico presented it to the jury as Meta claiming to take down harmful misinformation while secretly using Xcheck to let big accounts spread it, and the jury (and now the judge) punished Meta accordingly.

I'm honestly not sure how any internet company avoids facing a similar risk down the road. When an AG can take broadly true statements, strip them of context, and call them deceptive (when the only deceptive thing is the AG's presentation), how can any company survive such lawsuits?

And, with the chance to get a $25 billion award from it, these lawsuits are going to be everywhere. It could even be worse, given that New Mexico actually asked for even more, and the judge said he could have ordered a penalty over $200 billion. And, again, these are for basically true statements! How do you run an internet company with that kind of threat of liability over your head?

Even if you look at the strongest elements of New Mexico's case against Meta, I'm left a bit baffled. The key part of the case resolved around the claim that "You have control over how your information is shared," which was a statement from back in 2010. The court in New Mexico claimed that was deceptive… because of the FTC's $5 billion fine of Meta, over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That fine hinged on the same claim, with the FTC arguing that it was misleading by Meta to claim that because anyone could also share their friend graph, and since that graph includes information about other people (namely that you are connected to others), they argued that revealed private info.

But, as we noted at the time, that doesn't seem like that big a deal? Knowing who is in your friend graph from a social media site doesn't really seem like violating privacy. Friend graphs are… just how social media works. There's also no evidence that anyone was directly "harmed" from the ability to access a friend graph this way.

Finally: the FTC fined Facebook for this already, and did so at $5 billion for the entire country. Why does anyone think that New Mexico alone deserves 5X that amount?

Combined with the judgments and the settlements, these cases are going to keep piling up, and they're going to make the internet worse in almost every way. If you thought enshittification was bad before, wait until politicians and judges are the true product managers for the internet, driven by headline seeking and profit maximizing Attorneys General who will view suing tech companies as a way to fill state coffers.

People can celebrate the fact that big internet companies we all hate are losing cases and having to pay, but the end result won't be a better internet. It will be one driven by politicians looking to shake down tech companies any time anything "bad" happens online. That's going to lead to way more restrictions on the internet. Way more identity verification to do anything. Way less innovation (and new offerings will have to go through an exhaustive legal review — not to make them better, but to make them less likely to end up in court). It's also going to lead to way less transparency. The New Mexico verdict means that even accurately describing how your site works can lead to a massive verdict against you, so companies are going to tell execs to shut up completely. This will also mean very few new competitors — except those with massive bank accounts. The broligarchs will be able to afford the liability risks of new services. Everyone else will be priced out.

This was the world that Ron Wyden and Chris Cox sought to avoid when they authored Section 230 30 years ago. But it's here now — even without the repeal of Section 230 — and we're going to see just how bad that is for the internet.

Ford's new Fathom electric pickup truck -- which is still under wraps -- comes with a new bidirectional EV charging system that eliminates the cost of an external inverter.

The post Look Ma, No Inverter! New Ford Fathom Cuts The Cost Of Bidirectional EV Charging appeared first on CleanTechnica.

A DSA-backed California prosecutor who helped force Meta to pay a historic $17 billion settlement this year is on a glide path to become the top lawyer for Los Angeles — unless a tech investor cozy with Elon Musk can spend enough to stop her.

San Francisco resident John Hering has sunk more than $1.25 million into an effort to defeat Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general at the California Department of Justice endorsed by the LA chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and to support John McKinney, a county prosecutor running an uphill general election campaign. It's a heavy injection of cash from a single individual in a local race for a little-known office, but it pales in comparison to Hering's private-sector spending: In 2022, his investment firm Vy Capital pumped $700 million into Musk's takeover of the company then known as Twitter and $300 million into his tunnel-construction Boring Company.

A co-founder of the cybersecurity company Lookout, Hering is spending in line with the tech industry in which he's long been invested. While the city attorney's office is commonly used as the city's defense against litigious residents, the office also carries the power to mold legislation, enforce state law, such as labor protections, and take on corporations and the federal government in court. Roy has vowed to wield the office's regulatory muscle against corporations — including Big Tech.

"Monopolies and Big Tech are things that [Roy] sees as an opportunity to wage battle against," said former LA City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who has not endorsed either candidate. "If I were Big Tech, I would certainly think, 'OK, well, this is someone who is a potential threat.'"

Hering, who did not respond to The Intercept's request for comment, is part of a group of tech titans backing McKinney. Others include the founders of Ring, Tinder, and Boingo, and investors in Anthropic, Anduril, and SpaceX, who have collectively put more than $1.9 million into pro-McKinney committees. A group called "Committee to Expand the Middle Class Candidate" — backed by the property rental tech giant Airbnb — donated an additional $4.2 million to a committee supporting McKinney.

To help get McKinney through the June primary election, Hering and fellow tech investor Diego Berdakin poured more than $1 million into another committee. Over the past month, Hering's general-election spending group, Neighbors for John McKinney, has been paying for TV and online ads and mailers that play up McKinney as "a lifelong Democrat" and "100% anti-MAGA." 

The same can hardly be said for the group's top funder.

After giving to Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 presidential bid and Democratic candidates like Beto O'Rourke, Hering donated $41,300 to the Republican National Committee and $500,000 to Musk's America PAC in 2024 to support Donald Trump's run for president. He has publicly praised Musk's chaotic purge of the federal government through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency program and called the world's richest man an "American hero" for offering to pay TSA salaries during the spring government shutdown. In 2025, Hering and Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who has also donated to Neighbors for John McKinney, attended a White House dinner where Trump hosted dozens of high-profile Silicon Valley figures. The pro-McKinney group is also funded by billionaires Rick Caruso, a failed LA mayoral candidate, and Ron Burkle, a Democratic megadonor.

Earlier this cycle, Hering, who listed San Francisco as his residence in campaign finance documents, also waded into the LA mayoral election — boosting right-wing reality star Spencer Pratt.

Tech industry spending in LA's elections arrives amid a midterm cycle where Big Tech and artificial intelligence have doled out millions of dollars to exert influence in congressional and state races across the U.S. as lawmakers grapple with how to regulate the industries. Musk, for example, has dropped more than $442 million into the midterms, including more than $70 million in his political action committee, America PAC, in October alone. And in state Assembly and Senate races across California, tech and AI executives have spent more than $29 million, according to Tech Equity Action, a political nonprofit that lobbies to craft tech-related legislation while advocating for workers' rights.

Related The AI Doomsday Future Is Not Inevitable

California Gov. Gavin Newsom gave big AI companies a scare last month, when he signed a slate of bills protecting workers from AI overreach, like limiting its use to terminate or discipline workers, banning employers from using AI to surveil employees in bathrooms, and assuring that human healthcare workers will have the final say on patient care decisions. 

The tech industry had fought hard to kill the bills, and while Newsom did offer the industry some concessions, labor organizers say the new laws offer them an opportunity to expand local worker protections, too. 

In LA, Roy has said she would use the city attorney's office to fight for workers against losses in potential wages, promising that she would go after "large corporations and big tech companies" that "misclassify workers as independent contractors to avoid paying them minimum wage and providing benefits," according to her campaign website. She also spoke against companies who are increasingly using automation "to evade regulations and eliminate jobs."

Tech leaders may view a city attorney with an appetite for regulation as "existential to their business model," said Brian Justie, a researcher at the UCLA Labor Center who was part of the coalition that pushed for the bills. 

"What happens in California sets a precedent and serves as a blueprint for the rest of the country," Justie said. "And so if you're a Big Tech, you really need to have a certain outcome come to pass here to avoid ripple effects elsewhere." 

Related Facing Outraged Residents, Flock Got Help From Group That Uses AI to Rally Public Support

For his part, McKinney has blasted Roy for her desire to "turn the city attorney's office into the country's largest public interest law firm" as out of touch with what LA voters want. However, voters across the U.S. have increasingly expressed opposition to the expansion of artificial intelligence and the construction of data centers. Roy's campaign has shown a willingness to lend an ear to growing AI anxieties.

"Billionaires don't want to answer to the working people, consumers, and communities they exploit," Roy said in a statement to The Intercept. "But as Los Angeles' City Attorney, I intend to hold them, their corporations, and the MAGA Republicans that permit their behavior accountable — that's why they're spending on someone who won't."

McKinney did not respond to The Intercept's request for comment.

Ads put out by Neighbors for John McKinney assert that McKinney would "take on crooked landlords." The committee's website said he would fight for tenant's "legal protections" against things like "illegal eviction." But among the committee's biggest funders is the Santa Monica-based real estate firm, Douglas Emmett Properties, which attempted to carry out one of the largest mass evictions in LA history until it was overruled by a judge. Douglas Emmett donated $250,000 to Neighbors for John McKinney in late September.

Related The Ellisons Could Make a Killing in Big Surveillance With the Paramount Merger

Neighbors for John McKinney has also funded attack ads against Roy that paint her as an inexperienced attorney who is weak on crime and has "extreme DSA" positions. The ads cite an article by the conservative California Post, a West Coast spinoff of the New York tabloid, that claimed she had supported a freeze on prosecuting misdemeanors, which she denies.

McKinney campaigns in the mold of law-and-order candidates, pledging to address homelessness and public safety by prosecuting misdemeanors, touting closer relationships with police, and promising to revive a neighborhood prosecutor program. Other California tech-supported efforts have echoed the same — like when tech leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area fueled a successful effort to oust progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin. 

But the LA city attorney's office holds limited criminal enforcement power, Bonin pointed out. He suspects the tech investment in the LA race is more concerned with potential civil litigation, and he thinks that if voters make that connection, it could spell an issue for the campaign.

"Voters are concerned about Big Tech, they're certainly concerned about AI, they're concerned about the influence of — I don't think you can describe it any other way — 21st-century robber barons," Bonin said. "Income inequality is a big issue in Los Angeles, so if they make the connection that this funding is symbolic of the agenda that McKinney will pursue … then it becomes more of an issue." 

Roxana Tynan, executive director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, called the amount of Big Tech money being spent in the race "outrageous." As she and other labor rights groups gear up for a fight for more worker AI protections in LA — like expanding safeguards to include temporary and gig workers, and banning employers from using AI software to collect sensitive worker information — she said she hoped people would follow the money being poured into the race and the influence that a few figures look to exert on the city.

"These are people who really believe that not only can they buy elections," Tynan said, "but that they deserve to buy elections."

The post The Elon Musk Funder Trying to Sway the Race for LA's Top Lawyer appeared first on The Intercept.

Thick as thieves, Don Jr. and his wedding-bankrolling Russian oligarch buddy went off to kill the threatened Mongolian Altai argali sheep. This is not the first time Don Jr. has killed an argali, or had a wedding.

Kremlev put hundreds of thousands of dollars toward the May wedding, including covering a fireworks show and event planning, ProPublica reported.

— Read the rest

The post Don Jr. went sheep hunting with the Russian oligarch who bankrolled his wedding appeared first on Boing Boing.

Diaper Don's crowning achievement, the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Ballroom, seems less popular than expected.

The Orange Menace likes to talk about his probably illegal ballroom. At Monday night's rally in Corinth, Mississippi, an attendee had apparently heard enough. "Shove that ballroom up your fat ass!" — Read the rest

The post "Shove that ballroom up your fat ass!" Trump gets some architectural feedback appeared first on Boing Boing.

Right now, people in parts of Indonesia are inhaling what may be the most polluted atmosphere on Earth. As the historically large 2026 El Niño intensifies, parts of south east Asia have been plunged into an air quality crisis of catastrophic proportions.

Smoke from fires has driven concentrations of dangerous and tiny particulate matter, known as PM2.5, to extreme levels - creating a public health emergency threatening millions of lives.

The World Health Organization (WHO) stipulates a maximum breathable "safe limit" of 15 micrograms per cubic metre of PM2.5 across a 24-hour average. In haze affected parts of Indonesia, this year's concentrations have routinely exceeded 500 micrograms, and even 1,000 in places - that's more than 65 times the WHO maximum.

This is not the kind of polluted air you might find on a smoggy day in most parts of the world - it is a toxic atmosphere considered by the US Environmental Protection Agency to be "hazardous". The delayed effects of breathing such air include increased risk of heart attack, stroke and a host of respiratory illnesses.

The catalyst for this year's crisis is a collision between meteorological events and decades of changes to Indonesia's landscape. The historically intense El Niño has brought a punishing dry spell across the archipelago, leaving the landscape parched.

But the weather is only the match; land management practices provide the fuel.

Historically, lowland tropical forests growing on peat soils were naturally resistant to fire because of their moist conditions. However, deforestation for agriculture, forest fragmentation and peatland drainage have drastically altered the landscape and increased its flammability.

The effects can extend beyond the areas directly cleared or drained: even untouched forest close to degraded areas will have lost some of its natural fire resistance. The El Niño-driven drought has supercharged these changes, making it easier for fires to take hold and spread.

Fire is widely used across the region, to help prepare land for agriculture, clear low-lying vegetation, or to burn household waste. Yet, when fires are set during a drought, they can ignite the drained peatland soil and escape into the surrounding landscape.

A peat fire does not simply flame and pass; it also smoulders downwards into the ground, sometimes burning for weeks or months. An alarming consequence of peat fires is the release of ancient carbon—organic matter that has been safely locked away for hundreds of years. This carbon generally won't be reabsorbed by future forest growth, as the land has been repurposed for agriculture. It is a permanent transfer of carbon from land into the air.

This year alone, Indonesia's fires have released an estimated 175 million tonnes of carbon, equivalent to three-quarters of the country's annual fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions and exceeding the combined annual fossil-fuel and industrial CO₂ emissions of the UK and France.

The scale of the 2026 fire and haze marks a setback after some years of progress. There has been a promising downward trend in regional fire activity, due in part to improved fire management and efforts at "re-wetting" peatlands to make them less flammable.

The severity of the current El Niño has interrupted this good work. Satellite analysis indicates more than 120,000 fire hotspot detections across Indonesia so far - fewer than in 2015 (another El Niño year), but seven times as many as in 2025.

The human and economic cost of the resulting haze is staggering, and many will likely perish from the effects of the toxic smoke. The haze has also drifted beyond Indonesia, at times blanketing neighbouring Malaysia, Brunei, southern Thailand and Singapore.

The health effects of wildfire smoke extend around the world. Globally, exposure contributes to a million or more premature deaths each year, including almost one in ten deaths of children under five.

Worryingly, the number of fires in Indonesia could actually be underestimated as satellites are less effective at detecting the lower temperatures of smouldering peat fires. New technologies designed to better detect these fires could help authorities identify them sooner and respond more quickly, provided the data can be rapidly delivered to those who need it.

But better detection and fire suppression can only do so much. In many areas, the key action is to restore drained peatlands so they are less vulnerable to fire in the first place. A new national peatland and mangrove management agency is being established with this remit.

For now, the immediate prognosis remains bleak. It is hard to extinguish underground peat fires once they have taken hold, and the 2026 El Niño is projected to intensify until the end of the year. The immediate crisis will eventually end, but reducing the risk of future disasters will require Indonesia to restore and protect its peatlands with renewed vigour.

Martin Wooster receives funding from UK Research and Innovation and the Leverhulme Trust.

Gareth Roberts does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When a company wants to be more sustainable, adding an eco-friendly feature isn't always better than taking something away.

People often favour "more". Studies suggest that statements framed around "more" are easier to process and remember than those framed around "less".

In experiments that involved modifying Lego structures, redesigning miniature golf courses and improving digital grids, it was found that participants routinely overlooked opportunities to improve outcomes through subtraction. People tended to add things rather than remove them, even when subtraction would work better. Recent consumption trends also show this tendency: the size of the average car is growing at a rate of 1cm every two years as larger models have become more popular.

One reason why people favour more is that additions are visible. When people judge a service or a product, they tend to focus on what is in front of them and overlook what is missing. It is easier to notice something a company has added than to value what it has deliberately removed.

That can distort how consumers judge sustainability. A hotel room with bamboo toiletries, a recycled plastic water bottle and other eco-friendly extras may look greener than a room with fewer items, even if removing unnecessary products means less waste. This tendency is known as the sustainable additive bias: people perceive environmentally friendly additions more favourably than reductions, even when reducing use or waste may bring greater environmental benefits.

This bias occurs because visible eco-friendly additions can signal that a company is making an effort and is committed to sustainability. A reduction leaves fewer obvious eco-friendly cues, so consumers may interpret it as "less effort" rather than as a considered attempt to reduce environmental harm.

We tested this bias across nine studies in different product and service settings in our latest study. In an experiment with 302 hotel guests, rooms with more eco-friendly amenities were judged more sustainable than rooms with fewer. Yet guests in those rooms generated a higher proportion of waste. Across the studies, consumers could recognise the benefits of removing conventional, less sustainable items. The bias arose when they compared adding and removing items presented as eco-friendly.

Why is this problematic? When hotels replace single-use toiletries with refillable dispensers, or companies remove unnecessary items from product bundles to cut waste, they may expect consumers to hail these changes as environmentally responsible. But the opposite may happen. Companies that genuinely want to reduce their impact on the environment may be misjudged.

This does not mean companies should avoid replacing less sustainable products with more sustainable alternatives. The concern is adding eco-friendly items that are unnecessary. Companies should explain why reducing these items benefits the environment, so customers do not mistake using less for making less effort.

So sustainable consumption needs a rethink and a cultural change.

Companies should explain why less is more and make the work behind those decisions prominent, explaining the environmental logic: which items or resources are being reduced, why they are unnecessary, and how the change cuts waste or environmental impact.

A food delivery company, for example, could stop automatically including disposable bamboo cutlery and napkins with every order, and instead let consumers request them when needed. The company could explain that it changed its ordering and packing process to avoid sending items many consumers do not use, reducing unnecessary material without changing the meal itself. This helps consumers recognise the effort behind a reduction rather than interpreting it as a lower quality offer or a lack of commitment.

Italian circular-fashion brand Rifó offers an example of making reduction visible: its sustainability report explains how its pre-order model is designed to match production with demand and avoid making garments customers do not need. They also encourage consumers to repair rather than replace with new items.

By emphasising the effectiveness of simple solutions, policymakers can celebrate reduction as a virtue. They can showcase production and consumption practices that use fewer resources, offer fewer unnecessary items or prevent waste - thereby reducing their environmental impact. This approach may benefit consumers too: reducing consumption and materialism can improve people's wellbeing, while minimalism enhances happiness and life satisfaction. Giving positive examples a visible platform can help challenge the assumption that progress always means adding another product or feature.

Sustainable production alone cannot solve the problem of overconsumption. We need to learn that less can be better. We are accustomed to seeing addition as improvement, but removing what is unnecessary does not mean reducing quality. Sometimes it creates a more efficient service and a genuinely better environmental outcome.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The weather may have defeated MotoGP at Phillip Island, but the series keeps rolling on. While the paddock heads to Sepang for the next round of the series, here's a round up of some of the news items that have been happening. An update on Jorge Martin, and how he is preparing to attempt to ride in Malaysia after fracturing his wrist, the return of Joan Mir to the Honda HRC Castrol team, an update on Qatar, and another step forward for the Adelaide Street Circuit due to host the Australian GP in November 2027.

Jorge Martin's wrist

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