Hey. Really important announcement for those of you on discord. Someone used my delivery message without asking for permission beforehand, including the art that I MADE, so I reported it to staff. I just had a conversation with THE LEAD DEVELOPER of the Virtual Diner bot, and he actively supports art theft, calling me dramatic when I was trying to get the issue resolved. Attached are screenshots of the delivery message that was stolen (which I got the person to change) and the conversation with the lead developer of the bot afterwards. This is bullshit. As cool as the bot is, please do not use it. I wouldnt be suprised if he supports AI art too.

This is blatent disrespect towards me and one of my partners who was trying to help. I was not asking for criticism of the art. I was asking for the issue to be resolved. I would argue that the developer was the one being immature.

Please spread this around. Tumblr, twitter, discord, etc. You have full permission to use these screenshots.

Cloudpunk

Sorry for the stark differences from my usual posts but it’s come to light that the Discord Bot ‘The Virtual Diner’s owners and admins actively support art theft and will mock people who are asking for their art to not be stolen. Stating that they ‘shouldn’t have posted it’ or ‘put their name on it if they wanted it to be theirs so badly’. Included are recipts from a conversation regarding a copied intro and stolen art dated to 13/11/23. Please remove this bot from any servers it may be in as art theft is a genuine issue that should not be allowed to continue.

"Yeah it's not fancy. But they're open 24 hours. Coffee is cheap too."

"And the owner gives you free pie."

"Yeah, that too."

I'm busy having fun. Haha. Haha.

So, slept on it and I think I'll do a spoiler free review thingy for the first Sandman episode:

It's just as visually stunning as I thought it would be from the trailer. They put so much love and effort into bringing this world to life.

I've read the comics so I'm not the best person to judge this but I think so far they're doing a good job explaining what the heck is going on for people who've got no prev knowledge. It's a first episode so it's kinda high in exposition but that's not a bad thing.

All the actors are just so perfect.

Disaster gays.

Don't ask me to explain how any of this works timeline wise because I've got no idea xD

Also a warning: pretty sure this show will not shy back from blood and gore in any way and there will most likely be one very gore heavy episode, just for those who don't want to watch something like that.

Can't wait for the rest of the season to be released on Friday.

desperately trying to get wildtangent to send me an account recovery email and they refuse i had to send a help ticket but wildtangent is like over 30 years old i doubt they are going to help me

stomach bugs suck. tummy hurt disease 🤢😵‍💫🤮😷

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]

MDNI - Naïve!Jungwon 10 - ... because he's down bad for you...

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6| Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9

You just wanted sex– no strings attached– but now you’re officially dating Jungwon. An adorably sweet man who swears he’s not as innocent as you assume he is. There was only one way for you to find out. It’s not that you don’t want to be his girlfriend. You really didn’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend. You never intended the “conquest for his dick” (as he calls it) to go this far. But here you are, a new level of Jungwon unlocked.  

💋💋💋💋💋

“Babe, do you know what you want?” Jungwon asks, interrupting your thoughts. “Hmm?” you respond, absentmindedly fidgeting with the hem of your short red skirt as you look at the menu in his hands. His eyes land on your bare thighs. He adjusts his glasses as he swallows hard. Then he scans the diner for anyone who may be watching you two. It's virtually empty. The coast is clear. He drops the menu onto the table and grabs your hand, quickly pulling you out of the booth and around the corner into the unisex restroom. Jungwon locks the door. “I need you, Noona. Please stay quiet for me, baby,” he says, kissing you gently as he unzips his pants. You nod your head before turning toward the wall, pressing your face against your stacked hands. You arch your back and widen your stance as he lifts your skirt. No panties, so he can use you anytime, just the way he likes. Jungwon pulls out his needy cock. He puts his open palm in front of your mouth. “Spit.” You create a large ball of saliva before spitting into his hand. “Good girl,” he smiles, quickly coating his cock with it. He presses the tip against your entrance and you bite your lip to hold in a squeal. You’ll never get used to how thick he is. With basically no prep, the uncomfortably delicious stretch as he tries to go all in makes you claw at the wall. “Fuck, Wonie,” you whine. He covers your mouth with both of his hands to quiet you, while pulling and impaling you on his cock. “Shhhh, Noona. I just need to fill you up with my cum, baby. It’ll be fast. I promise,” he says, clenching his teeth as he quickly works you over. Your legs are already shaking. Muffled moans into his hands. Eyes watering. It hurts so good. Only a few thrusts and you come undone. Jungwon can barely hold in his own grunts as he fucks you faster through your orgasm. “Gonna fill you up pretty girl,” he whispers. You feel him throbbing inside you. It’s so much, it’s dripping down your legs and all over his pants before he even pulls out. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” You’re still clinging to the wall, trying to fight your soul back into your body while he grabs a wad of paper towels and curses to himself over the mess he’s made of you two. You turn around to see him, wiping his jeans and pouting as his predicament. You can’t help but giggle. “S’not funny babe,” he mumbles, as he now tries to clean you up too. “Yes it is. You’re just so damn cute. This happens every time you get greedy. Now we have to go home and change. I don’t want my pussy sticking to the booth.” Jungwon looks away embarrassed. The duality is so unreal. He just impulsively dicked you down in the bathroom of a diner. But he will never not be adorable when he immediately gets shy about it afterward.

💋💋💋💋💋

“Wake up baby,” Jungwon whispers sweetly in your ear. But you don’t budge. “Get up, Noona,” he says, trying to be more stern. You still don’t move. The bed is just too comfortable and it’s Saturday. Jungwon snuggles his naked body closer to yours and kisses your cheek. You open one eye ever so slightly to see his feline eyes staring at your face. You immediately close your eye again. “I saw that!” he says. You try to hold back your smile as you let out a fake low snore. “Fine. I guess I’ll have to…” Jungwon snakes his hand underneath the covers to touch your thigh. He feels you tense up but his fingers creep between your thighs until his fingertips meet your naked pussy. You keep your eyes closed but your brows furrow as he rubs his fingers along your folds. You impulsively spread your legs, wanting him to continue. “And you call me greedy,” Jungwon chuckles and pulls his hand away. He climbs out of the bed. “Jungwonie, don’t stop– you're so mean,” you open your eyes, watching his cute naked butt saunter to the bathroom. You’re hoping if you follow him, he'll pin you to the shower wall and rail you– just like he did last night. Your muscles are still a little sore. You won’t tell him that because you know he’ll sincerely feel guilty and apologize like the sweetheart he is. In his defense, you were absolutely begging to be destroyed like the succubus you are. But he started it this morning and now you can’t resist. You hear the shower running, so you slip inside the bathroom hoping to sneak up on him. Jungwon is always one step ahead of you. The glass door is open and he’s completely wet, hair slicked back as the water cascades down his slender body. “Nope,” he says, watching you from the shower. “Be a good girl.” You frown as you take a seat on the bathroom counter. Jungwon grabs his body wash and pours it into his hand. Rubbing his hand over his chest and then his abs before landing on his erect cock. He stares at you as he starts to stroke himself. Lather building. He tightens his grip and picks up speed. He bites his lip, rocking his hips and fucking his hand. You start to stand up. “Stay right there,” he growls. You pout as you grip the edge of the counter with both hands to keep yourself from bolting into the shower. He rubs circles over his tip with his thumb and moans your name. A smile crawls across his face. Dimples on full display as he edges himself. Jungwon is deliberately trying to make you go crazy. “Please Wonie,” you beg. You know he loves to hear how pathetic you get for him. “Come here baby,” he coos, still stroking himself. You grin as you eagerly hop off the counter and walk over to him. But he holds up his other hand to stop you just outside the shower door. Jungwon almost came just seeing you get so giddy for him. He drops his hands, letting out a shaky breath, trying to calm himself down. “I know you want me to fuck you baby. But I also know you’re still sore. I don’t want to hurt you. Gimme your hands.” You immediately grab his cock. He smiles, wrapping his hands around yours and fucks into them. Suds run down your arms as the spray from the shower ricochets off of him onto you. You stare into his blissed out eyes. His little whimpers of your name make you pussy clench. You moan, tightening your grip and his whole body shakes as his cum spills onto your intertwined hands. Jungwon pulls you into the shower, hugging you tightly and kissing you slowly as the warm water gently beats down on both of your bodies.

Naïve!Jungwon 11

@nyfwyeonjun @maymarrylhs @nyxtwixx @wildflowermooon @ilabjungwon @enha-ism @belowbun @snoopypupp @moonlightndaydreams @daydreams-after-dark

Made a little gif thing for Virtual Diner cause Im kitchen staff for the bot :]]

So if ya order something with the Virtual Diner discord bot you might see us pop up on there!

I was looking through your masterlist and I don’t think you’ve done this au….

Bartender bucky or tattoo artist bucky, honestly idc which one you choose to provide recommendations for(if you do)!:)<3

Tattoo Artist!Bucky

masterlist | req masterlist

I did tattoo artist!bucky this time, but if you send another req I am very willing to do bartender!bucky too���😏

ONESHOT

Jacks and Sunshine by @rookthorne

You were the warmth and light to Bucky’s shadows and brooding nature – a match made in heaven, and it was a miracle that a certain someone realised as much.

Soft by @softlyspector

Bucky and the reader have been together for a few months. She wants him to stay the night with her, but he’s reluctant.

fingers by @buckycuddlebuddy

you couldn’t take your eyes off of his hands. 

Sting by @adrinktostopyourthirst

TattooArtist!Bucky praising you during a session.

tattoo parlor by @alisonsfics

the beautiful artwork and craftsmanship wasn’t the only thing that kept you coming back to bucky’s tattoo shop.

american tattoo by @seventven

steve and bucky run a tattoo shop together in brooklyn. y/n, a friend of steve’s, decides to get inked. only bucky is present at the shop and he’s about to close it for the night.

inked by @buckys-black-dress

A Little Cover-up by @butwhyduh

You get a tattoo.

make it count by @serpienten

It’s cold and rainy when Bucky sees her for the first time. Within three minutes, he’s under her spell.

Starstruck Beginnings by @rookthorne

Shopping in your favourite art store with Bucky brings back the memory of your first encounter, and after so much time has passed, it was with fondness that you looked back on just how starstruck you were in his presence.

SERIES

A Touch of Ink by @deamstellarus

After a breakup with your ex, you decided to move to the small town where your long-time friend Sam lives, hoping for a change of pace and starting a new chapter in your life. You were prepared for a slower paced lifestyle, quaint diners, and a change of scenery. However, you didn't expect to be swept off your feet by two stunning pairs of blue-grey eyes.

Paws and Pins by @matchamunson

In which Bucky runs into the owner of the animal shelter across the street from his shop. (Social Media AU)

Fight For You by @revengingbarnes

Brooklyn, New York. At the annual local boxing championship, Y/N is the leading medical specialist on call. It’s a whole new environment, and despite the drastic change, she loves it. Bucky Barnes is the reigning boxing champion of Brooklyn. Virtually undefeated, this tattoo artist by day, boxer by night is someone that is now fighting his way into Y/N’s head. And she’s helpless in front of his winning streak.

Skin on Skin by @navybrat817

Hottie and Sugar

In June and July 2021, there was a pop-up cafe based on WEEKEND GARAGE at the E-DINER cafe located in a mall in the Toshima Ward in Tokyo.

The menu consisted of five items based on the members of Vivid BAD SQUAD and their starting Virtual Singers.

1. Kohane's dream plate, consisting of two peach buns filled with red bean paste, and two sesame balls filled with sesame seed paste. These are Kohane's favorite foods, hence the name of the dish.

2. Colorful punch tea, a fruit punch drink with mint. An grows mint as a hobby, which is why the drink is mint flavored. The drink is also the same color as her image color.

3. Marscapone pancakes, consisting of two pancakes topped with cream made from marscapone, orange slices, blueberries, and syrup. Akito's favorite food is pancakes, and his image color is orange (and Toya's image color is blue).

4. Coffee shaved ice, a coffee flavored shaved ice drink topped with coffee jelly. Toya's favorite drink is coffee, and he is not fond of sweet things, hence the unusual flavor for a typically sweet drink.

5. Tricolor omurice: chicken rice with omelette, ketchup, basil, and broccoli. Designed to match the image colors of the virtual singers - red ketchup for MEIKO, yellow omelette for Len, and green basil and broccoli for Miku.

Above images are all from corocoro's article about the diner.

Various merchandise was also available, such as WEG t-shirts like the one Ken wears, WEG tea cups, and Vivid BAD SQUAD ice cream spoons.

🦜 - Why did the parrot learn to video call? Because he wanted to see his tweetheart!

The Best News of Last Week - May 2, 2023

1. Engineers develop water filtration system that permanently removes 'forever chemicals'

Engineers at the University of British Columbia have developed a filtration system that would permanently remove "forever chemicals" from drinking water. This news comes after a recent study revealed nearly 200 million Americans have been exposed to PFAS in their tap water. Dr. Madjid Mohseni, a professor at British Columbia, shares his research.

2. Berkeley diner provides free meals to anyone who's hungry, no questions asked

The Homemade Cafe in Berkeley, California, is giving away free breakfasts to anyone who is hungry, no questions asked. Owner Collin Doran's Everybody Eats Program started when he saw people panhandling outside his diner. Customers can add $5 to their bill to help the program or grab a coupon for a free meal. Doran's act of kindness has resulted in a 15% increase in business, and he hopes that more businesses will follow his lead in making the world a better place.

3. Pope Francis gives women right to vote in bishops’ meeting for first time

Pope Francis has decided to give women the right to vote at an upcoming meeting of bishops, an unprecedented change that reflects his hopes to give women greater decision-making responsibilities.

Francis approved changes to the norms governing the Synod of Bishops, a Vatican body that gathers the world’s bishops together for periodic meetings, following decades of demands by women to have the right to vote.

4. US adult cigarette smoking rate hits new all-time low

U.S. cigarette smoking dropped to another all-time low last year, with 1 in 9 adults saying they were current smokers, according to government survey data released Thursday. Cigarette smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer, heart disease and stroke, and it’s long been considered the leading cause of preventable death. In the mid-1960s, 42% of U.S. adults were smokers. The rate has been gradually dropping for decades, due to cigarette taxes, tobacco product price hikes, smoking bans and changes in the social acceptability of lighting up in public.

Last year, the percentage of adult smokers dropped to about 11%, down from about 12.5% in 2020 and 2021.

5. Scientists taught pet parrots to video call each other - and the birds loved it

When humans are feeling lonely, we can call or video chat with friends and family who live far away. The idea for this study was not random: In the wild, parrots tend to live in large flocks. But when kept in captivity, such as in people’s homes as pets, these social birds are often on their own. Feeling bored and isolated, they may develop psychological issues and can even resort to self-harming tendencies like plucking out their feathers. New research suggests that these chatty creatures may also benefit from virtually connecting with their peers.

Domesticated parrots that learned to initiate video chats with other pet parrots had a variety of positive experiences, such as learning new skills. The parrots that learned to initiate video chats with other pet parrots had a variety of positive experiences, such as learning new skills including flying, foraging and how to make new sounds. Some parrots showed their toys to each other.

I wanted to see this experiment so bad, so here’s a video from the paywalled study. I uploaded it on my youtube channel.

6. World’s First Carbon Import Tax Approved by EU Lawmakers

The European Union’s parliament approved legislation to tax imports based on the greenhouse gases emitted to make them, clearing the final hurdle before the plan becomes law and enshrines climate regulation in the rules of global trade for the first time.

Tuesday’s vote caps nearly two years of negotiations on the import tax, which aims to push economies around the world to put a price on carbon-dioxide emissions while shielding the EU’s manufacturers from countries that aren’t regulating emissions as strictly, or at all. The tax gives credit to countries that put a price on carbon, allowing importers of goods from those countries to deduct payments made for overseas emissions from the amount owed at the EU’s borders.

7. Genetic Driver of Anxiety Discovered

An international team of scientists has identified a gene in the brain responsible for anxiety symptoms and found that modifying the gene can reduce anxiety levels, offering a novel drug target for anxiety disorders. The discovery highlights a new pathway that regulates the brain’s response to stress and provides a potential therapeutic approach for anxiety disorders.

Critically, modification of the gene is shown to reduce anxiety levels, offering an exciting novel drug target for anxiety disorders.

That's a driver I'd like to uninstall.

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That's it for this week :)

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