How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

The only problem our economy has is the Fed. They don’t have a feel for the Market, they don’t understand necessary Trade Wars or Strong Dollars or even Democrat Shutdowns over Borders. The Fed is like a powerful golfer who can’t score because he has no touch - he can’t putt!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2018

In my golden tower
There is nothing else's
But the smocking covfefe
The special councel
And the possibility of lasting peach.
... SAD.

       d t scumbag

When a prominent YouTuber named Lewis Hilsenteger (aka “Unbox Therapy”) was testing out this fall’s new iPhone model, the XS, he noticed something: His skin was extra smooth in the device’s front-facing selfie cam, especially compared with older iPhone models. Hilsenteger compared it to a kind of digital makeup. “I do not look like that,” he said in a video demonstrating the phenomenon. “That’s weird … I look like I’m wearing foundation.”

...

This isn’t a totally new phenomenon: Every digital camera uses algorithms to transform the different wavelengths of light that hit its sensor into an actual image. People have always sought out good light. In the smartphone era, apps from Snapchat to FaceApp to Beauty Plus have offered to upgrade your face. Other phones have a flaw-eliminating “beauty mode” you can turn on or off, too. What makes the iPhone XS’s skin-smoothing remarkable is that it is simply the default for the camera. Snap a selfie, and that’s what you get.

In an era of waning American exceptionalism, inhabitants can at least pride themselves on an underratedly important, probably shameful distinction: They reside in the paper-towel capital of the world.

This status is unquestioned. According to data shared with me by the market-research firm Euromonitor International, global spending on paper towels for use at home (but not in office or public bathrooms) added up to about $12 billion in 2017, and Americans accounted for about $5.7 billion of that total. In other words, the U.S. spends nearly as much on paper towels as every other country in the world combined.

Suck it, losers.

I'm still anti-streaming. I like to own my music (even if it's digital). This hasn't been a problem.... until now.

I heard good things about a rapper called 'Noname'. So, I went to iTunes to check her out. iTunes doesn't have anything for sale (or for preview in their store) from a female rapper named Noname. They have some other stuff by other people/bands with that name. Odd? You can stream her stuff from Apple Music, though. You can stream it from SoundCloud. You can stream it from Amazon. But you can't buy it on any of them. You can stream it from her own website, or you can buy her latest record on vinyl for $30.

I don't understand.

But, you can stream and buy it on Bandcamp.

I really don't understand.

SAN FRANCISCO — A startup in San Francisco is trying to make an aged whiskey that’s never seen the inside of a barrel and can be produced in about 24 hours.

The first bottles of the result — a product called Glyph, billed as the world's first molecular whiskey — recently hit shelves, retailing for around $35 each.

Endless West, which manufactures Glyph, begins the process by studying existing popular aged whiskeys at the molecular level, to understand and map the flavor profiles. Endless West then builds Glyph from scratch by adding a plethora of different chemicals to medical-grade alcohol. The entire process is completed overnight.

Don't skimp on the 5-Butyl-4-methyloxolan-2-one !

The dominant narrative around climate change tells us that it’s our fault. We left the lights on too long, didn’t close the refrigerator door, and didn’t recycle our paper. I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. If the light switch was connected to clean energy, who the hell cares if you left it on? The problem is not so much the consumption — it’s the supply. And your scrap paper did not hasten the end of the world.

Don’t give in to that shame. It’s not yours. The oil and gas industry is gaslighting you.

...when Vancouver, Washington-based artist Tim Klein gets a hold of some jigsaw puzzles, they become surreal images like those painted by Salvador Dalí. And the way he makes them is surprisingly simple: for years, jigsaw companies have been using the same cutting molds to make puzzle pieces. All Klein has to do is find interlocking pieces from different puzzles, and a mashup comes together.