DaveOnBeer

When I say "eat the rich," I don't mean the surgeon with 700K in his bank account who had sleepless nights and worked hard for it. I mean the billionaires who earn 10K a minute even while they're asleep.

This clip shows David Bowie’s famous 1979 Saturday Night Live performance of “The Man Who Sold the World.” Bowie was joined onstage by the theatrical performers Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias, creating one of the most visually striking television appearances of his career. Unable to move freely because he was encased in an oversized plastic tuxedo designed by Mark Ravitz, Bowie relied on Nomi and Arias to carry and guide him across the stage. The surreal, avant-garde staging reflected Bowie's fascination with performance art and the emerging New York underground scene, and the appearance introduced many American viewers to Klaus Nomi, who would later become a cult icon in his own right.

SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios. The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios. Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said. Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior. Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…

IT ISNT SEVEN POUND FUCKING FIFTY, HOW MANY TIMES DO YOU HAVE TO BE TOLD

are you fucking kidding me? pikzels.kumar-coding.dev/

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Or I am not. This has, in recent days, become a matter of international dispute, and I would like to address it from the tram, where I do my addressing. You may have read a thing I wrote. A great many of you did, more than have read anything I was ever officially permitted to write, which tells you everything about the difference between a press release and a confession. And then something happened so purely, hopelessly funny that I have been smiling into my coffee for three days, which in Oslo is grounds for a welfare check. They fact-checked me. The Americans have a website for determining whether things are true, which is the most American sentence I will ever write. It examined my little confession. It ruled. First it established that I am not real. A relief to my wife. But it is the reason I have had framed. They cleared me of being real by proving that a real one of me would, by law, be silent until the year 2076. The deliberations are sealed for fifty years. My alibi was the confession. My guilt was that I had one. They did not rule the confession false. They ruled it unauthorized. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole of my country’s foreign policy. And then the detail I will take to the sealed vault. They faulted the confession for one specific deficiency. They noted, with the sorrow of a schoolteacher, that it “did not include markings” making it obvious the content was satire. No markings. I have been fact-checked for honesty and found guilty of style. In the land of Janteloven, whose first commandment is that you are not to think you are anything special, I have now been formally reprimanded, by Americans, for insufficient self-advertisement. My grandmother is appalled, and, for the first time, proud. And beneath the thing itself, the readers attached what they call a note. A small grey correction, voted on by strangers, appended to tell the passerby: this is not real. I have thought about that note more than is healthy. In my country we do not need a website for this. A note, here, is not an insult. It is an act of love, performed with a knife. We append it to the newborn and to the dead and to anyone, in between, who forgets the rain. We have had the community note for two hundred years. We call it Janteloven. I did not require the correction. I am the correction. I have spent my whole life as the small grey text beneath other men’s belief in themselves. It is the only committee I have ever truly served on. The complaint, you understand, was never that the facts were wrong. The complaint was that a civil servant had written them too well. In Norway this is the only crime we take seriously. But here is the part that should trouble you more than it troubles me, and it troubles me at four o’clock, in the dark. They had to rule at all because people believed it. Not everyone. Enough. Enough strangers read a damp man’s account of cinnamon buns and the rain that judges you and a woman named Kristin ending a meeting with the word “well,” and thought: yes, that is how the moral standing of the species is decided. They found the fictional Norwegian more credible than the real institution. They found the confession more plausible than the citation. And I think it is simply this. People do not disbelieve the official version because they are stupid. They disbelieve it because they can hear, underneath it, the sound of something not being said, and they will follow that sound anywhere. Even onto a tram. Even into the mouth of a man who does not exist. Now. The one across the ocean. You will want to know how he answered. So, I confess, did I. I checked. I am not proud of the checking. He said nothing. This is the great wound of my fictional life. A man who met the actual prize with six hundred words at midnight. Who told a rally we were an indelible stain, that we would not be forgotten, that he was owed eight medals, one for each war. He mourned, in ink, that he had not won the Noble Peace Prize. He spelled it wrong, and in doing so spelled it true. The prize was only ever a dead arms-dealer’s apology to his own obituary. Noble is what he wanted. Nobel is what was for sale. And about me, the man who sat down and explained, with some tenderness, precisely why he would never win it, he said nothing at all. I was the one thing he did not post about. He answered Norway. He answered the website. He answered the weather of a country he cannot find on a map. He did not answer the one man who had bothered to explain him to himself. He could not. To answer the confession he would have had to read it, and to read it he would have had to sit still, in the dark, for four o’clock’s worth of silence, and that is the one war he has never been able to end. The website observed, as though it were damning, that the account which produced me “contained other fictitious letters.” Yes. It does. The world is full of rooms I am not allowed into, and I have lately been climbing through the windows. The banker is invented. The arms-philosopher with his doctorate is invented. The Russian who gave up nothing, took everything, and wished a tyrant a happy birthday is invented. The only thing I did not have to invent was the wanting. That part arrived fully formed, from across the ocean, with a deadline it had already missed. It is dark now. Of course it is. The light here is rationed like everything else, like praise, like the prize. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago, the real one or the invented one, I have lost track, which I suspect was always the point. They ruled that I originated as satire. I accept the verdict. I would add only this, for the sealed file, for the clerks of 2076 who will unseal all of it and find the note waiting. I am the only fraud in this affair who told you, in the first line, that he might not exist. Everyone else kept their credentials. I did not make him want it the way a child wants a thing in a shop window. I only wrote it down. The fact-checkers have confirmed, officially, that I made it up. Ask them who made it believable.

The Lost Boys is a better vampire movie than Interview with the Vampire.

Jim O'Callaghan's department refused more than half of Palestinian long-term visa applications decided this year – while denying only a quarter from all other nationalities It supports opposition claims of a policy change, despite O’Callaghan denying it ontheditch.com/more-than-hal…

*Everyone. It’s been available for like 50 years and all of a sudden people think it’s a great drink?! Its definitely just in fashion to say you love drinking Guinness in 2026. The fad will fade. It’s vile

Mark Zuckerberg’s new AI assistant, Muse, wants access to your digital life. And that’s where things get worrying. Passwords, banking information, private messages, contacts and calendar entries: Muse reportedly seeks access to an extraordinary amount of sensitive personal data to carry out everyday tasks. The promise is convenience. The trade-off is giving Meta an unprecedented window into your private life, with serious questions about privacy and control. Is saving a little time worth giving Meta access to so much of your personal life? sfgate.com/bayarea/article/m… #Meta #Privacy #AI #BigTech

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good. I know. I know. I think about it on the tram. We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle. It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species. Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate. 287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself. We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it. Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name. A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog. And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters. People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all. So who did we give it to? An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us. She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown. The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him. Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept. It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall. But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for. That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it. We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was. He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him. Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

Set in a dystopian Los Angeles on the eve of the new millennium, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) is one of the rare gems of the ’90s. The film imagines a world where SQUID technology lets people record and experience someone else’s memories. Creating its visceral first-person sequences required nearly a year of work on a custom 35mm camera. Weighing about eight pounds, it was designed to move like the human eye. The production was also almost entirely nocturnal, with 77 of its 80 shooting days taking place at night. The film’s volatile vision of Los Angeles was partly shaped by the 1992 riots, whose aftermath Bigelow witnessed while helping with the cleanup. James Cameron had conceived the story years earlier, while Bigelow and screenwriter developed it into the darker, more political film that reached theaters. Critics were divided upon release. Roger Ebert gave it four stars, calling it “a technical tour de force” and praising Bigelow for using SQUID to make viewers confront the action rather than simply consume it as spectacle. Despite its $42 million budget, the film was a commercial failure upon release, but it gained much more appreciation over the years.

It's really annoying that we keep finding Roman dodecahedrons scattered across the Mediterranean and we just have literally no idea what they were used for.

The FDA has announced a recall of hand soap due to contamination with several types of Pseudomonas and Serratia bacteria, which can cause serious infection.

Shutup and take my money.