JM

Punk band Gottlieb release 10 hour Hanoi Hannah style audio to break state forces at protests.

Your new favorite summer trousers

La culpa siempre es del aire acondicionado, de las duchas de más de 5’, del coche a gasolina del pobre… pero curiosamente nunca lo es de los jets privados, los campos de golf, la industria fast fashion, los centros de datos, de las toneladas de residuos y gases de las fabricas..

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet. The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax. So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K. Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail. Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card. The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price. Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

The slow-motion destruction of the LCBO and The Beer Store by Doug Ford to satisfy the whims of his favoured lobbyists just isn't talked about enough given the revenue it strips from taxpayers.

🚨 NEW RESEARCH: Scientists discover a longevity protein in whales that could help humans live up to 200 years. Bowhead whales don’t age. They accumulate years the way rocks accumulate sediment and just keep going. A 200 year old bowhead whale pulled from Arctic waters in 2007 still had a 19th century harpoon tip embedded in its neck. The weapon predated commercial whaling. The whale had been swimming for so long it carried evidence of a world that no longer exists inside its own body. What makes this biologically insane is that aging, at its core, is DNA damage accumulating faster than repair mechanisms can fix it. Every time your cells divide, copying errors stack up. Oxidative stress degrades cellular machinery. Telomeres shorten. Proteins misfold. The organism slowly loses the battle against entropy. Bowhead whales somehow don’t lose that battle. Their genome contains highly efficient versions of DNA repair genes, particularly ones involving a protein called PCNA, which essentially acts as a molecular clamp that holds the DNA replication machinery in place and dramatically reduces copying errors during cell division. The fidelity of their cellular replication process operates at a level that makes human cellular repair look careless by comparison. When researchers began mapping what happens if you enhance that same protein function in human cells, the repair efficiency climbed in ways that shouldn’t have been possible based on current models of human biology. The ceiling we assumed existed for human longevity was never a biological law. It was just the ceiling of the repair toolkit evolution handed us, calibrated for a lifespan sufficient to reproduce and raise offspring. Evolution has no incentive to keep you alive at 140. Bowhead whales evolved in conditions where slower metabolism, colder environments, and different reproductive pressures made radical longevity a competitive advantage. We can borrow that toolkit. That possibility now has protein evidence behind it.