Zach Alan

aspirational levels of fucking up at work

The official vote is in from W Pacific Fishery Council. Every single Pacific National Monument will be opened to commercial fishing. Longlines in Papahānaumokuākea. All fishing gear in Rose Atoll. The entire Marianas Trench reserve gone. ~80% of US protected waters abolished.

Audio from Air Traffic Control when plane collided with fire truck at New York airport: "Stop Truck 1, stop!" "We were dealing with an emergency earlier and I messed up"

A viral track repeating just two words,“Yanis Varoufakis,” is spreading across Russia's clubland. Created by a Moscow DJ, the tune has taken off among zoomers, with critics linking its appeal to a revival of 90s/early 2000s techno. The irony is that most listeners likely have no idea who @yanisvaroufakis is, they just like the rhythm of the name.

Against my better judgement, passing along a hopeful story.

few things better embody the mentality these tech billionaires have than when William Shatner tried to have a moment of reflection on man's place in the world after going into space — only for Bezos to cut him off and pop champagne in his face

I worked at Epic Games for two years. This is real, and the strategy behind it is smarter than most people realize. Tim Sweeney has spent nearly two decades buying North Carolina forest land. 50,000+ acres across 15 counties. He’s now one of the largest private landowners in the state. The purchases started in 2008, right after the real estate collapse wiped out developers who had been planning golf resorts and luxury communities on biodiverse wilderness. Sweeney paid $15 million for Box Creek Wilderness, a 7,000-acre stretch in the Blue Ridge foothills containing 130+ rare and threatened species. Developers had owned 5,000 of those acres before the crash. He bought them for conservation prices when nobody else was bidding. He runs the acquisitions through an LLC called “130 of Chatham.” He buys the land, holds it for years, then either donates it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In 2021, he donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Largest private land donation in North Carolina history. The part people miss: he told the News & Observer that since 2021, land got too expensive to keep buying. So he shifted focus to converting his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status. He’s locking the land into legal structures that make development impossible regardless of who owns it in the future. A billionaire worth roughly $6 billion is spending tens of millions acquiring wilderness specifically during economic downturns, then giving it away or placing it under permanent legal protection. The land will outlast him, Epic Games, and Fortnite. That’s the part that separates Sweeney from billionaires who write checks to get their name on a building. The building depreciates. The forest compounds.

I've been watching these guys for weeks and they finally did it

mogged? brother, back in my day you were pwned

There's Actually Still A Little Bit of History Left by Francis Fukuyama

This is a pretty good example of how AI is tied to Byung-Chul Han's idea that excessive 'positivity' has taken over in contemporary life, while negativity (friction, resistance, pain, and 'otherness', etc.) is disappearing. The result of overdoing positivity will not be a sweet utopia but boredom, anxiety, a loss of meaning, and a desperate lack of love.

Just a few hundred billion in more data centers should fix this, easy

Archeologists believe that the individual buried in the 3rd century BC chariot Burial "SP 1002" discovered at Roissy, was a Druid since his grave had no weapons and contained amulets, divinatory tools and bronze ornaments displaying Pythagorean figures such as a tetractys.

"Sure, Lee Oldham told me, he had spread radioactive fracking waste on Texas farmland. But in his defense, he never in a million years thought anyone would put a school there." 20-60 million tons of fracking waste were dumped in and around DFW thebarbedwire.com/2026/02/11/a-w…

This is what people watch on tv in Robocop

今週撮影した、スカイツリーと東京都庁の向こうに昇る十六夜（いざよい）の月。 月が空低い時は大気の影響で少しゆがんで、オレンジ色をしています。昇るにつれて黄色く変化します。 動画は実際のスピードの40倍速で再生されます。（望遠鏡を使って撮影）

Really blows my mind that there isn’t coherent political pushback to this. A way in which American life is getting rapidly worse. We could just choose not to