ZygmuntZ

Your washing machine runs at 57°F. The CDC says bacteria die at 160°F. That's a 103-degree gap between what kills pathogens and what you're actually using on your underwear. And Procter & Gamble spent the last five years making sure you'd widen it. They enlisted Ice-T, Stone Cold Steve Austin, the NFL, Walmart, Samsung, NASA, and the World Wildlife Fund to convince America to wash in cold water. Cold water loads went from 48% in 2020 to 57% in 2023. Their Cold Callers campaign alone drove a 39% sales lift for Tide. The reason is carbon math. 90% of washing machine energy goes to heating water. P&G needs cold water adoption to hit net-zero by 2040. So they built campaigns around "$150 savings a year" and ran them during peak inflation. The sustainability math works. The microbiology doesn't. P&G's own internal data, published in a peer-reviewed microbiology journal, showed 44.7% of US households now wash over half their loads on cold. The same paper found that enteric bacteria require hot water, bleach, or both to reach acceptable risk levels. Cold water with regular detergent leaves viable pathogens on fabric. A University of Arizona study found 44% of home washing machines tested positive for fecal bacteria in the drum. Front-loaders are worse: a 2025 Frontiers in Microbiology study measured bacterial loads nearly 1,000x higher in front-loaders than top-loaders. 90% of bathroom towels carry coliform bacteria. One load of underwear can release 100 million E. coli into the wash water. And at 57°F, that bacteria doesn't die. It transfers to the next load. P&G solved their carbon problem by creating your hygiene problem. The $150 you save on energy is buying you a washing machine that functions as a bacterial trading floor.

Since China worships university education means it will develop many of the same ideological problems of "elite overproduction" that the West has. The bizarre derangement of first university professors, then media workers, then bureaucrats, then judges seems likely to develop.

The company I worked for consulted for them in 2019-2020 and they HATED HATED that most of their clients were now footballers and YouTubers instead of global royal families.

Isn’t that London is now a hellhole, actually it is very nice in many parts - is more that it is undergoing a process of (avoidable) ‘enshittification’ where quality of life on certain metrics gets slowly worse over time. So easy to tolerate but things are still worse than before

Pope Leo XIV places a wreath of flowers and prays for the Algerians who died in the Algerian War of Independence against French Colonial rule at the Maqam Echahid Martyrs’ Monument in Algiers.

‼️ZELENSKYY: We will not sell our weapons like we did in the 1990s. Instead, we will share our knowledge and expertise in exchange for long-term, mutually beneficial security partnerships with Ukraine. “We're building new partnerships on weapons differently than in the nineties or two thousands, when Ukrainian weapons and forces were sold off like it's Black Friday. We're not holding a fire sale of our weapons or emptying our warehouses. We're offering a security partnership that's long-term and profitable for Ukraine” - Zelenskyy’s address to the workers of Ukraine’s defense-industrial complex. April 13th, 2026.

It's remarkable that there hasn't been a single defection from the Islamic Republic, despite all claims that their collapse is imminent.

EU's von der Leyen: Moving to qualified majority voting in foreign policy is an important way to avoid systematic blockages as we've seen in the past. We should use the momentum now really to move forward on that topic.

French lawmakers set to push bill criminalising speech on Israel, with penalties of up to five years in prison

The Iran echo chamber’s claim that zero enrichment was not the Trump administration’s position — and that Iran has a “right” to enrichment — is a bad fact-check performed by people who never knew or checked the facts in the first place.

Massive unforced error by Restore.