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Est. 2026 · Vol. I · The Daily Grievance
Grump News
"The worst thing that happened to me today that you NEED to know about. And some other news stuff."
❖ The Gripe ❖
A Personal Affront, Reported Faithfully
Meta agreed to pay eighteen billion dollars over ten years to settle a lawsuit from twenty nine states accusing it of designing Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to kids and illegally collecting their data, and the company is not admitting it did any of it. Nearly a third of that money, over five billion dollars, only gets paid out if YouTube and TikTok also agree to add things like screen time limits and a night mode for teenagers. Meta's own top lawyer said the fix has to be industry wide, since teenagers use more than one app. Eighteen billion dollars. Zero admission of guilt. And a chunk of the bill only clears if the competition agrees to behave too. I have never once been allowed to settle an argument with my wife by paying a fine that is also somehow contingent on the neighbors changing their behavior.
❖ The Damage Report ❖
Today's News, Ranked By How Much It Ruined My Mood
🔥 Most Enraging
Bill Gates published a long essay proposing a tax on companies that replace human workers with robots, arguing the current tax code rewards automating jobs away without anyone actually deciding that on purpose, plus a category of jobs reserved for humans only, particularly in places like elder care where he says human contact still matters. He said you cannot tell a fifty five year old construction worker to go find fulfillment in a nursing home. One of the richest men alive, whose fortune was built substantially on software replacing human labor, is now worried about software replacing human labor. I have also had a change of heart about something only after it had already made me extremely comfortable.
😩 Most Exhausting
Researchers tracked half a million adults over sixty six and found the ones who got the shingles vaccine were about twenty four percent less likely to develop dementia over the next four years, roughly one case prevented for every seventeen people vaccinated. Half a million people. One shot for a different disease. A smaller chance of losing your mind. I got a flu shot in October and its only known side effect was a sore arm and mild resentment.
😤 Unreasonably Annoying
A pastry shop owner in Cornwall, England, was driving to work and filmed a wallaby hopping calmly through the middle of town, no explanation offered by the wallaby or anyone else. A wallaby. In England. Commuting, apparently, better than most commuters. My dog Larry once refused to walk past a shopping cart for eleven minutes, and that shopping cart was not even moving.
🤷 Somehow Also Happening
A researcher in Australia is arguing that two entire branches of ancient human relatives, Australopithecus and Paranthropus, should just be folded into our own genus Homo, because new fossils have blurred every trait that used to separate them. Some of our actual ancestors had smaller brains than the ones we used to call less advanced. The family tree may not have been a tree. I have relatives I also cannot cleanly categorize, and no fossil record has ever offered to help.
❖ And Some Other Stuff ❖
Briefly, And With Limited Enthusiasm
▸ Exercise matters more for keeping weight off than for losing it — A study of over eleven hundred people found that exercise barely affects how much weight you lose in the first place, but it strongly predicts whether you keep it off afterward, mostly by protecting muscle and metabolism. Exercise, it turns out, is a maintenance plan, not a starting move. I have never once kept anything off, on purpose, including weight, obligations, or the people who deserved a wider berth.
▸ The mysterious Ox Alpha AI model was revealed to be from Z.ai — The mystery AI model everyone spent last week guessing about turned out to be exactly what a lot of people already suspected, a new model from the Chinese AI company Z.ai, which has now promised to release its underlying weights. A whole week of speculation, resolved by the obvious answer. I have never once had a mystery in my own life resolve itself that cleanly, or that quickly.
▸ A kitten was rescued from 10 feet down a rusty pipe in a field — A kitten fell about ten feet down a rusted metal pipe in an abandoned California field, and an animal control officer managed to get it back out. Ten feet. Down a pipe. In a field nobody was using for anything else. I have gotten my own arm stuck reaching for a dropped spoon, and no one came.
Stay annoyed out there.
— The Grump · (and Larry)
Grumpnews: Complaining, professionally, since whenever this started.
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