OpenAI chief scientist warns no one is prepared for consequences of AI
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyzrrd0kp7o

a legal grey area that allows supplements to advertise that they can help with fitness, hair growth, sleep, and your ability to focus.
Costco drops beverage, supplement brand pushing it to Chapter 11 bankruptcy - TheStreet
https://www.thestreet.com/retail/loss-of-costco-deal-helps-push-focus-factor-maker-into-chapter-11

Global warming: Tropical diseases expand range
Helicopters spray Tampa neighborhoods as dengue cases climb
https://baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2026/09/06/what-tampa-residents-should-know-about-helicopter-mosquito-spraying-during-dengue-outbreak

"The call is coming from inside the house" is a famous horror movie line...

...and yet people keep inviting these stalkers in.

LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices
https://www.notebookcheck.net/LG-smart-TVs-caught-logging-audio-with-screen-off-and-snooping-on-local-devices.1391214.0.html

Novel nairovirus found in Asian longhorned ticks
https://newatlas.com/disease/virus-ticks-identified/

Asian Longhorned Tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis (They now have been identified in 18 US states)
https://extension.psu.edu/asian-longhorned-tick-haemaphysalis-longicornis

> Costco drops beverage

I've mentioned before that I met a guy who turned Costco down. They offered a potentially life-changing amount of money, but Costco doesn't carry that many products and you have to compete for shelf space and win or they drop you, but you also have to meet huge supply targets. So he would have had to open a new facility and hire a ton of staff and take on a ton of debt that would amortize over years, but Costco would only sign a six-month contract.

> ticks

Ugh! My favorite animal. I might need trigger warnings in the subject line for tick topics.

https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle/ticks/asian-longhorned
Expand the "Current Status" box to see the current range. Mostly east of the Mississippi, but


Climate change influences on the potential geographic distribution of the invasive Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-86205-6

QuoteThe results demonstrated that Europe is at potential of high environmental suitability for H. longicornis invasion although this species has not been recorded in any regions of Europe yet. Our model also anticipated the environmental suitability for H. longicornis in eastern parts of the USA

Your router has a hidden setting that stops smart TVs from spying on your network
https://www.howtogeek.com/stop-your-smart-tv-from-accessing-everything-else-on-your-network-it-takes-30-seconds/

It doesn't solve the microphone problem, but it does stop it from probing other devices. Essentially, set up client isolation or network isolation. For older Starlink routers like mine, that means putting it on the guest network (network isolation).

BTW, our TV habits protect us from the TV doing things while we are not watching (but does nothing to stop it from doing things while we are watching). Basically, our TV is on a smart switch. When we sit down to watch TV, we turn on the power and set the smart switch to shut off at a pre-determined time. When that time comes, the power gets cut. The TV is effectively unplugged and becomes a dead box, just like back in the Dark Ages.

I have the media cabinet power strips split into "stays on" & "controlled off" and the dumb tv, game systems, etc all go off by hubitat or -more often- manual override.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that these predatory smart tvs have a bios/cmos type battery to continue powering their skullduggery.

Federal court rejects claim of constitutional right to clean water
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/09/07/court-constitution-right-clean-water/91649488007/

> constitutional right

This might sound callous, but I think the courts made the right call here.  I fully support the Clean Water Act and all the measures to keep water clean, but a ruling that says that everyone has a constitutional right to clean water opens a can of worms that will be really hard to handle.

We are currently going through the lengthy process to raise rates in four utility districts in our county. Three of these districts are insolvent and at least two of those are certain to vote against the rate increase as they have voted against every rate increase in the past. In my district it is 20 years since rates have increased.

So if there were a constitutional right to clean water, couldn't we just keep voting against rate increases and then seek redress on a constitutional basis?

Alternatively, if the local government has a constitutional obligation to supply us all with clean water, wouldn't they have a case for saying that they can't allow local input on rates since the constitutional obligations override any local and individual rights?

As a final alternative, we have a community near here that is probably going to disappear due to water costs. There are 24 houses and to keep their current system running will cost about $1100/month/home. They are currently paying $60 and before 2018 were paying $30. The cost of this is prohibitive for the homeowners. Most are of modest income. But this is a county of 17,000 people. Something like 6,000 households, 90 percent of which maintain their own wells and septic and have NO help from the county with water and sewer. So do the other 6,000 households, who are also on tight budgets and not getting any water benefit themselves, need to pay to keep the 24 houses afloat? At a certain point, it makes more sense for the county to buy out the owners and turn the lands into a park or a ranch. I'm not sure how constitutional rights to clean water would play into that situation, but I'm guessing that the 25-year cost of the water system will be higher than the present value of all the houses in that district and much higher than the value of those houses if the new rates go into effect (in which case they will be looking at $13,000/year for water, $10,000 for insurance and $3000 for property tax).

In other words, would a constitutional right to clean water obligate the county to evict those people from their land and take the land at fair value, which would be close to zero given the lack of water? And by the way, Public Works has looked into everything - drilling individual wells, trucking in water, and so on. There are no cheap solutions.

In the United States, we unfortunately made the Constitution hard to amend compared to other countries who followed after us. In some cases, they made the constitution too easy to amend (this was a huge lever for Orban). But it means that we are forced to read all sorts of questions through the lens of our Constitution that it was never designed to address. That means that we often can't decide cases on the plain language of the document, but are forced to ask what the drafters of it, writing centuries ago, would have thought of this situation if they were alive today.

It's kind of an absurd situation that only appears at all normal because we have become used to it. It's especially strange in California where I would say the constitution is too easy to amend and we amend and then amend it back constantly, using the constitution for things that often should be simple legislation.

I sometimes wonder if we would be better off if the courts simply said more often that "this is not addressed by the Constitution" and bounced it back to Congress. Which I think would work if Congress worked. But at the least it might provoke some amendments and maybe a Convention.

But we have become sclerotic. We have never gone so long without adding a new state (thinking DC or PR, not Canada) and only once without a substantial amendment.

The last substantive amendment was in 1971 when we granted 18yos the right to vote. That's 55 years ago in constitution that is 237 years old.

We have in the past gone 61 years (1804 to 1865), but that's partly because we had had 12 amendments in 15 years, partly became it was close to the drafting so the fundamental conditions of life had not changed that much, and of course partly because the issue of slavery loomed over the amendment process. And look how that went. It took our bloodiest war to get the next set of amendments. After the flurry of post-Civil-War amendments, we again went 43 years (1870-1913) without one.

But not counting the long quiet periods on each side of the Civil War, we have never gone more than 18 years without ratifying a new amendment until the current 55-year gap. Again, we think this is normal, because it has been the norm for most of our lives. But it has not always been the norm.

On the one hand, I have not the slightest idea how we could get a set of reasonable amendments and break the logjam in the current climate. I don't think it's possible.

On the other, the parable of the reed and the oak comes to mind. The inability to bend in the wind presents a risk in and of itself.