Welcome back to the Pirate Wires Morning Report.

THIS ISSUE: new AI-related rules for the Grammys, Hunter Biden pleading guilty, China’s Cuban military base, horny asexuals (???), an evolution in the climate protest, and a question we never thought we’d have to ask: what the actual f**k is wrong with everyone celebrating the lost Titanic submarine?

We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together (with exception of the submarine stuff, which was frankly horrifying). Also, don’t forget to watch the debut episode of the Pirate Wires podcast, and look out for the second when it drops this Friday (subscribe to us on YouTube so you don’t miss it). Godspeed.

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BROAD TECH

Fascinating: Twitter charging for API access will help war criminals and increase natural disaster death toll, experts say (WaPo)

• Elon: “cis” and “cisgender” are considered slurs, now. Make sure to keep in mind that the prefix “cis” has been around for “thousands of years”, as surely everyone knows.

• Elon and Zuckerberg trade zingers about potential cage match (The Verge)

• Twitter unveils new ad features ahead of Cannes advertising festival, allowing businesses elevated control over what content appears near their ads (Axios)

Reddit blackouts getting (even) weirder. Angry mods have found an even better way to stick it to the man than posting about vacuums: categorize their subreddits as NSFW, which limits user access in some cases, and causes subreddits to appear without ads. Some mods say Reddit retaliated by removing them, then reinstating them. Catch up on the Reddit blackout saga in last week’s Morning Report as well as Tuesday’s.

Grammys roll out new rules for AI-generated music. Songs featuring AI voices and instrumentation will be considered for some awards, but entries in songwriting-based categories should be “written mostly by a human.” (NPR)

• Check out Solana’s interview with Grimes, the foremost intellectual and creative leader in AI-generated music (she hates this characterization, but it is what it is).

Google sued by news publisher Gannett over ad-tech market monopolization. Gannett, whose main property is USA Today, alleges Google’s ad tech business engages in anti-competitive practices that stifle publishers, and local newsrooms most of all. The lawsuit comes as Google fends off antitrust cases from the DOJ and the EU, both of which are also over its ad tech business. Also looming: the California Journalism Preservation Act, which would tax the revenue Google makes off ads on news articles and distribute it to “local news rooms,” many of which are owned by… Gannett. (WSJ)

• Gannett CEO’s op-ed on why company is suing Google (USA Today)

Bernie launches investigation into Amazon warehouse conditions (inevitable). Uncle Bernz heads up the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP), which recently sent a letter to Amazon initiating an inquiry into its safety record at warehouses, and its treatment of workers who are injured on the job. (Seattle Times)

• FTC files lawsuit against Amazon alleging it takes too many clicks to cancel Prime, and using “dark patterns” to trick people into signing up for Prime (Reason)

• Amazon may overtake Walmart in beauty product market share by 2025 (Bloomberg)

TikTok answers letter from Congress. From reporting on Forbes: “There is a difference between ‘U.S. user data collected by the TikTok app’ and information that creators give to TikTok so they can be paid for content they post. The former is stored in TikTok’s data centers in the U.S. and Singapore, TikTok said. It did not explicitly state where the latter is stored.” (But I think I have an idea!)

Facebook data central to DHS investigation of female enslavement. A 66-year-old Delaware man and his female sidekick lured drug addicts and formerly imprisoned women looking for work on Facebook, then enslaved them for sex and domestic labor. The Feds used 89,000 pages-worth of Facebook data to nail them. (Forbes)

→ Crypto

• Powell: “Crypto appears to have staying power as an asset class” (Watcher.Guru)

• Valkryie files for Bitcoin spot ETF, joining Blackrock, WisdomTree, Invesco (The Block)

• Bitcoin surges after Schwab and Fidelity-backed EDX crypto exchange goes live (CNBC)

• Deutsche Bank applies “for regulatory permission to operate a custody service for digital assets such as crypto currencies” (Bloomberg)

• BTC temporarily spikes to $138k on Binance’s US exchange, likely caused by low Bitcoin/ Tether liquidity (everyone left the exchange basically) (Coindesk)

• High schoolers stealing million-dollar-NFTs to make in-game Roblox purchases (The Block)

• “We’re gonna need some transparency”: Brooklyn spa claims their pools are heated with Bitcoin mining, hell breaks loose (@Twitter)

→ Artificial Intelligence

• Schumer describes his vision for big AI regulatory push in think tank keynote; “speech was light on details about what specific AI-focused laws could look like” — thank you Chuck, very cool! (WaPo)

• Biden meets with AI critics in SF “to learn about the potential controls that could be put in place to protect people from the harms of the new tech” (WaPo)

• HP releases cloud service for LLMs (Bloomberg)

• Snapchat CEO: “150 million people have used Snapchat’s My AI chatbot since its launch, sending more than 10 billion messages” (WSJ)

• Slack to hire a “significant number of new roles” focused on generative AI in Q3, and rehire some employees laid off from the company in Q1 (Fortune)

• AT&T leveraging OpenAI internally (Axios)

• AI-powered mining startup, KoBold Metals, valued at $1b after $200m fundraise from a16z, others (WSJ)

• Softbank CEO: I want us to lead the AI revolution (WSJ)

→ More

• Spotify exec calls Prince Harry and Meghan Markel “fucking grifters” (Deadline)

• Spotify to offer new premium tier subscription with hifi audio (Bloomberg)

• Internal emails allegedly show Microsoft views Activision acquisition as a means of putting PlayStation out of business (Axios)

• Adobe’s $20b Figma acquisition may face challenge from EU (Financial Times)

• Tesla’s EV charging network now open to Rivian, joining Ford and GM (WSJ)

• NBA’s Utah Jazz drop cable broadcasting for streaming (Bloomberg)

• Chinese Tesla competitor Nio pulls in $738.5m from Abu Dhabi (TechCrunch)

• Alibaba’s top executive, Daniel Zhang, steps down; will be replaced by co-founder pair Joseph Tsai as chairman, Eddie Yongming Wu as CEO (NYT)

THE NATION

Titan, the lost five-person submersible (people pictured are not the ones who are currently lost) | Images: OceanGate

What the fuck is wrong with everyone making fun of the people trapped in the submarine? Following a cursed voyage to the Titanic, five people are stuck, and lost, 13,000 feet under water in OceanGate’s submersible, Titan. Facing the prospect of a slow and unimaginably terrifying death unless rescue teams pull off a miracle, large swaths of the internet have taken to celebration. One example: “Hope that submarine full of rich people is okay just so they can get back on twitter and see how everyone was making fun of them for dying.” There’s… a lot of this:

Separately, pretty much nobody knows what they are talking about, or what is actually going on:

• Twitter user on Tuesday night: “the submarine lost communication at 11:45am and the coast guard was notified at 6:35pm.” The same Twitter user, Wednesday morning, after the tweet racked up 1,700+ retweets and 4.4m views: “Good morning! every time mentioned in this tweet is wrong. I read a dozen articles very fast then drank 3 glasses of wine please understand.” Just a great, fucking fantastic job guys. (Twitter)

• Snopes verifies it’s true ✅, Elon is absolutely, obviously to blame for the lost sub, which used Starlink, his satellite network (minor caveat: “literally none of this is true or even physically possible lol sorry”) (Snopes)

• Though game controllers are so good at controlling things the military routinely uses them to control equipment (e.g., the US Navy uses Xbox controllers on some of their submarines), the media keeps writing headlines like “The missing Titanic sub might have used this old video game controller”

• Documentary on the missing sub apparently set to air in the UK today? (Variety)

Hunter Biden pleads guilty to misdemeanor tax charges, reaches plea deal on firearm charges. It is unclear how long — or whether — Hunter will serve time in prison, leading some to speculate about the unusual lenience of federal prosecutors. Could it have anything to do with the fact that the DOJ reports to the defendant’s dad? (CNN)

• Hunter to make initial court appearance July 26 (Devdiscourse)

More evidence emerges that some of the earliest people who got Covid were US-funded Wuhan virologists experimenting with SARS-like coronaviruses. Surprising approximately nobody, new reporting all but confirms earlier claims that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a Chinese lab. (WSJ)

• Anti-debate-me-bro hobbit virologist Peter Hotez criticized congressional probe into gain-of-function research, but also helped fund Wuhan gain-of-function research (USRTK)

Bipartisan team seeks to limit Chinese purchase of U.S. farmland. Sens. Joni Ersnt, R-Iowa, and Debbie Stabenow, D-Michigan, said they “are taking action as a response to reports of China threatening America’s food supply and posing an even greater national security risk by acquiring U.S. farmland near military installations.” The pair are introducing legislation which would increase reporting and transparency in an existing system set up in 1978 to collect information about foreign ownership of agricultural land (WHY IS THIS ALLOWED AT ALL, BY THE WAY), among other actions. (NBC)

• Helpful context: check out Matthew Foldi’s March reporting for Pirate Wires on China buying up US farmland, and military academies (including Trump’s alma mater)

Alito: “ProPublica misleads its readers.” ProPublica recently ran a piece alleging conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had a history of failing to recuse himself from cases wherein his opinion was compromised, and of failing to make financial disclosures of gifts received. Tuesday, Alito published a scathing op-ed refuting ProPublica’s report, charge by charge. (WSJ)

Judge orders court to unseal the names of Congressman George Santos’s bond sponsors. After his arrest on campaign finance related charges, Representative Santos, the people’s princess, sought to keep the names of those who sprung him out of jail a secret. Who are these mysterious benefactors? The court says we will find out Thursday. (The Hill)

• Read River’s ode to Santos, published back in March

PA’s I-95 to reopen after collapse this weekend, well ahead of its insanely long initial schedule. I’m inclined to say something like “wow, amazing what our leaders can accomplish when they apply themselves to the problems of basic governance instead of the stupidest shit imaginable.” But also… is it amazing? Or did we just fix a critical road within a difficult but possible timeframe, which is roughly what we should expect from the richest and most powerful nation in human history? Idk, I’ll still take it I guess. (6ABC)

→ More in politics

• Following Trump’s arraignment in Miami, judge sets his trial date for August 14 (ZeroHedge); Former AG Bill Barr would testify if asked (ZeroHedge)

• Trump: “no regrets” about how he handled Covid (Twitter)

• RFK: The Chinese are developing ethnic bioweapons (Twitter), suggests housing vouchers capable of fixing San Francisco’s fentanyl crisis (Twitter). He also thinks wi-fi causes cancer, which I planned on making fun of, but after he said to “Google this, there are studies,” I did in fact Google it, and I’ve got to say… there do appear to be a few studies…

• Marianne Williamson loses second campaign manager in two months (River still loves this woman, for what it’s worth) (Politico)

• Adam Schiff the third Congressperson this century to be censured “over his handling and public statements regarding the Trump-Russia investigation and Trump’s first impeachment” (@therecount)

→ Economy, business

• In May, US home construction saw biggest spike in 30 years (Reuters)

• FCC to investigate consumer impacts of broadband data caps, specifically soliciting feedback from disabled people, poor people, and “historically disadvantaged communities” (The Verge)

→ More

• “The math and reading performance of 13-year-olds in the United States has hit the lowest level” since 1990, “according to test scores released today from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold-standard federal exam.” Shocking, frankly, as I believed the “algebra is literally white supremacist” campaign was on the path to doing some good work, here. (NYT)

• Judge strikes down Arkansas bill banning cross-sex hormones for minors (NBC)

• Bill allowing non-citizens to become police officers hits Illinois governor’s desk (My Stateline)

• Pentagon says “accounting error” responsible for sending Ukraine an extra $6.2b (Twitter)

• Special Pentagon unit monitors mean social media posts about high-ranking military officials (Intercept)

• Education Department: student loan repayments to resume in October (CNBC)

• FCC nominee Anna Gomez’s confirmation hearing is today; she was nominated by Biden in an effort to break the agency’s 2-2 regulatory stalemate (seems fine and normal) (The Verge)

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

China plans military training facility in Cuba. Anonymous U.S. officials said “a new military facility could provide China with a platform to potentially house troops permanently” on Cuba, and the plans are “part of China’s ‘Project 141,’” an initiative by the PLA to expand its global military base and logistical support network.” Elsewhere, Blinken shakes hands with Xi, and boasts about the dampened tensions between our two great countries. (WSJ)

• Biden calls Xi a dictator after Blinken’s diplomatic visit (NBC)

• Raytheon CEO: decoupling from China is “impossible” (Financial Times)

• Retired NYPD sergeant convicted of acting as “agent of China” (Bloomberg)

Russia’s failed 2020 plot to kill a CIA spy in Miami. Vladimir Putin’s regime is sufficiently brazen to kill U.S. informants on American soil — even if insufficiently competent to pull it off (NYT)

Andrew Tate charged in Romania with rape and human trafficking. The indictment accuses Tate and his brother Tristan with forming an organized crime ring and exploiting at least seven women. (BBC)

CLOWN WORLD

Gay and horny, but somehow asexual? On r/askgaybros (exactly what it sounds like) a 23-year-old man says he’s gay and has a sex drive (which he calls annoying) but doesn’t have any interest in sex and only masturbates to stop feeling horny (I guess he thinks this is a uniquely asexual behavior?). He wants to know: would a “sexless or mostly sexless” relationship would be a dealbreaker? After the gentlemen over at r/askgaybros suggested the OP seek professional help and work through whatever trauma or anxiety is at the root of his obvious intimacy issues, he accused them of invalidating his ‘asexuality.’

Out of all the fake sexualities, many of which we’ve come to celebrate during Pride month for no discernible historical reason, asexuality might be the funniest. How could people who don’t experience sexual desire possibly require a civil rights movement? In any case, such people are no longer the only ones calling themselves asexual. The Trevor Project says asexual people might masturbate, or become aroused, or even have sex — after all, it is a spectrum. If so, that means that the entirety of the human race — from literal eunuchs to the horniest among us — are on it. I’m not sure what term we should pick for a gay man with supposedly zero desire for actual sex constantly beating off, but if the word is to actually mean anything, it isn’t asexual. It’s liar. (Reddit)

So is MarioKart going to sue, or…?

New Pride flag just dropped. This one includes an infinity symbol that’s supposed to symbolize autistic people, who are gay now, I guess? The creator, Valentino Vecchietti, previously designed a Pride flag including the intersex symbol (yellow thing with the circle) — the new flag is just that one with the infinity symbol photoshopped across the center. She/they is quite proud of her/their work. (Twitter)

Freemasons wracked by trans drama. Several masons reportedly “took the oath as a guy and then changed or took the others saying that they were nonbinary, gender fluid, or something,” leading to confusion about whether they could retain membership in the all-male secret society. (Daily Caller)

Super disappointing: no dead indigenous kids found buried at former Canadian hospital. In the summer of 2020, when media outlets realized Canadians wanted to do George Floyd too, they produced a shocking new history that described Canadian institutions killing thousands of indigenous kids and burying them in mass graves across the country up until as recently as 1978. The problem: to date, not one single body (of an estimated 3,000+) has been recovered. This week, another disappointment: “21 spots flagged by ground-penetrating radar” outside of former Camsell Hospital in Edmonton “only turned up debris.” The local chief has “mixed feelings” about it: “What happened to them? That's something there that is a big question for me, if they were removed and reburied somewhere else,” he said. (CBC)

Two climate protestors detained in Stockholm after throwing paint and glue at Monet painting. Protestor: “The situation is urgent. As a nurse, I refuse to watch. The pandemic was nothing compared to the climate collapse. It’s about life or death.” (AP)

→ More

• Rachel Dolezal, who’s apparently making money on Cameo, gets ‘tricked’ by 4chan into reading a thinly veiled Cameo script about FBI crime statistics (Twitter)

• Online, a movement begins to leash the dog people: ya’ll gotta leave those mutts at home, there’s no reason I should be making eye contact with a labradoodle at Chilis (Twitter)