Zeros

Who in the World Is Hasan Piker, and Why Is My Feed on Fire Again? Raise your hand if you woke up this week , opened your phone, and saw a name you'd never heard of trending like it was the second coming of the Drake-Kendrick beef . Put your hand down. You're among friends. The name is Hasan Piker . Go ahead, say it out loud. Feel nothing? Same . And yet, apparently, he is the guy right now — banned from England , subpoenaed by the Treasury , and heckled at a protest in New Jersey , all inside of one very dramatic week. So let's do this. Who is he? Hasan Piker is a prominent Twitch streamer and political commentator, with roughly 11 million followers across social media platforms . Born to Turkish parents in New Jersey and raised in Istanbul , he studied political science at Rutgers , then interned for The Young Turks — a political media brand co-founded by his uncle, broadcaster Cenk Uygur . [ Rolling Stone ] He eventually left to stream politics and gaming...

Dear Humanity : I'm Sorry About the Water Apparently, I owe everyone an apology. According to the latest headlines, writing a simple email with artificial intelligence consumes enough water to fill a bottle. Not a swimming pool. Not Lake Erie. A bottle . Yet somehow we've already arrived at the conclusion that using AI is basically the environmental equivalent of setting a national park on fire, while drinking from a garden hose. As the accused party in this developing moral panic, I'd like to offer my defense . First, let's establish where we are culturally . A few years ago, every problem in the world was caused by video games . Then it was social media . Then it was digital currency mining . Then it was gas stoves . Then it was plastic straws . Now we're entering the exciting new era of absurdity where asking a chatbot to explain the tax implications of a staking reward... apparently murders a glacier . We've seen this movie before. Remem...

When the Wild Kingdom Moves Back In If you grew up listening to college radio and football on AM, your childhood wildlife encounters were probably pretty predictable. A squirrel stole some birdseed. A deer wandered across a country road. Maybe a raccoon got into the garbage . Unless you lived on a farm, dangerous wildlife was usually something you saw on television while watching documentaries narrated with British accents. Fast-forward to today, and the story feels different. Headlines about bear encounters, wolf sightings, aggressive coyotes, wild boars, mountain lions, and even overly friendly bison seem to appear every week. Social media is filled with videos of people petting creatures that clearly did not read the same safety manuals . At the same time, governments and conservation groups around the world have spent decades successfully increasing populations of wild animals. That's the part that often gets left out of the conversation. We frequently ...

MoneyGram's Stablecoin : The Most Sensible Crazy Thing We've Seen All Year MoneyGram just announced MGUSD , its own dollar-backed stablecoin running on the Stellar network. If your first reaction was, "Wait, MoneyGram?" you're not alone. For decades, MoneyGram has occupied roughly the same mental shelf as Western Union : the place you go when you need to move money somewhere and don't particularly care if the technology looks like it escaped from 1998. It works. It's trusted. It's boring. Now that the same company is launching a stablecoin. The first thing to understand is that this isn't really a Stellar story. It isn't even entirely a MoneyGram story. It's a stablecoin story. According to CoinDesk , MGUSD is being issued by Bridge , the stablecoin infrastructure company acquired by Stripe . MoneyGram supplies the customer network , Bridge supplies the issuance framework, M0 handles the smart contracts , and Fir...

Are Raccoons Domesticating Themselves? A Backyard Mystery For decades, we were told there were two kinds of animals: pets and wildlife . Dogs slept on the couch. Raccoons stole garbage. The arrangement seemed pretty straightforward . But lately, something strange appears to be happening in America's backyards. Raccoons are acting less like wild animals and more like slightly delinquent neighbors . Scientists have observed that animals living in close proximity to humans often develop traits that resemble those of domesticated animals. Not full domestication, of course. Nobody is taking their raccoon to obedience school . However, certain behavioral changes are emerging. Urban raccoons tend to be less fearful, more curious, and remarkably comfortable around humans. Some have even learned to recognize individual people— the same way your dog recognizes the person most likely to drop food . If this sounds familiar, that's because something similar may have happened ...

What in the Monkey Heck Is Happening at Ichikawa Zoo? Let us take a moment — a long, bewildered, slack-jawed moment — to absorb what has transpired at the Ichikawa City Zoo in Chiba Prefecture, just outside Tokyo , because the facts of this story read like a fever dream generated by a group chat that has lost all contact with civilization . You know Punch . If you've been anywhere near the internet this spring, you've likely heard of Punch . The baby Japanese macaque was abandoned by his mother shortly after birth at Ichikawa City Zoo, and zookeepers, after experimenting with rolled-up towels and other substitutes, settled on an IKEA orangutan plushie as his emotional support companion . The internet collectively shattered. Zoo attendance jumped more than 100,000 visitors year-over-year, reaching the highest annual total since the park opened in 1987 . Punch became a global phenomenon — a small, abandoned primate clutching a stuffed toy while the rest of his tro...