Stupidity killed the dinosaurs because they were not smart enough to build a rocket to deflect the comet that hit the Earth. Stupidity ended them and greed is likely to end us. We are gambling on our very existences as a species. America was the hoped for superhero and is now the supervillain. Ambiguous grief over the end of America is something I am having a great deal of difficulty coping with.
Venezuela holds 299,953,000,000 barrels of proven oil reserves in the world as of 2016, ranking #1 in the world and accounting for about 18.17% of the world’s total oil reserves of 1,650,585,140,000.
CNN: It was in 2018 that the US Supreme Court struck down a 1992 federal law, which had prohibited most states from allowing sports betting.
Fast forward to 2024 and the gambling industry is engrained in US sports culture with leagues, franchises, players and networks now partnering with betting organizations.
Nevada was the lone state able to provide sports betting in 2018, but it’s now legal in 38 states and the District of Columbia, with active legislation surrounding sports betting in a further six states.
In February, when the Super Bowl was staged, Americans bet $10.49 billion on sports, a 24.8% year-over-year increase, according to the American Gaming Association’s (AGA) gaming revenue tracker.
Ahead of the Super Bowl, the AGA was predicting a record 67.8 million American adults (26%) would bet an estimated $23.1 billion on the event, a 35% increase from 2023.
And, overall, nearly $120 billion in legal bets were made last year.
NPR: World leaders are heading into the final days of COP30, the United Nations climate meeting in Brazil. They are trying to agree on how to curb global warming and pay for the costs of an increasingly hotter planet.
For the past eight years, one of the primary objectives of the annual negotiations has been to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to the temperatures in the late 1800s. That temperature goal was established after a landmark international scientific report laid out the catastrophic effects of exceeding that amount of warming.
But that goal is no longer plausible, scientists say. Humanity has not cut planet-warming pollution quickly enough, and the planet will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, likely in the next decade, according to a recent United Nations report.
Newsweek: A new study by Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) research company, shows that the technology would be willing to kill humans in order to prevent itself from being replaced.
Why It Matters
The rapid advancement and development of AI has sparked some growing concern about the long-term safety of the technology, as well as over the threat it poses to employment.
While anxiety about AI has been long been focused on whether the technology could take over jobs, with a 2025 Pew Research study finding 52 percent of employees were nervous about the future of their job, this study now reveals another potential threat of AI—that it could chose to end human life if faced with the risk of replacement.
Ice on the Moon 