Chinese robot breaks human world record in Beijing half-marathon

Source: Yahoo! News

“A Chinese-built humanoid robot beat the human half-marathon world record in Beijing on Sunday, marking a breakthrough moment in a high-stakes global race for technological dominance. A robot developed by Chinese smartphone maker Honor completed the 21-kilometer (13-mile) race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, beating the human record of about 57 minutes set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo last month. The performance marked a dramatic improvement from last year’s inaugural event, when the top robot finished in more than 2 hours and 40 minutes. Dozens of humanoid robots competed alongside about 12,000 human runners, navigating a parallel course to avoid collisions.” (04/19/26)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/chinese-robot-breaks-human-world-114425148.html

Thomas L. Knapp

Anarchist Notes on the Theory of Money, Credit, and Capital. Part I: Theory

Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson

“Part I of this two-part paper will examine a number of loosely related and considerably overlapping conceptual issues concerning the nature of money and credit: metallism vs. chartalism, money theories of credit vs. credit theories of money, and advance vs. synchronization economics. They all hinge, in one way or another, on the question of whether money and credit are ‘real’ material entities, on the one hand, that must be in some way ‘saved’ or ‘accumulated’ before they can be ‘lent’ or ‘invested,’ or simply units of account for allocating resources and tracking the balance of exchange of material goods, on the other. That is, is money a store of value — a commodity with intrinsic value in its own right — and does credit require a stock of past savings to be lent against?” (04/17/26)

https://c4ss.org/content/61109

Thomas L. Knapp

WI: Three-year-old shoots two people during “Youth Turkey Hunt”

Source: New York Post

“A 3-year-old boy shot and wounded a man and his son after mistaking them for a turkey at a Youth Turkey Hunt in Wisconsin. The toddler was being mentored by his 34-year-old parent who aided the three-year-old in shooting the 12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun. The two spotted motion in the woods that they mistook for a wild turkey, according to the Department of Natural Resources report. However, a 40-year-old man and his seven-year-old child were actually in the brush 35 yards away from the shooters and were struck by pellets in the back, hands and head.” (04/19/26)

https://nypost.com/2026/04/19/us-news/wisconsin-three-year-old-shoots-two-people-in-freak-turkey-hunting-accident/

Thomas L. Knapp

Why Altman (and AI) is under attack

Source: NonZero Newsletter

“The knives are out for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, both figuratively and pretty close to literally. Last week—a few days after publication of a New Yorker piece featuring tons of anonymous attestations to Altman’s duplicitousness, and a few days before a Wall Street Journal piece about his conflicts of financial interest—an anti-AI extremist threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s house. Altman suggested a causal link between the two kinds of attacks.” (04/18/26)

https://www.nonzero.org/p/why-altman-and-ai-is-under-attack

Thomas L. Knapp

Mises on “Rightly Understood Interests”

Source: Free Association
by Sheldon Richman

“Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) still has much to teach us if we want a society in which individuals freely pursue their happiness. The economist and social philosopher lit the path to that widely shared goal in his magnum opus, Human Action (1949). especially chapter 24, section three, ‘The Harmony of the ‘Rightly Understood’ Interests.’ The title alone is refreshing, considering how preoccupied political philosophy, economics, and history have been with mankind’s supposedly fated and endless conflict — racial, national, or class — and power struggles. That alone should draw us to the work of a thinker who understood that this emphatically is not man’s destiny.” (04/17/26)

https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/tgif-mises-on-rightly-understood

Thomas L. Knapp