Kindness, maybe thats the real punk rock, says James Gunns Superman, which hit theaters this past weekend. Its a message that seems to have resonated deeply with Gen Z. One X user said: I havent felt depressed even once since watching it.
The film brought in $125 million at the U.S. box office and is earning praise across TikTok and Reddit for returning the superhero to his hopecore roots, The Daily Dot reported. Hopecorea trend that emerged on TikTokserves as an antidote to an internet overwhelmed by ragebait, manosphere content, and AI slop.
At a time when nihilism dominates, incel culture and toxic masculinity are on the rise, anti-immigrant sentiment is shaping policy, and political divides are deepening, be kind feels like a radical, even revolutionary messageone Gen Z seems ready to embrace.
The superman movie I just watched really said no one is an alien, everyone is a human, billionaires are evil, war is created, journalism is important, superheroes are hope, empathy is a superpower, and being soft hearted is punk rock, one TikTok user posted.
@ericadanlle #superman made me cry #dc Punkrocker (feat. Iggy Pop) – Teddybears
The masculine urge to help others in need, another TikTok post reads. This movie is going to do for the boys what Barbie did for the girls and I support it, one user commented.
On Reddit, one post summed it up best: We finally made it out of the But WHAT IF Superman was a big asshole/ ackshually superheroes would be dicks IRL zeitgeist that swept the late 2010s of comic book media.
They continued: We have genuine hope and wholesome superman again and its refreshing. In a world where we are increasingly socialised and incentivised to act purely out of self interest, Superman 2025 dares to tackle the rebellious act of being kind. As one X user added: Ill take Hopecore Superman over a dozen dark, edgy or evil Superman any day.
Ill take Hopecore Superman over a dozen dark, edgy or evil Superman any day. https://t.co/b9EiKD3HnN— BBally (@BBally81) July 15, 2025
This is exactly the response Gunn was hoping for. This Superman does seem to come at a particular time when people are feeling a loss of hope in other peoples goodness, Gunn said in an interview with The Times of London. “Im telling a story about a guy who is uniquely good, and that feels needed now because there is a meanness that has emerged due to cultural figures being mean online.”
Or, as one X user posted: I asked grok I asked chatgpt well I asked Superman and he said kindness is the new punk rock.
When Mark Zuckerberg announced on July 14 that his company Meta was embarking on a project to build massively power-hungry data centers to support its ambitions for advancing artificial intelligence, the imagery that accompanied his posts on Facebook and Threads was stark. The data centers he was announcing would have power requirements upwards of five gigawatts and, to show just how big that would be, Zuckerberg’s post included a visual of a gigantic rectilinear block covering a sizable portion of Manhattan. It was as if the city were suddenly snuffed out by millions of square feet of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
A detail that was not included in Zuckerberg’s initial announcement was the curious way these massive data centers are currently being built. In an interview with the Information, Zuckerberg briefly explained that part of the way Meta is building out its multi-gigawatt data centers is by using quickly constructed hurricane-proof tents.
“We have a very strong infrastructure team that is doing novel work to build up data centers,” Zuckerberg said. “I wanted them to not just take four years to build these concrete buildings, so we pioneered this new method where we’re basically building these weatherproof tents and building up the networks and the GPU clusters inside them in order to build them faster.”
A Meta spokesperson confirmed to Fast Company that tents are currently being set up as part of at least one of the multi-gigawatt data centers the company is building, located in New Albany, Ohio. Dubbed “rapid deployment structures,” the tents are long rectangular buildings made of puncture- and water-proof fabric supported by an aluminum substructure with a mushroom-esque pitched roof.
The Ohio data center, which Meta has named Prometheus, is an already existing complex that is having additional computing capacity added through these server tents. Meta expects the facility to be big enough to draw more than one gigawatt of power by 2026. It is one of the worlds largest AI training clusters, according to the AI and semiconductor research company SemiAnalysis. The rapidly built tent structures there are part of the way Meta aims to meet its gigawatt goal next year.
Tents may be part of another multi-gigawatt data center Meta is building in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Named Hyperion, it’s anticipated to pull two gigawatts of power by 2030, with the potential to grow to five gigawatts. Meta’s spokesperson says construction has been underway in Louisiana for months. The data center being built there will encompass 11 buildings adding up to more than four million square feet. The site covers roughly three square miles, so there’s plenty of space to expand. But even at capacity, it’s far less than the 22 square miles of land that makes up Manhattan.
How much of this space will be initially made up of tents remains to be seen. But as the arms race and talent competition heat up between AI-focused companies like Meta, OpenAI, Alphabet, and Microsoft, the size of these tents may be less important than how quickly they can be constructed.
“I’m very excited about building them in an innovative way,” Zuckerberg said.
The U.S. auto safety agency is shedding more than 25% of its employees under financial incentive programs to depart the government offered by the Trump administration, according to data provided to Congress seen by Reuters.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Transportation Department, is shrinking from 772 employees as of May 31 to 555 under the program. The Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration are also both losing more than 25% of their staff.
Representative Rick Larsen, top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, expressed concerns about the cuts, questioning how USDOT can “expedite project delivery and advance safety with a decimated workforce.”
Overall, USDOT is losing just over 4,100 employees dropping from nearly 57,000 to 52,862, with the Federal Aviation Administration shedding 2,137 and falling from about 46,250 to 44,208.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Wednesday that the department did not cut any safety-critical employees and is actively seeking to add air traffic controllers.
USDOT and NHTSA did not immediately comment. It is unclear if the Transportation Department still plans to conduct a layoff program on top of the early retirement departures.
NHTSA has a number of ongoing investigations into advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving vehicles involving Tesla, Alphabet’s Waymo and other companies.
Consumer advocacy groups on Thursday urged lawmakers to drop proposed cuts to NHTSA’s budget, including cutting its operations and research account by over $10 million “harming the agencys ability to conduct rulemaking, enforcement actions, and research and analysis.”
It would also cut nearly $78 million of supplemental funds from the $1 billion 2021 infrastructure law. Groups said they were “particularly concerned that such funding cuts may lead to further firings or forced retirements, which have decimated NHTSA.”
David Shepardson, Reuters
Holders of the digital tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, one of the crypto ventures of the family of Donald Trump, voted on Wednesday to make them tradable, paving the way for their wide sale and purchase potentially boosting the value of the president’s holdings of them.
The World Liberty tokens, known as $WLFI, were sold to investors after the Trump family and their partners launched the venture – a “decentralised finance” platform that has also issued a stablecoin – last autumn.
The tokens were not made tradeable at their initial sale. Instead, they gave holders a right to vote on some changes to the business, such as its underlying code. Early investors have said the primary draw of $WLFI was the connection to Trump and, in turn, their expectations the tokens would grow in value due to his backing.
Making the tokens tradable would see investors determine their price, enabling speculation, earning trading fees for exchanges that list them and likely stoking interest from a wider swath of crypto investors.
The extent to which the Trump family, which reaps three-quarters of revenues from the initial sales of the tokens, will benefit from their wider trading is not clear.
Gains in the tokens’ price would, however, swell the value of the family’s token holdings, the exact level of which is unclear.
World Liberty and Trump’s other crypto businesses have faced criticism from Democratic lawmakers and ethics experts as the president’s administration reshapes regulations in the booming crypto sector.
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Democratic Representative Maxine Waters sent a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year in which they said, “The Trump family’s financial stake in World Liberty Financial represents an unprecedented conflict of interest with the potential to influence the Trump Administration’s oversightor lack thereofof the cryptocurrency industry.”
The World Liberty tokens have not been designated as securities by the SEC, meaning they are not subject to the same scrutiny as investments like stocks.
The White House has said Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children and that there are no conflicts of interest.
The White House has not released the details of the trust arrangement. The Trump family business has been placed into a trust whose sole beneficiary is the president, meaning that the hundreds of millions of dollars from crypto deals struck while Trump is in office could hypothetically be withdrawn at any time, or at the latest, be at his disposal when he leaves office in less than four years.
Trump’s company, DT Marks DEFI LLC, was set to receive 22.5 billion out of a total 100 billion $WLFI tokens, according to a description of the project released in October. The president held 15.75 billion of the tokens at the end of last year, according to a public financial disclosure report published last month.
The Trump family has made around $500 million from World Liberty since the platform was launched, according to Reuters calculations based on the company’s terms and conditions, transactions traced by crypto analysis firms and publicly-disclosed deals.
Asked by Reuters how the vote would impact the value of $WLFI tokens held by Trump and his family, the White House press office said: “This is not an inquiry for the White House.”
The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.
In response to Reuters’ questions about how the tokens will become tradable, a World Liberty spokesperson said: “Additional details are forthcoming.” The venture says on its website that making $WLFI tradeable “brings us one step closer to building a more open, transparent, and powerful financial system.”
“The American public should be very concerned about the president’s vested interests in the cryptocurrency market,” said Chris Swartz, a former longtime attorney at the U.S. government’s Office of Government Ethics, including under both Trump administrations, who now serves as senior ethics counsel for Democracy Defenders Action, a legal advocacy group.
“Not only is it a potential conduit for foreign emoluments and other illicit payments, but it puts the president in competition against other cryptocurrency issuers at the same time he is advocating for digital asset marketplace legislation. That is a clear conflict of interest.”
99.9% support
The World Liberty proposal to “formally initiate the tradability of the token,” posted on its website on July 9, was approved by 99.94% of around 20,900 votes.
Some voters cited expectations of price gains or support for Trump as reasons for their choice. “We invested to get rich,” one wrote on the World Liberty website. “To make america great again,” wrote another. The identities of nearly all holders are hidden behind wallet addresses.
A Milan-based person using the name Paolo, who declined to give his full name, told Reuters he had bought 95,000 $WLFI tokens for about $5,000. $WLFI tokens were sold in two initial tranches at $0.015 and $0.05.
Paolo said he voted in favour of making the tokens tradeable and planned to hold the tokens until they reach $12. “Then I try to buy more when the price drops,” he said.
The World Liberty proposal said the timing for making the tokens tradeable, and the eligibility requirements, would be determined at a later, unspecified date. Tokens held by World Liberty’s founders, team and advisers would not be initially “unlocked” for trading and would be subject to a longer “unlock schedule,” it said.
The implementation of approved proposals would “occur within a reasonable time from the passage of the applicable proposal, according to the project description from October.
Tom Wilson, Reuters
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Nvidias Huang says chip bans arent the way to deal with China
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been active on the government relations and lobbying front, and now hes got something big to show for his efforts: the Trump Administration has agreed to lift a ban on selling Nvidia H20 AI chips to China.
Huang met with leaders in both Washington and Beijing, arguing that the AI revolution is a tide that will lift all boatsthat AI technology can boost business productivity, raise the standard of living, and improve GDP for both the U.S. and China. He emphasized that the best way for America to maintain an edge in the AI race is to ensure the worlds AI models and apps run best on chips made by a U.S.-based company.
The U.S. (under Biden) initially began restricting sales of Nvidias most powerful chips to China in an effort to slow Beijings AI ambitions. The Trump Administration later doubled down, effectively banning sales of the H20 back in April. As a result, Nvidia reported a loss of about $2.5 billion in sales during its quarter ending in April, and projected it would miss out on another $8 billion in the quarter ending in July.
Huang apparently persuaded the Trump Administration to reverse course. His argument likely sounded something like this: Our mission, properly expressed, is that in order for America to have AI leadership is to make sure that the American tech stack is available to markets all over the world so that amazing developers, including the ones in China, are able to build on the American tech stack so that AI runs best on the American tech stack, Huang said during a recent interview with CNNs Fareed Zakaria. Huang also noted that half of the worlds AI researchers are in China and Chinese.
Huang seems to be suggesting that the U.S. can retain technological dominance by controlling the platform AI runs onsimilar to how it maintains financial dominance by ensuring most world trade is based on the dollar. There may be some truth to that. But it raises important questions: What does such control actually mean? Will the U.S. be able to dictate how the Chinese use the chips? Nono more than it did when DeepSeek used the H20 to build its world-class models. Is Huang implying that the U.S. could collect information about Chinese AI activities through these chips (as the U.S. once accused China of doing through Huawei)? That seems very doubtful.
Theres no doubt that Nvidia and its shareholders benefit when the worlds AI is built on its chips and softwarebut is America really better off? And if Huang truly believes the best AI chips shouldnt be restricted, doesnt it follow that hell also ask the Trump Administration for permission to sell China its most powerful Blackwell chips, too?
Fears grow that the U.S. government will use AI to surveille
Six months into a chaotic second Trump presidency, new reports have emerged suggesting the government is increasingly interested in using AI tools to track and profile U.S. residents. According to multiple whistleblowers and insiders, agents of Elon Musks DOGE are actively working to build a centralized, cross-agency database of Americans personal informationsome of it highly sensitive.
The Washington Post reported in May that DOGE is rapidly constructing a centralized database that includes Social Security numbers, medical records, and tax filesdoing so without regard for federal data privacy rules, and without standard oversight or even interagency agreements.
From the outset, DOGE has pushed past barriers and sidelined individuals to gain access to data stored at the Treasury, Office of Personnel Management, Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services, and the Departments of Education and Labor, reports the Brookings Institution
Meanwhile, concerns are also growing about how other agencies may be using AI to expand surveillance capabilities. ProPublica reported this week that the Internal Revenue Service is now developing a computer program that would give Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data belonging to millions of American taxpayers, including their home addresses. In the past, ICE requested IRS data only for individuals it was actively investigatingtypically no more than a dozen at a time. The new system could serve as a mass surveillance tool, possibly using AI, to identify new deportation targets. Due process may be a secondary concern.
Adding to the unease, FedScoop reported last week that the General Services Administration is considering using an AI model developed by Elon Musks xAI to process the personal data of American citizens.
Palantir (cofounded by Trump ally Peter Thiel) has become deeply embedded within agencies across the federal government. Its AI is used for data integration, analysis, and decision-making at defense and intelligence agencies, as well as FEMA, ICE, and HHS. Critics have raised concerns about the breadth and depth of data Palantir can access, and the lack of transparency regarding how its systems function.
After 9/11, Palantir began addressing the governments urgent need to make sense of the vast volumes of intelligence data it was collecting on potential terrorist operatives and events both domestically and abroad. Since then, the use of Palantirs platform has only grownand it could easily be leveraged to form deep profiles on regular American citizens.
AWS launches a one-stop shop for enterprise AI Agents
Amazons AWS cloud division is placing a big bet on AI agents. At this weeks AWS Summit in New York City, the company unveiled AI Agents and Tools, a new section within the AWS Marketplace designed as a kind of concierge service for businesses looking to buy, deploy, and manage AI agents. The store will feature agents from AWS, as well as third parties like Anthropic, IBM, Perplexity, and Salesforce. Typically, AI agents can store large amounts of information about a company and its workflows, and can reason through tasks.
For existing AWS customers, the platform will likely simplify the process of integrating AI agents with AI modelsallwing both to reside within the same secure cloud environment as their data. Amazon AWS is bundling everything companies needdatabases, security tools, IT support, and deployment infrastructureinto one streamlined experience. Businesses will be able to describe their automation needs in plain English to an AI-powered search tool and receive customized recommendations on which agents are best suited for the job.
Gartner predicts that agents will automate half of all business decisions by 2027. And no company wants to fall behind while competitors gain new efficiencies. However, building custom agents from scratch can be a major challenge for corporate IT departments, often requiring significant additional infrastructure and integration work. The new AWS agent platform and marketplace could help eliminate those hurdles.
AWS is optimistic about the potential. It upends the way software is built, said AWS VP for Agentic AI Swami Sivasubramanian at the announcement. It also introduces a host of new challenges to deploying and operating it, and potentially most impactfully, it changes how software interacts with the worldand how we interact with software.
More AI coverage from Fast Company:
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Its hard work soaking up sunlight to generate clean electricity. After about 25 to 30 years, solar panels wear out. Over the years, heating and cooling cycles stress the materials. Small cracks develop, precipitation corrodes the frame and layers of materials can start to peel apart.
In 2023, about 90% of old or faulty solar panels in the U.S. ended up in landfills. Millions of panels have been installed worldwide over the past few decadesand by about 2030, so many will be ready to retire that they could cover about 3,000 football fields.
As an electrical engineer who has studied many aspects of renewable energy, recycling solar panels seems like a smart idea, but its complicated. Built to withstand years of wind and weather, solar panels are designed for strength and are not easy to break down.
The cost conundrum
Sending a solar panel to a landfill costs between US$1 and $5 in the U.S. But recycling it can cost three to four times as much, around $18. And the valuable materials inside solar panels, such as silver and copper, are in small amounts, so theyre worth about $10 to $12which makes recycling a money-losing prospect. Improvements in the recycling process may change the economics.
But for now, its even hard to reclaim the glass in solar panels. Many layers are glued together and need to be separated before they can be melted down for reuse. And if the separation is not precise enough, the glass that is recovered wont be of high enough quality to use in making other solar panels or windows. It will be suitable only for lower-quality uses such as fill material in construction projects.
Other panels, usually older ones, may contain small amounts of toxic metals such as lead or cadmium. It can be difficult to tell whether toxic materials are present, though. Even experts have trouble, in part because current tests, such as the toxicity characteristic leaching procedure, can give inaccurate results. Therefore, many companies that own large numbers of solar panels just assume their panels are hazardous waste, which increases costs for both disposal and recycling. Clearer labels would help people know what a solar panel contains and how to handle it.
If someone wants to recycle a solar panel, and is willing to bear the cost, there arent many places in the U.S. that are willing to do it and are equipped to be safe about it.
Designing for a new life
Despite the Trump administrations cuts to subsidies for solar projects, millions of solar panels are already in use in the U.S., and millions more are expected to be installed worldwide in the coming years. As a result, the solar industry is working on ways to minimize waste and repeatedly reuse materials.
Some ideas include sending used solar panels that still work at least a bit to developing nations, or even reusing them within the U.S. But there are not clear rules or processes for connecting reused panels to the power grid, so reuse tends to happen in less common, off-grid situations rather than becoming widespread.
Future solar panels could also be designed for easier recycling, using different construction methods and materials, and improved processing systems.
Making panels last longerperhaps as long as 50 yearsusing more durable materials, weather-resistant components, real-time monitoring of panel performance and predictive maintenance to replace parts before they wear out would reduce waste significantly.
Building solar panels that are more easily disassembled into separate components made of different materials could also speed recycling. Components that fit together like Lego bricksinstead of using glueor dissolvable sealants and adhesives could be parts of these designs.
Improved recycling methods could also help. Right now, panels are often simply ground up, mixing all of their components materials together and requiring a complicated process to separate them out again for reuse. More advanced approaches can extract individual materials with high purity. For example, a process called salt etching can recover over 99% of silver and 98% of silicon, at purity levels that are appropriate for high-end reuse, potentially even in new solar panels, without using toxic acids. That method can also recover significant quantities of copper and lead for use in new products.
A shared journey
Increasing the practice of recycling solar panels has more than just environmental benefits.
Over the long term, recovering and reusing valuable materials may prove more cost-effective than continually buying new raw materials on the open market. That could lower costs for future solar panel installations. If they are fully reused, the value of these recoverable materials could reach over $15 billion globally by 2050.
In addition, recycling panels and components reduces American reliance on materials imported from overseas, making solar power projects less vulnerable to global disruptions.
Recycling also keeps toxic materials out of landfills. That can help ensure a shift to clean energy doesnt create new or bigger environmental problems. Also, recycling solar panels < href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psep.2023.03.053">emits far less carbon dioxide than manufacturing panels from raw materials.
There are already some efforts underway to boost solar panel recycling. The Solar Energy Industries Association trade group is working to collect and share information about companies that recycle solar panels.
Governments can provide tax breaks or other financial incentives for using recycled materials, or ban disposing of solar panels in landfills. California, Washington, New Jersey and North Carolina have enacted laws or are studying ways to manage solar panel waste, with some even requiring recycling or reuse.
These efforts are important steps toward addressing the growing need for solar panel recycling and promoting a more sustainable solar industry.
Anurag Srivastava is a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at West Virginia University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Mark Zuckerberg and current and former directors and officers of Meta Platforms agreed on Thursday to settle claims seeking $8 billion for the damage they allegedly caused the company by allowing repeated violations of Facebook users’ privacy, a lawyer for the shareholders told a Delaware judge on Thursday.
The parties did not disclose details of the settlement and defense lawyers did not address the judge, Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery. McCormick adjourned the trial just as it was to enter its second day and she congratulated the parties.
The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Sam Closic, said the agreement just came together quickly.
Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who is a defendant in the trial and a Meta director, was scheduled to testify on Thursday.
Shareholders of Meta sued Zuckerberg, Andreessen and other former company officials including former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg in hopes of holding them liable for billions of dollars in fines and legal costs the company paid in recent years.
The Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion in 2019 after finding that it failed to comply with a 2012 agreement with the regulator to protect users’ data.
The shareholders wanted the 11 defendants to use their personal wealth to reimburse the company. The defendants denied the allegations, which they called “extreme claims.”
Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021. The company was not a defendant.
The company declined to comment. A lawyer for the defendants did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This settlement may bring relief to the parties involved, but its a missed opportunity for public accountability,” said Jason Kint, the head of Digital Content Next, a trade group for content providers.
Zuckerberg was expected to take the stand on Monday and Sandberg on Wednesday. The trial was scheduled to run through the end of next week.
The case was also expected to include testimony from former Facebook board members Peter Thiel, Palantir Technologies co-founder, and Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix.
Meta investors alleged in the lawsuit that former and current board members completely failed to oversee the company’s compliance with the 2012 FTC agreement and claim that Zuckerberg and Sandberg knowingly ran Facebook as an illegal data harvesting operation.
The case followed revelations that data from millions of Facebook users was accessed by Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trump’s successful U.S. presidential campaign in 2016. Those revelations led to the FTC fine, which was a record at the time.
On Wednesday, an expert witness for the plaintiffs testified about what he called “gaps and weaknesses” in Facebook’s privacy policies but would not say if the company violated the 2012 agreement that Facebook reached with the FTC.
Jeffrey Zients, a former board member, testified on Wednesday that the company did not agree to the FTC fine to spare Zuckerberg legal liability, as shareholders allege.
On its website, the company has said it has invested billions of dollars into protecting user privacy since 2019.
The trial would have been a rare opportunity for Meta investors to see Zuckerberg answer probing questions under oath. In 2017, Zuckerberg was expected to testify at a trial involving a lawsuit by company investors opposed to his plan to issue a special class of Facebook stock that would have extended his control over that company. That case also settled before he took the stand.
“Facebook has successfully remade the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ scandal about a few bad actors rather than an unraveling of its entire business model of surveillance capitalism and the reciprocal, unbridled sharing of personal data,” Kint said. “That reckoning is now left unresolved.”
Tom Hals, Reuters
The Social Security Administration (SSA) will officially stop issuing paper checks. The transition, which aims to improve efficiency, security, and ensure beneficiaries receive their monthly benefits promptly, will come into effect starting September 30, 2025.
Beneficiaries should receive electronic funds transfers (EFTs) quicker than the time it takes for a check to arrive in the mail. Electronic payments should also be more secure, with the SSA claiming a paper check is 16 times more likely to be stolen or lost.
Meanwhile, the federal government will financially benefit from the change. It costs about 50 cents to mail a paper check, while the EFT should cost under 15 cents.
How many people will be impacted by this change?
The SSA claims that less than 1% of recipients still get paper checks.
As paper checks are phased out for Social Security benefits, individuals can either enroll in direct deposit through their bank or get a Direct Express card. The latter works as a prepaid debit card with just the federal benefits added to it, meaning you don’t need a bank account to use it.
A survey by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) last year found that about 5.6 million U.S. households were unbanked in 2023. Although the percentage of people without bank accounts is declining overall, certain populations are disproportionately impacted, according to the FDIC. Those include low-income households, Black and Hispanic households, and people who are disabled, have less formal education, or are in single-parent households.
The plan to gradually eliminate paper checks actually dates back to 2010, according to the Department of Treasury.
However, a lot of recipients may just be hearing about it after the SSA posted an alert on Monday. Comments on that page suggest many are unhappy with the change.
What steps are being taken to assist the elderly and physically / visually handicapped paper check recipients?” one commenter stated.
“What will SSA do if, on 30 September, there are hundreds of thousands of benefit recipients who have not set up electronic payments? Just not send them their payments? another commenter asked.
The SSA claims it is proactively sending notices to beneficiaries who receive paper checks and explaining how to make the change. Their technicians should also be able to help with the transition.
If a regular hot girl walk is no longer cutting it, why not add a weighted vest to the mix? While not exactly new, weighted vests are making a strong comeback, especially on TikTok and Instagram, where wellness and fitness creators are touting the benefits of adding a 12-pound vest to your daily strolls.
Its my weighted vest era, menopause expert Dr. Mary Claire Haver posted to Instagram. Walk as much as you can in a weighted vest and you will be unrecognizable, one TikTok creator wrote. This is my clubbing, another creator posted. The strobe lights are the stars I see while walking 3 miles in 90 degrees with a 30lb weighted vest on.
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Mary Claire Haver, MD, author The New Menopause (@drmaryclaire)
From the $30 Zelus vest dominating your For You Page (often linked through influencers Amazon storefronts) to a sleek 20-pound version from Equinox priced at $375, the concept is simple: Adding weight to your walks, runs, or workouts may help boost endurance and stamina. Now fitness and wellness creators are also promoting it as a weight-loss hack, with some claiming theyve shed up to 30 pounds just by incorporating daily walks with the vest.
@kymberlychase #fyp #fitness #fitnessmotivation #fitnesstips #fitnessjourney Take My Breath Away – EZI
But what does the science say? In one frequently cited study, participants wore weighted vests equal to 11% of their body weight for eight hours per day over three weeks and lost an average of 3.5 pounds. Another study had participants wear vests for 10 hours per day and found no significant weight-loss benefitsthough many did report sore backs.
Some influencers have said weighted vests are among the best-kept secrets for increasing bone density. However, most of the studies cited as evidence of weighted vests effectiveness dont actually involve walking, and the ones that do found no difference in the bone health of participants who wore vests compared with those who didnt. The Bone Health & Osteoporosis Foundation doesnt currently endorse weighted vests for bone health, calling the evidence at best “uncertain.”
The bottom line: If your goal is to build strength or lose weight, dont ditch your regular resistance training. But if you want to throw on a weighted vest for your walk to the gym, more power to you.
The sun is liquifying Madrid. Again. June 2025 shattered temperature records, with Spain recording its hottest June since weather records began in 1961. The month averaged 74.5°F, with a peak temperature of 114.8°F in El Granado, Huelva, while the Spanish capital experienced temperatures as high as 102°F. Now another heat wave is coming that will easily beat 40C, which I believe is equivalent to lava in Fahrenheit.I shouldn’t have been surprised to discovered that, of course, there’s an app for that: One that makes summer urban wandering a bit less dangerous by telling you which streets have more shade in a city at any given time. Usually, reasonable people would stay at home, but Spaniards being Spaniards, the Call of the Terrace is too strong to resist. Our nature is weak even in the face of a deluge of deadly photons from our home star. We are like water buffalos herding towards the water knowing that death by crocodile awaits. It doesnt matter: Caasthe deliciously cold foamy tap beer served in very small glasses that you must drink before you dietapas, and messing around with friends in a shady terrace is all that counts.People walk in the shade as they attend a tour of the Royal Palace during a heatwave in Madrid, on July 2, 2025. [Photo: Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images]Thats why yesterday a friend shared a tweet that said Google Maps is taking too long to include the option of how to get there but por la sombra. Thats an idiom that literally means through the shade and figuratively means to be careful and protect yourself, which you really need to do here during the summer (more than a thousand deaths attributed to heat waves in the last two months, the government says). I thought the idea of a navigation app to show you routes through streets with the most shade was a clever idea. After all, Ive been playing that game with my son walking these past few weeks, back and forth to the summer camp bus, triangulating in our heads the optimal street walking sequence to avoid this ultraviolet tsunami.That’s when another friend chimed in with a solution: “I have become addicted to this website. Photography directors use to see if a location is in the sun or in the shade. It’s a Google Maps of shade.” He then pasted a link to something called Shademap.[Screenshot: Shademap]It was cool: A 3D map that could put you anywhere in the world to visually show the buildings’ shadows on the street at any time and any day, for free. For a bit of money you can also see the shade projected by terrain and actual trees captured with aerial LiDAR, the laser sensor that creates three-dimensional maps of the world. The Shademap interface has a search bar on the top to find a location, which you can adjust using the same mouse conventions of Google Maps. A bar on the bottom allows you to easily select the date and time, which you can animate just by scrubbing a timeline. Seeing the shadows change throughout the day is surprisingly fun. You should try it.Sunlight is everythingShademap exists because life and every significant decision related to the design of our environment comes down to the sun. Homeowners planning a house extension may need to know how their addition will affect their neighbor’s garden or their own. Real estate buyers want to understand whether that cool Manhattan duplex with a glass rooftop will become a radioactive death chamber by July. Landscape designers must predict which plants will thrive and which will wither on a certain spot based on seasonal sun exposure. Architects use it to position windows that maximize winter warmth while minimizing summer heat. Urban planners rely on shadow analysis to design parks and public infrastructure that people can enjoy.Solar power installers calculate optimal placement sites and angles in a house or a factory to maximize energy capture. The latter is especially important as the world moves away from fossil fuels: Knowing the solar energy potential for any location is what allows engineers to design massive solar farms. And theres the film and leisure aspect that I already mentioned. Shademap is the kind of tool that makes you realize how much of our world depends on understanding a single, predictable celestial body that we regular peeps largely ignore until it’s trying to kill us.[Screenshot: Shadowmap.org]In my quest to find a dedicated shaded terrace locator, I also found an alternative to Shademap called Shadowmap, a professional tool which a more polished interface that offers a lot more features than Shademap. Its divided in three tiers. You can use it for free, too, which provides basic functionality including sun path visualization, current-day time changes, and worldwide 3D buildings and terrain. [Screenshot: Shadowmap]Shadowmap Explorer ($2.50/month) adds full camera freedom and first-person view, making it ideal for photographers, film crews, and event planners, or dedicated hikers (the antithesis of the Spanish terrace buffalo). Shadowmap Home ($8.33/month) includes all Explorer features plus high-quality 3D buildings, satellite maps, enhanced rendering options, and global weather/UV forecastsdesigned for homeowners, gardeners, and property seekers who want to really look at how a new home will get illuminated throughout the year. For professionals, there’s Shadowmap Studio ($58/month annually), which includes everything plus the ability to upload custom 3D models of your own projects, interactive solar analytics, project sharing capabilities, and Google’s high-resolution satellite imagery. This tier is specifically designed for architects, urban planners, real estate professionals, and solar energy specialists who need advanced modeling capabilities.[Screenshot: Shadowmap]Which, OK, whatever, cool I guess. The question remains, “Where can I have a caa and eat half a dozen gildas without melting into the sidewalk?” Thats the tier Im missing, Shadowmap, Shademap, Google, and whomever in hell is reading this. Make it a phone app, too, so I can search directly for terraces in the shade near me RIGHT NOW!! It will kill it in Spainand the rest of the worldI tell you.(But only Spain gets the jamón ibérico and boquerones lubricated with vermouth.)
