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FRANCE BURNS DOWN FRANCE
France went out Saturday over the cost of living and the state of its schools. The interior ministry counted about 550,000 marchers, the CGT union claimed 800,000, and most of them did the normal thing and went home. Masked groups in Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux, Nice and Strasbourg did not. They popped the metal shutters off storefronts and cleared the shelves, and police have blamed radical far-left groups plus a crowd of opportunists who turned up for free sneakers. CNN reported more than 2,000 arrests over the weekend, with later counts around 2,400. Roughly 1,500 businesses were damaged and losses run into the hundreds of millions of euros. Two people died. A protester in Saint-Etienne lost a hand and the interior minister declined to confirm whether a police grenade caused it. That answer is not calming anybody down. Limoges lost its 143-year-old town hall to a fire. Lyon lost its tourist office, which does simplify the brochure. Macron vowed to hold accountable anyone who "sought to bring down the Republic," officials started floating curfews, and the blame carousel began. Le Pen called the government powerless. Melenchon told PM Sebastien Lecornu he was playing with fire. Lecornu said the far left built the conditions. Nobody dwelled on Tuesday, when the National Assembly votes on the revenue half of a 2027 budget that trims the deficit from 5.4% of GDP to 5%, with French debt at 119% of GDP, the highest since 1946.
Sources (3)
- washingtonpost.com - France reels from unrest, with public buildings burned and hundreds detained
- cbsnews.com - French police arrest more than 1,800 people after violent protests erupt across country
- fortune.com - 'France, truly, is on the brink' and just days away from a make-or-break moment in its debt crisis
NEBRASKA IS SELLING 103-YEAR-OLD PISS TROUGHS FOR $3,000
Memorial Stadium is getting a $600 million gut job called the Big Red Rebuild, and Nebraska decided the old fixtures were too dated to keep and too sacred to toss. So the school is selling the men's room urinal troughs to fans at $3,000 a pop. Seven of the thirty available are already spoken for, which is $21,000 the athletic department made off plumbing. These are not keychains. Each trough is porcelain, roughly 300 pounds, up to eight feet long, and carrying 103 years of Saturdays. The sales site is completely unbothered about it: a pair of stadium seats says you love Nebraska football, while a trough says "you have fully committed." Suggested uses include a flower planter, a garage centerpiece, and a display stand for your other Husker memorabilia, so your signed helmet can live where thousands of men once aimed. Rare Goods, the company running the sale, notes that fans have logged serious hours at this particular fixture, especially since the stadium started selling beer last year. Everything gets cleaned before pickup, which starts November 22. If three grand is rich for you, seats begin at $25, reclaimed benches go for $400, and a stainless steel water fountain trough is $2,500. The Bills beat Nebraska to this with fixtures from old Highmark Stadium at a reported $5,000, so Lincoln is the budget option.
FIRST WEEKEND OF CORNELL FRAT BAN
Cornell's first weekend under the party ban was Homecoming weekend. Nobody in the administration appears to have looked at a calendar before picking the start date. Students had already spent the fall protesting on campus, some calling for President Michael Kotlikoff to resign and some chanting "Ban the frats." They got the second one, timed to the weekend the alumni drove in. Kotlikoff announced it October 13 in a letter to the campus: no parties or social events in Interfraternity Council houses for the rest of the 2026-2027 academic year, "zero tolerance for violations," and an immediate emergency suspension for any fraternity that holds one anyway. Roughly a third of Cornell students are in Greek life, so that is most of the weekend. It follows a civil lawsuit filed in September by a former student identified as Jane Doe, who says she was pressured into drugs and alcohol and sexually assaulted by seven Chi Phi members on October 19, 2024. All seven deny wrongdoing. Here is what the school managed before the hammer came out. A Title IX panel expelled two defendants, suspended two and put them on probation, issued one a persona non grata order, and gave two others no-contact orders, "educational modules" and "reflection papers." The persona non grata man, who had already graduated, was barred from campus for three years. Cornell says it followed its policies and Title IX. The Tompkins County DA declined to charge anyone, citing a lack of evidence. Prosecutors have now reopened the criminal investigation, and at least two of the accused are trying to get Attorney General Letitia James off the case because she posted support for the accuser before her office was named special prosecutor. Chi Phi is still barred from campus, and the faculty senate has given notice of a rare no-confidence resolution.
SCIENTISTS WITH NOTHING BETTER TO DO, ARGUE ABOUT LUNAR TIME ZONE
NPR got James Olthoff, a delegate to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, on the air to answer a question with no official answer: what time is it on the moon. Right now the answer is Houston time. That is what Apollo did, along with mission elapsed time, a clock that starts at liftoff and just counts up. The problem is gravity. It is weaker up there, so lunar clocks run fast, roughly 56 microseconds a day ahead of Earth by the NIST calculation. Nobody is missing dinner over 56 microseconds. Navigation is a different story. GPS satellites gain about 38 microseconds a day, and engineers deliberately slow those clocks before launch so your phone doesn't route you into a lake. So the paperwork is moving. The White House told NASA in April 2024 to have Coordinated Lunar Time figured out by the end of 2026. The International Astronomical Union defined a Lunar Coordinate Time that same year. This month the General Conference on Weights and Measures met at Versailles with a resolution on a lunar reference time scale traceable to UTC, because of course moon time gets settled in a French convention center. Olthoff says the simple option is a clock built just for the moon. The hard option is one time system for the entire solar system, which would also cover Mars whenever we get around to screwing that up too.
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ANTHROPIC PLEDGES 5% OF ITSELF TO THE PUBLIC
Anthropic announced Sunday that it's committing 5% of its shares to a new entity called the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, money the company says could go toward large nonprofit donations or "direct distributions to specific populations." The catch sits in the same sentence as the number. It's subject to stockholder approval. At Anthropic's last reported private valuation of about $965 billion, that's roughly $48 billion the owners still have to vote on. The structure comes with an escalator. The board can add another 2% of the company for every 50% increase in Anthropic's value above a set baseline, and Anthropic has not said what that baseline is. It says it will publish the milestones, structure and governance in the coming months. All of this arrives while the company is reportedly lining up an IPO as soon as November, which is a hell of a time to rediscover your values. The fund will be a wholly owned LLC rather than a 501(c)(3), which Anthropic says keeps its giving options flexible, and none of its equity can be used for lobbying or political donations in any country. The pitch is that escalating stock awards normally go to executives, and this one gets pointed at the public instead. Add the co-founders' pledge of 80% of their equity and the employee donation match, and Anthropic says about 20% of its shares are dedicated to the public good. Elon Musk replied on X that he recommends giving the shares directly to the public, then pledged one SpaceX share to every kid in America.
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