Politically Correct ‘Dignity Index’ Would Inject Social Credit Scores Into Public Education
An index designed to categorize speech as contemptuous or dignifying threatens to become another speech suppression and indoctrination tool.An index designed to categorize speech as contemptuous or dignifying threatens to become another speech suppression and indoctrination tool.25 years later, the gaming console that caused so much chaos is still No. 1
After a quarter of a century, one console still reigns supreme.
It has been nearly 25 years to the day since iconic photos and video of the Paris launch showed just how crazy the world was for PlayStation 2.
'I never leave my house.'
On November 24, 2000, crowds in Europe lined up, camped, and even pushed through crowds to get their hands on a PlayStation 2 for the first time. The launch was almost a month after the American Oct. 26 debut and signified a true consumerism-fueled riot that became synonymous with Black Friday.
From its launch day through Christmas 2000, Sony said it sold 1.35 million units in North America and another 1 million units in Europe during that same period.
The PS2 has sold an average of over 6 million consoles per year since then, or 500,000 per month, totaling more than 160 million lifetime units sold as of this November.
RELATED: A kid got a mint PS1 from his grandpa, and the internet is freaking out
As reported by Techgaged.com, the PS2 eclipses two Nintendo products at the top of the list.
The second-most sales are for the handheld Nintendo DS at 154 million, followed by the Nintendo Switch portable console at 152 million.
A steep drop occurs for fourth place with the original Game Boy, released in 1989, having 118 million units sold. Sony's PS1 and Nintendo's Wii are the only other gaming systems to have sold over 100 million.
Interestingly, the PlayStation 2's main competitors during its era, the Nintendo GameCube (launched in North America on Nov. 18, 2001) and the original Xbox (launched in North America on Nov. 15, 2001), do not even crack the top-20 list.
The Xbox, Microsoft's first foray into gaming systems, has sold 24.65 million units in its lifetime, while the GameCube has sold 21.74 million units.
Both company's modern systems — Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch — have already surpassed the sales of their 2000s counterparts.
The PS2 was so pervasive, historical image banks provide a bounty of time capsules showing celebrities flooding PS2-themed parties that were constantly taking place to promote the product.
There were events like the PlayStation 2 and the Hip-Hop Summit "Race to the Polls" event in 2004, or the mouthful, PlayStation 2 Celebrates Red White and Blue with Poolside Party at the Bentley Hotel in NYC, temporarily referred to as the PlayStation 2 Hotel for the occasion, in 2003.
Super Bowl parties became linked with the console during that era too. The Sony PlayStation 2 Game Over Party saw celebrities like NSYNC in its first year and Paris Hilton in its second year. In fact, the celebrity sightings and performances connected to PS2 events at that time are nearly limitless.
If readers don't believe the PS2 was as much of a cross-cultural phenomenon as it seems, refer to this quote from "Friends" actor Matthew Perry in 2000.
"I used to have a social life, go on dates, go to dinner parties, have a job. Now all I do is sit in a big chair and play PlayStation 2," Perry said, per Digital Journal. "I never leave my house. My friends have wondered what happened to me. Howard Hughes must have had one of these."
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Nvidia becomes first company to top $5 trillion valuation amid AI boom
The Big Tech boom around artificial intelligence shows no signs of stopping as several companies continue to climb in value. And Nvidia is leading the charge.
AI chipmaker Nvidia became the first company to reach a $5 trillion market valuation this week, just three months after it climbed over the $4 trillion threshold, the New York Post reported.
'The market continues to underestimate the scale of the opportunity, and Nvidia remains one of the best ways to play the AI theme.'
Nvidia, now in the $5 trillion club by itself, has seen outstanding growth in the last three years since the start of the AI boom. In June 2024, Nvidia reached $3 trillion; in July 2025, it reached $4 trillion.
RELATED: Everything’s bigger in Texas — especially Nvidia’s new $500 billion AI factories
"Nvidia hitting a $5 trillion market cap is more than a milestone; it's a statement, as Nvidia has gone from chip maker to industry creator," Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, told the New York Post.
"The market continues to underestimate the scale of the opportunity, and Nvidia remains one of the best ways to play the AI theme," Britzman continued.
Some estimates pin Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's stake in the company at roughly $179.2 billion, making him the world's eighth-richest man.
This week, Apple topped $4 trillion, joining Microsoft and Nvidia above that mark, according to CNN.
This rapid growth in the tech industry, however, has sparked concerns that this could be a bubble waiting to burst.
In an August interview with The Verge, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, "When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth."
"If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing. Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited," Altman said.
Return reached out to Nvidia for comment but did not receive a response.
Dems, Unelected Bureaucrats Obstruct Implementation Of Trump Elections Order
What’s the holdup? Bureaucratic dysfunction? Always. But the usual muck of politics in the TDS era is at work.'Tongue-in-cheek' xAI project Macrohard is an existential threat to software companies
Competition has always been cutthroat in the AI development space, but until now, the companies at the frontier have always been similar in one way — they are companies run by people. Now, however, the artificial intelligence community is facing a potential seismic shift with Elon Musk's new venture Macrohard.
A "tongue-in-cheek" wordplay on xAI's competitor Microsoft, Macrohard will purportedly be a software company entirely run and managed by AI, threatening to make software companies as we know them obsolete.
'It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real!'
On Friday, Elon Musk explained the idea of the venture in an X post: "Join @xAI and help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real! In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI."
One user on X explained that this was a groundbreaking evolution in AI. "If successful, Macrohard isn’t competing with Microsoft — it’s dissolving the very need for software corporations as human institutions," the account said.
"The joke hides the scar[y] truth: 'Macrohard' = the first AI-native megacorp. And whoever builds it won’t just disrupt Microsoft — they’ll render the whole concept of a software company obsolete."
According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the trademark application was filed on August 1, 2025. The application is currently awaiting assignment to an examining attorney but has met the minimum requirements to move forward. However, the official licensing process may take up to 13 months to complete, according to the USPTO website.
While the official venture trademark application was made earlier this month, Musk appears to have had the idea for the name for years. In 2021, Musk posted, "Macrohard >> Microsoft."
Microsoft did not respond to Return's request for comment.
'Neither artificial nor intelligent': Physicist Lawrence Krauss casts doubt on AI's capabilities
Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss says artificial intelligence is great at producing hype, but he isn't completely sold on its alleged potential.
Krauss is a renowned scientist who has taught at Arizona State University, at Yale University, and on other faculties, and recently lamented how diversity, equity, and inclusion has stifled scientific progression and, more generally, scientific excellence.
In an interview with Blaze News, Krauss commented on the perception that AI will spawn a global reckoning and what he sees as the true concerns about the emerging technology.
'You're gonna displace a lot of people's jobs, and that wealth is gonna go into one place.'
Getting to the truth means "one has to cut through the hype," Krauss said about AI. "Every new development has risks and benefits. And we have to think carefully about what those are."
The scientist continued, "I'm not as concerned as some people are, but partly because I think that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent at this point, and I think we're a long way from artificial general intelligence."
While most AI chat bots "beautifully regurgitate" information found online, Krauss described, they still are not representative of a sentient intelligence. Still, Krauss said he has real concerns about AI, but they are more in regard to the average worker than they are about AI taking over the world.
While AI may not be on the cusp of world domination, Krauss said that what he does worry about is wealth becoming concentrated in such a way that a select few companies can dominate their sectors by utilizing AI "light-years ahead" of their competition.
"You're gonna displace a lot of people's jobs, and that wealth is gonna go into one place," he explained.
The physicist claimed that in a perfect world, AI would do menial tasks and free up humanity's time to expand their horizons and increase productivity and wealth where it matters.
"If it was somehow spread so people benefited from that development, it'd be fine," Krauss stated. "But I suspect what's gonna happen is — and we already see it happening — is that mega-wealthy individuals and companies will develop ... AIs that allow them to access a huge amount of resources and wealth."
Not recognizing this could displace many workers and cause "huge dislocations of society," Krauss added. "That could be a problem."
RELATED: AI faces death by a thousand state regulations
Krauss stressed that literacy in emerging technology is about as important as teaching critical thinking skills. Drawing from his battles with DEI in academic settings, Krauss said it was paramount to "teach people how to search critically and question what they see" while looking broadly at a myriad of sources.
"You know, it used to be we teach some facts in schools, but facts aren't as important as the ability to think critically and be able to tell the wheat from the chaff."
Concluding that there's a lot of good and a lot of bad whenever a new technology captivates society, if you can't tell the difference between truth and fiction, "you're in trouble," Krauss said.
Krauss' latest book, "The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process," is now available.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Today's top stories
www.theblaze.com