Josh Lappen

Nothing quite compares to the feeling of spending part of your Saturday completing a mandatory training on *federal research ethics* in 2025

Mayor Daniel Lurie is restructuring how San Francisco’s government works—outsourcing core functions to private tech firms backed by politically active billionaires. His latest move: giving OpenGov, Inc. control over the city’s permitting system. 🧵

*deletes angry paragraph*

Thank you to the career federal employees, who show up to work every day and improve people's lives across the country.

Hadn't really thought about this but thank you for unlocking a new worry for me! Great precedents in the rise of the automobile industry, too...

Can driverless cars get tickets? What happened when Bay Area police pulled over a Waymo Police officers in San Bruno observed a Waymo car making an illegal U-turn. The incident highlights a gray area in law enforcement’s ability to cite robot cars when they violate traffic laws.

"Written laws are like spiders' webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful."

This isn't a legal loophole - it's a series of decisions to excuse systematic corporate lawbreaking.

www.latimes.com/business/tec...

National parks left open during a government shutdown under the last Trump administration experienced permanent damage - vandalized petroglyphs, chopped down Joshua trees - but they plan to keep them open once again.

If you've done in-person research at any of the following presidential libraries in the last 8 months, can you please follow me/contact me—soon—for a story I'm working on (can be off the record)?

Hoover
FDR
Truman
Eisenhower
JFK
LBJ
Ford
Carter

And either way, can you please share this request? 🙏

e.g.! bsky.app/profile/grub...

Political strategizing is a two step process: First, seeing the moment and its context clearly, and second, assessing how to take advantage of it. Klein and most other professional pundits rarely try the 1st step independent of their opinions on the 2nd, which distorts their understanding

One thing I'd like to add re Klein-Coates: In trying to defend blending politics w journalism, Klein has shown how self-defeating that instinct is: It produces thinkers who can no longer clearly distinguish btwn truth and messaging. Coates calls that unethical-it's also prelude to political failure!

A Final Message from the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS) After nearly four decades of service to the Arctic research community, the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS) has now reached its sunset. This will be our final message to the community. On behalf of the ARCUS Board of Directors and all ARCUS staff, we want to thank you for the many years of collaboration, support, and partnership that made ARCUS possible. We have enjoyed working with this community immensely and believe that the goal of broadening participation in Arctic-focused research, education, and policy is still an important mission to achieve.

End of an era and a sad day for those that care about Arctic work done in the best ways possible. 😢 Nonetheless "… the goal of broadening participation in Arctic-focused research, education, and policy is still an important mission to achieve." #Arctic

they are destroying US climate science on purpose, and it hurts my heart. but take it from an MIT-trained nerdass:

all most of us need to know is that we have to stop burning stuff

stop burning stuff for heat

stop burning stuff for make car go

stop burning stuff for power

we have the tools

The Spread of Soy in South America Grasslands, savannas, and dry forests have become popular places to grow soy.

Cropland area nearly doubled in South America between 2000 and 2019 - the largest relative increase in the world. Soybean production replaced rainforests, grasslands & savannas. earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/14962... As China refuses U.S. soybeans, this puts more pressure on natural ecosystems.

nothing pisses me off quite like mandatory UI updates to my phone.

To the extent this is about enforced novelty as a marketing technique, feels like good evidence against the longstanding thesis that behavioral psych is hardwired!

definitely looks like a partially-eaten gumboot! Nothing else that size on the central CA coast

This would be why I am such a strident critic of digitization as a substitute for actual archival preservation. My sixteenth century documents are far sturdier and likely to survive another 500 years than the detritus on the internet. And digitization is not democratization.

Indeed - but a couple of market orthodoxies have papered this over very well in some policy circles!

I'm merely echoing @kevinjkircher.com here but I think our inability to be nuanced about cost dynamics is also about to get us into big trouble with the emerging attempt to make decarb about consumer bill reductions...

Biden’s First Climate Actions Are Missing Coal’s Long Tail Despite setting an extensive initial climate agenda, by not addressing existing leases, the Biden administration risks leaving billions of tons of publicly owned coal for the taking—and burning.

The initial steps Trump DOI is taking to expand coal extraction are the exact ones I highlighted here in the very first days of the Biden admin. Others have been doing so for decades. Describing the risks of resurgence often gets you not just dismissed but derided.

www.thenation.com/article/envi...

I say this without rancor: I hope those in the climate movement who have repeatedly declared US coal dead over the past 15 years can question their core assumptions. Coal's trajectory tells us a lot about what to expect from other fossil industries - which means we need different approaches.

separate from everything, the idea that 2020 was a squeaker but 2024 represents a historical mandate will simply be the death of me

National Defense Ministry Honors 11 Soldiers for Refusing Illegal Orders National Defense Ministry Honors 11 Soldiers for Refusing Illegal Orders Honored for rejecting illegal orders during martial law, Marine death probe

The South Korean Ministry of Defense has awarded medals of merit to 11 officers for disobeying direct orders of superiors during the martial law fiasco, orders that they deemed to be contrary to the constitution and endangerment to democracy.
www.chosun.com/english/nati...

Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in Ice detention Government data shows 16,523 people with no record, versus 15,725 with a record and 13,767 with pending charges

It’s not the point of this story, but ICE jails now hold about half the number of Japanese Americans interned during WWII
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

So revealing of how little your average tech lord actually reads that they looked at writing and thought "we should speed that up"

beside the point but I would watch a competence-porn documentary titled Unclogging The Next Sewer Fatberg

So revealing of how little your average tech lord actually reads that they looked at writing and thought "we should speed that up"

Could everyone please stop writing for a day or two? I cannot keep up.

I would like the ADL to be more focused on this than on whether Zohran Mamdani has met with some Jewish nonprofits more than others.

“But it would be nice if they reached out to us and perhaps share some of the profit, since we are in a financial crisis.”