Michel Lind

I can't even ...

A major problem in American culture is that, in recent decades, it's become increasing focused on the short term. We've literally become a nation incapable of planning.

Instead, we've exalted the vultures of society: vulture capitalists.

Every single class of elite societal institutions has done this. The corporations. The law firms. The universities. The banks. The television networks. The Papers of Record. The professional sports leagues. On and on. It's been a full-scale national shanda of epic proportions.

Writers should internalize Lao Tzu's lesson about how the emptiness at the center of a wheel is what makes it useful, and how a pot is valuable because of where the clay *isn't*. Corporate geek culture has warped us into thinking that negative spaces are flaws that need to be fixed.

"dog autism" uh, what?

Diff courtesy of @archive.org

web.archive.org/web/diff/202...

Constitution Sections on Due Process and Foreign Gifts Just Vanished from Congress' Website Part of Article I Section 8, and all of Sections 9 and 10, which address things like habeas corpus, nobility, and militias, are gone from Congress's website for the Constitution.

Constitution Sections on Due Process and Foreign Gifts Just Vanished from Congress' Website

🔗 www.404media.co/constitution...

RFK Jr’s health department to halt $500m in mRNA vaccine research Agency to end 22 federal contracts, questioning safety of technology credited with helping end Covid pandemic

Hey, so, TOTALLY not suggesting that RFK Jr. BACKS DOWN when we PUSH BACK, BUT if you’d like to call…

HHS Toll-Free: 1-877-696-6775

HHS Direct Line: 202-690-7000

PLEASE share and consider calling your senators and representatives as well.

NONE of this is okay.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I'm repeating myself but the key to explaining Trump's love of tariffs is: He literally believes any money coming into the Federal gov't belongs to *him, personally*.

So when importers pay tariffs, *Trump thinks he gets richer*. The fact that the cost is passed on to Americans is irrelevant to him.

Hi, former Foreign Service Officer here

The Secretary of State might be interested to learn that visa requirements and terms are generally reciprocal. We do it to them, they do it to us.

Same. And people who are refraining from travel until they can move out permanently

It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy. It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation.

If you're at #fossy, my talk about power dynamics, relicensing, and forks starts at 11:45 in the Science of Community room (333), and even if you aren't here, you can still have a look at the slides: fastwonderblog.com/wp-content/u... #fossy2025

A photo of Kyle Langford Californian gubernatorial candidate standing outside a concentration camp with the caption that this is his 0% unemployment plan

In a healthy society, someone who posted this would be afraid to walk the streets.

They would live in constant terror, flinching at every loud noise and shrinking back from even their most mild-mannered neighbours.

From my POV, the most important message for everyone who is doing the hazardous work of developing software in public on platforms like GitHub: you have to pay *close attention* to GitHub token permission scoping.
It’s not well known outside of security research circles how often GitHub tokens leak.

Hilariously PR-STV was introduced to Ireland by British interests while we were still in the UK to try and tamper down demands for Home Rule so they never really thought to apply it at home.

I do enjoy how the Irish defy stereotypes by producing the most insane election graphics known to man

The coalitionable, inoffensive, Labour Party How party strategy in European PR systems can tell us about Labour's victory, and a journey through the weird and wonderful operation of Britain's electoral system.

I decided to get one of those substack things people have and write about how Labour's victory is a reminder of how party strategy changes in a multi party, volatile environment. There's a bit about the 1977 Dutch election if you like that sort of thing

open.substack.com/pub/election...

One thing about the 'they don't have a party name' is that it's actually really hard to name a party in the UK. We have a combo of:

1. An Electoral Commission with broad powers to refuse registration on the basis of a name too similar to an existing party
2. A low barrier of entry for parties.

2 - images 6 - learn 7 - videos 12 - news 14 - web 15 - things to do 18 - forum 28 - shopping 36 - books 37 - products 38 - videos (exact?) 39 - short videos 44 - visual matches (images?) 48 - exact matches 50 - ai mode 51 - homework 56 - cleaner results without extra flair

Image of other udm= parameters.

Nobody clicks past Google’s AI Overviews Google claims the AI Overview on every search result — a frequently-wrong summary of other people’s work — sends a ton of clicks back to the original publishers they ripped off. This is false. Pew …

Story 1 of 2: Only 1% of users click past Google’s AI Overview in search results to check the sources, and only 8% click on any other search result. pivot-to-ai.com/2025/07/24/n...

Archaeologists conduct first ‘space excavation’ on International Space Station – and discover surprising quirks of zero-gravity life Where do astronauts keep their toiletries? What’s with all the velcro? Here’s what we learned from doing archaeology on the International Space Station.

We did the first archaeological fieldwork outside Earth!
🧪 🏺 #SpaceArchaeology

Betting on AI: The Delusion Driving Big Tech - Last Week in AWS Podcast

Big Tech is racing to build a sentient god out of duct tape and venture capital, and I'm told I'm the alarmist.

So I sat down with @edzitron.com to talk about the hype, the bullshit, and the trillion-dollar delusions behind AI.

www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/scre...

The malicious prompt in question displaying inside of a customer's Very Enterprisey(tm) endpoint security tooling during the attack window.

AWS security bulletin: aws.amazon.com/security/sec...

"This issue did not affect any production services or end-users."

Weird how customer logs show the wiper prompt executing.

Anyone else see "clean a system to a near-factory state" in your logs?

Lallemand said he borrowed his friend’s boat and was fishing near Venise-en-Québec, which is roughly 15 kilometres north of the U.S. border at the northern tip of Lake Champlain. He says he has been fishing for decades and is adamant that he was in Canadian waters when the Coast Guard showed up and told him to turn off his engine, to which he complied. The three officers told him he was in U.S. territory. “I said, ‘No, I’m very sorry, I’m in Canada.’ And I said I’m polite enough to talk to you guys but you cannot arrest me. ‘You can’t come across the border and pick me up’ but they did,” he recalled. Lallemand started his engine and said he wanted to talk with the officers by the shore, but the Coast Guard followed and tried to push him into the U.S., which is what caused him to go overboard. “They’re tying my boat to their boat. They’re not even taking care of me. The third time I went down, coming out with water in my mouth, spitting it out, I said throw me a buoy,” he said. Once on their vessel, he said he was aggressively put in handcuffs. “I never saw somebody so angry,” he said. He was then handed over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, who fingerprinted him, put him in a jail cell with his clothes soaking wet, and gave him a “dirty” blanket.

A Quebec fisherman who was fishing 15 kilometers north of the US border was essentially kidnapped by US Border Patrol, who capsized his boat and dragged him to an American prison cell.

In any normal time this'd be quite the international incident, y'know?

www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/art...

Since AFP was founded in 1944, we have lost journalists in conflicts, some have been injured, others taken prisoner. But none of us remember witnessing colleagues die of hunger".

— The outgoing Editorial Committee (Société de Journalistes, SDJ) of the AFP

An unbearably sad statement from the Editorial Committee (SDJ) of the AFP news agency, please read:

"Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die.
AFP has been working with 1 writer, 3 photographers and 6 videographers, all freelance, in the Gaza Strip… /1

🧵Introducing the Trump Action Tracker website!

Today I’m launching www.trumpactiontracker.info - a live, searchable list of authoritarian‑style actions from Trump’s second term (over 740 actions so far). 1/14

By any metric of fascism, when they come for the comedians, it's here.