Josh

A tech critic’s guide to holiday gift-giving Maybe your grandma doesn’t need that Alexa smart speaker

Christmas is coming, and the Black Friday sales signal we’re in peak gift-buying season.

When you’re picking out gifts for friends and family this year, there’s a whole slew of tech products that are better to avoid. I put together a guide to help you through it.

The photos in the New York Times also don’t give any sense of the scale.

Would you know that millions of people showed up across the country?

New NYT euphemism just dropped

Folks, the "I bought this before Elon went crazy" bumper stickers ain't gonna cut it. You gotta get rid of your Tesla. Anything less is a tacit endorsement of this man and his dangerous ideology.

That msnbc guy got fired for saying these words

Guys my experiences are completely subjective, but I gotta be honest, if you log off social media and go about your day for a couple hours, it really does not feel like America is in mourning.

“This is all psychologically damaging to our society in ways we don’t understand yet,” Mahadevan said. “We’re seeing posts on X of people saying, ‘Congratulations, you’ve radicalized me.’ And part of that is because they’re seeing the video of Kirk being killed. They’re not just reading about it. They’re actually seeing it.”

Not only are the Kirk shooting videos spreading rapidly, but some are in clear violation of the platforms’ social media policies. For example, TikTok’s terms of use state that the company does not allow “gory, gruesome, disturbing, or extremely violent content.”

Charlie Kirk Was Shot and Killed in a Post-Content Moderation World Videos of the shooting spread across TikTok, Instagram, and X. Researchers say that in some cases the platforms are falling short on enforcing their own content moderation rules.

For hours yesterday, starting minutes after Charlie Kirk was shot, @laurengoode.bsky.social and I combed through social media finding countless graphic videos of the incident. They autoplayed, without warning.

This is the post-content moderation world.
www.wired.com/story/charli...

1. We do not know the motive of the shooter. The man who shot at Trump was after attention.
2. The man who murdered MN legislators WAS motivated by politics, and I didn’t hear any Dems calling for reprisals against all Repubs.
3. It’s easy to start a cycle of violence. Not easy to end one.

This is the second time today an official has said a suspect was in custody then rolled it back, by my count.

everyone always says "im tired of living through historical events", but the era itself is prob gonna be remembered in history as an age of informational decay.

that the internet let us do banking easier for a few years, then sent everyone mad.

Putting hyperpartisan liars in charge of federal law enforcement has bad results.

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah took down X posts Tuesday making an apparent connection between Gov. Tim Walz and the man accused of shooting two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses, and blaming “Marxists” for the murders. The change comes after blowback from Sen. Tina Smith and her staffers as well as Minnesota Democratic and Republican lawmakers. One X post said “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” with pictures of Boelter, who is accused of killing Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and shooting Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in the early morning hours of June 14. Boelter also went to the homes of two other state lawmakers that night; one house was empty, and at the other, a police officer pulled up to the house shortly after Boelter arrived, so Boelter left. Another Lee post read, “This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” with a picture of Boelter.

No elected official Democratic party will be as cruel about Kirk's death as Mike Lee was about the death of Melissa Hortman.

wisconsinexaminer.com/2025/06/17/s...

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I hope all the people I have parasocial relationships with are having a good day.

GREAT KHAN HAS SPOKEN 🗣️🗣️🗣️

Staring down the barrel of rising authoritarianism looking for a viable grassroots political movement capable and willing to meet the moment like:

Finally the rationale I needed to unsubscribe from all those texts guilt-free

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand:

$678M raised through those spam tactics

$282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies.

$11M to actual campaigns (1.6%)

The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

We simply cannot allow the world's most powerful antisemites to continue pretending they care about the safety or freedom of American Jews. They don't give a fuck about us, and no one should act like they do.

No actual Italian person likes or cares about Christopher Columbus or views him as any sort of revered figure, it's just outrage bait for racists

Infographic titled “One Court, Two Standards” compares how the Supreme Court used emergency powers to rule on lower-court injunctions against the Biden and Trump administrations. Two panels show: • Biden Administration: Lower courts blocked policies in 21 cases. All 21 cases are represented by red squares, indicating that 0% of injunctions/TROs were lifted by SCOTUS. • Trump Administration: Lower courts blocked policies in 86 cases. 66 green squares and 20 red squares show that 77% of injunctions/TROs were lifted by SCOTUS. Key takeaway box below reads: “Using its ‘shadow docket,’ the Supreme Court granted emergency relief to lift 77% of lower-court injunctions against the Trump administration. It lifted 0% of those against the Biden administration.” Sources and notes below include: CourtListener data through July 7, 2025; analysis by Adam Bonica.

The Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” has cast very different shadows depending on which party holds the White House.

When lower courts blocked Trump admin policies, SCOTUS intervened on an emergency basis to lift those orders in 77% of cases.

For the Biden administration, that number was 0%.

in response to the authoritarian takeover of America, the opposition party leader is making a Gap ad

if you cancel your NYT games subscription there’s great alternatives for newspaper games like @puzzmo.com … www.puzzmo.com

NYT reporter meeting in a parking garage with an anonymous source dressed head to toe in Nazi regalia

I am grieving the barbarism that is going to unfurl from all this. People are going to die. Livelihoods gone. All to feed a corrupt kleptocracy.

I see every day up close how different it is from the first time around. There are no guardrails. A disaster. I’m sorry we have to live through this.

Case in point: bsky.app/profile/kenm...

It would be cool if Democratic electeds had a better response to the bill passing than “Republicans just did BAD thing, and now people will suffer!”

No mention of a plan to prevent future bad things. No clear vision for an alternative. Just Republicans bad and we’re your only other option.

But Hakeem Jeffries sure did break that record though. 🥹

Congress voted to pass the largest job-killing bill in history.

Congress voted to take away health care from 17 million people to pay for tax breaks for billionaires.

Congress voted to take away food assistance from 3 million people.

Congress voted to betray working people.