Jamie

The f*cked part is that this is a totally rational thing to do in an autocracy. Businesses know His Royal Majesty can make doing business inordinately difficult, so they lavish him with gifts and praise his greatness and etc etc

I passionately hate that we're here

The Department of Homeland Security embraces a socialist anthem | CNN Woody Guthrie’s classic song is about America’s history of injustice and poverty. Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is using it in ads.

Quite aside from this fact, the “your” in “This land is your land” quite explicitly encompasses the very people who DHS are setting out to deport

www.cnn.com/2025/08/05/u...

🚨@FBIDirectorKash has responded to my request to assist state & local law enforcement locate the runaway Texas House Democrats and investigate potential offenses. Thank you Director Patel for your swift response & action! 06 Aug 25

Honestly not sure how to read this. Gonna assume it means the FBI will attempt to illegally arrest Texas legislators.

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) Attached: 1 image Dan Davies https://backofmind.substack.com/p/department-of-what-now

mamot.fr/@pluralistic...

But the Region’s cost estimates to date are prohibitive potentially even for a full extension to Cambridge, let alone more. We are hoping to see a strategy for transit construction procurement and management to get the costs down and allow a more ambitious ION network.

Why I left The Washington Post “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — but what if the lights are going out from within?

Glenn Kessler spent 27 years at the WaPo and wrote The Fact Checker since 2011. He just quit the Post and wrote this essay explaining why: glennkessler.substack.com/p/why-i-left... media

We Finally Know What’s Killing So Many Starfish | The Tyee Sea star wasting disease has devastated marine ecosystems for over a decade. Now scientists have named the cause.

Oh my goodness! Here I am drinking in the latest scientific news on what the heck killed 6 billion sun stars in the big-name journals, when it turns out my incredible co-worker @kristendejager.bsky.social dropped a big feature on it for @thetyee.ca over the weekend thetyee.ca/News/2025/08...

Turns out nothing motivates like a fine in the mail.

According to Ottawa data, before #speedcameras were implemented: only 16% of drivers followed the speed limit!

🟥 Before cameras: 16%
🟧 After 3 months: 57%
🟨 After 1 year: 69%
🟩 After 3 years: 81%

That’s not just a jump it's a shift in habits!

These are the victim impact statements submitted at Ghislaine Maxwell's sentencing.

It's the official DOJ document.

“They had been abusing young females for many, many, many years. This is the longest-running sex trafficking scheme in history that I've ever come across."

World Athletics’ mandatory genetic test for women athletes is misguided. I should know – I discovered the relevant gene in 1990 World Athletics says its genetic test for women ensures ‘the integrity of women’s sport’ – but science does not support this overly simplistic idea.

World Athletics says that "The SRY gene is a reliable proxy for determining biological sex." The guy who literally discovered the gene and has spent the last 35 years researching it says they're wrong. theconversation.com/world-athlet...

2019 – 2024 – Repeated denials and discovery stonewalling Through years of communications with the police, the plaintiffs and the court through the investigation and later the discovery process for the lawsuit, Tesla never mentioned that it had all the data that explained how Autopilot saw the crash, which everyone was seeking, sitting on its servers for years. The facts are: Tesla had the data on its servers within minutes of the crash When the police sought the data, Tesla redirected them toward other data When the police sought Tesla’s help in extracting it from the computer, Tesla falsely claimed it was “corrupted” Tesla invented an “auto-delete” feature that didn’t exist to try explain why it couldn’t originally find the data in the computer When the plaintiffs asked for the data, Tesla said that it didn’t exist Tesla only admitted to the existence of the data once presented with forensic evidence that it was created and transfered to its servers.

This whole story is insane. Tesla apparently did everything it could to avoid providing the data it had about its Autopilot crash. This is just a snippet and there's a lot more. electrek.co/2025/08/04/t...

Whether it's conservatives assassinating State Senators in Minnesota or liberals refusing to sell Alan Dershowitz pierogis in Martha's Vineyard, both sides have taken incivility to an extreme.

CNBC Lora Kolodny article: Tesla must pay portion of $329 million in damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says Key Points A jury in Florida determined that Tesla should be held partly liable for a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash. The company must pay a portion of $329 million in damages to victims and a survivor, including compensatory and punitive damages. Tesla had argued that the driver’s behavior was to blame for the fatal crash, while plaintiffs claimed Tesla’s Autopilot technology was flawed and deceptively marketed.

Elon tweet: "Teslas can drive themselves!"

Two days ago: Tesla has to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for deceptively marketing Autopilot in a way that falsely made people think it could drive the car by itself.

Today: Elon Musk "Teslas can drive themselves!"

You ever just think about how much it sucks that Musk bought Twitter and absolutely destroyed it? Like man, that used to be where I'd meet new people, make real life friends, etc. Now, whenever I glance over there to check something, it's just unrecognizable.

Highrises seemingly popping up out of nowhere is the universal sign of "Oh my God we need housing now! Our society is literally on the brink of collapse! BUILD! BUILD! BUILD!"

It's better than not building, but it's not great. Good housing policy over a long period yields much more organic density.

My long thread chunked into 4 pieces. Its too long to add alt text so hopefully you read the post if you were interested enough to click on the image!

My long thread chunked into 4 pieces. Its too long to add alt text so hopefully you read the post if you were interested enough to click on the image!

My long thread chunked into 4 pieces. Its too long to add alt text so hopefully you read the post if you were interested enough to click on the image!

My long thread chunked into 4 pieces. Its too long to add alt text so hopefully you read the post if you were interested enough to click on the image!

This week, I resigned from my position as Director of IT/Tech at an org I truly believed in. I wanted us to stop using Generative AI and was told no.

This thread will explain my decision and why I believe this is a true crisis. I hope ya see this and if you want to chat, + or -, lets do it 1/

A country is more than just its ruling class, and I will die on the hill that American history has been a battle between those who see America as a horrifying fascist hellscape and those who see it as a beacon of multiracial democracy. And I'm not ready to admit defeat in that battle just yet.

people got taken to cecot without due process, were tortured then sent home, both governments involved are now throwing their hands up saying "we didnt do it"

If dudes are lonely, here are some suggestions:

—Go to the comic shop
—Start a feminist book club
—Start a club where you all attend free lectures at local universities and then go to the diner and talk about them
—Throw more parties
—Join a maker space
—Build a rocket
—Shove fascists in the rocke

Publishers don't want to work anymore

AN UPDATE ABOUT THE PRESS GALLERY

I finally have an update about The Press Gallery, though it's not a good one -- while there is no official announcement I can find, I understand that the publisher (Boundless, who earlier this year, bought Unbound, who went bankrupt) is winding up as well.

Is the Carney government abandoning national pharmacare? The Liberals campaigned on it. Why do they now seem to be backing away from it?

"Without stronger privacy laws or purpose-built Canadian cloud infrastructure, we risk ceding control of our population health data to the hostile hyperpower in our basement."

Probably my favourite line in this week's roundup (story 5).

canadahealthwatch.ca/newsletter/2...

I don't get it. Some of you accuse abolitionists of pipe dreams. The biggest pipe dreams are the ones that insist on prosecutions of the powerful. THIS IS NOT WHAT THE CURRENT CRIMINAL PUNISHMENT SYSTEM EXISTS TO DO. THE PURPOSE OF A SYSTEM IS WHAT IT DOES.

“He’s a nazi who cheats at video games” is like basically all people should need here lol

"He's a piece of shit, but let's get the political science stuff out of the way," Steven told me when I asked if he thought support of Tesla could be considered apolitical. "Elon Musk has platformed white supremacists and antisemites on X. He got rid of all the moderation. He put back accounts that were clearly neo-Nazis. He's changed algorithms to promote that type of hate. Him and DOGE did massive cuts in the government, including our civil services. He's cut cancer research. Did I mention he was a giant piece of shit?" "He's cut our aid to Africa, which Will result, without exaggeration, in millions of women and children and innocent people dying. Millions," he said. "I'm not a big fan of people who give the Hitler salute. I mean, I'm kind of fussy like that. He gave it twice at Trump's inauguration," he continued. "He's a Nazi. And he cheats at video games. You have another question?"

lol at this response to a “man on the street” interview with protestors at the Tesla diner

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Today, Trump directed his team to fire the commissioner BLS because he didn’t like the jobs numbers BLS released. This is a move straight out of an autocratic playbook. 1/

This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered

Curate your own newspaper with RSS Escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own enshittification-proof newspaper from the writers you already read

Newsletter: In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

Here’s how to use RSS.
www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-...

They’ll be aggressively normalizing with their cult the idea of not just a third term, but a dictator for life like in other countries Trump admires.