Andrew G. Farrand

The president obsessed with trade literally has no idea what our most globally competitive export industry is.

Economist Amartya Sen won a Nobel in part for asking: Why did India avoid the mass famines that killed tens of millions in China? His answer: a free press. Journalists could expose suffering and shame governments into action. Silence and avoidance, by contrast, can be deadly.

YouTube video by Siddhant Nayak Chernobyl (2019) (HBO) - How does an RBMK reactor explodes? Lies ! Vichnaya Pamyat - Episode 5

In case you missed it, the HBO Chernobyl series wasn't *really* about the Soviet Union. It took a lot of historical liberties.

It was about the relationship between truth and power in situations where those in power don't like inconvenient truths

In other words, it was about the US right now

Renewables to beat coal for first time as top global power source — IEA The International Energy Agency also said demand is expected to grow 3.3 percent next year because of artificial intelligence and electrification.

When it comes to energy policy, the current U.S. federal government is trying to take us in exactly the opposite direction of the rest of the world. It'll be an uphill battle, and it is a completely unnecessary one:
www.eenews.net/articles/ren...

The scope and scale of the wanton destruction across Gaza - buildings, trees, fields, hospitals, schools, universities, churches, mosques, streets, homes, *people* - is staggering. All of it with the support and funding of American administrations of both parties. Shameful.

Let UNRWA Aid Trucks Into Gaza The region’s most experienced aid agency could feed all of Gaza’s population for three months—if Israel would just let them do their job.

At this very moment, UNRWA alone has 6,000 trucks waiting just beyond the border with enough food to feed the entire population of Gaza for 3 mos

Why is Israel restricting UNRWA, and the UN, from doing the work they know best?

www.thenation.com/article/worl...

“Gaza is a turning point that lays bare the full range and cruel depths of the contemporary world’s contradictions ... It exposes what is fundamentally wrong today: a persistent inability to recognize every human being as equal and deserving of dignity and life.”

This slope on this chart is INSANE

All the more incentive for companies not to hold the PII

I once read the advice that you should spend roughly 1/3 of your time each on writing the paper, the abstract and the title.

Struck me as excessive at the time but I have kept thinking about it for years. Maybe not the worst heuristic to push ppl in this direction.

Gazans Are Dying of Starvation

"Food is unaffordable. There is nothing": In Gaza, a third of the population has not eaten for multiple days in a row, according to the World Food Program. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/w...

A law that would impose penalties for failing to protect PII and cause the company certain financial ruin in case of a breach, now that might shift the incentives. Not that such a law exists or could probably get thru this Congress...

This level of barbarity is unconscionable.

Nobody should be comfortable with children and families starving to death.

It is morally indefensible to allow the manufactured and man-made starvation to continue. The United States must stop funding and enabling this genocide.

"ChatGPT helped me with my essay." No it didn't. I promise you, it did not.

ALEX DE WAAL: So, let me say that I've been working on this field of famine, food crisis and humanitarian action for more than 40 years, and there is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today.

Few if any experts know more about the deliberate use of starvation as a war crime than Alex de Waal. If he says it's happening, it's so.

Only 3 years left – new study warns the world is running out of time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change Planet Earth is living on borrowed time, a new global report reveals. The world must stop burning fossil fuels now and take urgent steps to reduce global warming.

All 197 United Nations member countries were expected to submit their updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), detailing their plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, by February this year. However, only 25 countries, representing ~20% of global emissions, have done so.

Trump, Miller, Noem et al are disappearing innocent people to a concentration camp to be tortured. They know this is what they're doing. Everyone who has touched this policy belongs in prison.

Here's what Trump is working on blowing up today:

"More than $5 billion in goods and services is traded between the US and EU every day — it is the world’s biggest trading relationship — and a prolonged fight could cost both sides heavily."

via @semafor.com www.semafor.com/newsletter/0...

Coincidentally, a not so dissimilar mix can make other things explode. They definitely would have liked gunpowder.

A must-read for all those who denied Bachar al Assad's crimes against humanity for years. "A Syrian Death Factory Gives Up Its Secrets". archive.is/PeTqy

Recognised Palestinian state could develop disputed gas resources, expert says The Palestinian Authority’s ability to use the Gaza Marine field could leave them less dependent on aid

"Michael Barron, the author of a new book on Palestine’s untapped gas reserves, has suggested the field could generate $4bn in revenue at current prices and it is reasonable that the PA could receive $100m a year over 15 years."

"this administration is just a protracted war on anybody who's read a book without pictures in it"

The Amount of Electricity Generated From Solar Is Suddenly Unbelievable Solar power has become the fastest growing source of energy throughout the globe, with one gigawatt of capacity installed every 15 hours.

It's "estimated that the world is now installing one gigawatt worth of solar energy infrastructure every 15 hours — or about the output of a new coal plant"

Basically just "Give us some Americans you've got and in exchange we'll offer your citizens minimal due process instead of letting them rot in a Salvadorean prison without trial."

Rubio Restricts U.S. Criticism of Tainted Foreign Elections

Despite what they say, this is of course promoting an ideology. It just isn’t democracy.

Rubio Restricts U.S. Criticism of Tainted Foreign Elections www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/u...

i find myself regularly reminding people that not one single German was severely punished for simply refusing to contribute to the Holocaust

From the OpenAI community on Reddit Explore this post and more from the OpenAI community

This is fascinating: www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/I...

Someone “worked on a book with ChatGPT” for weeks and then sought help on Reddit when they couldn’t download the file. Redditors helped them realized ChatGPT had just been roleplaying/lying and there was no file/book…

The Death of US AID The most consequential legacy of DOGE will be human misery on a massive scale

New, from me: Elon Musk talks about saving our species. But the greatest legacy of his time in government will be to condemn millions to death because he could not discern reality from a paranoid fantasy.
How Musk and Trump killed USAID.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-death-...

At the rate this year's going, we'll be lucky if it goes down as one of the weirdest parts of 2025

To me, Francesca Albanese is a standard-bearer for the kind of bold yet self-effacing pragmatic integrity we should all aim for, both individually and with a view to giving rise to the kind of society where it would be the norm.

Solidarietà @franceskalbs.bsky.social