Melissa Johnson, PhD

cool how the Nobody Wants To Work Anymore guys are also the We Don't Want Human Employees Anymore guys. we're working as hard as we can to replace you with an iPad but until then let's see some hustle out there

Look, among other things, the courts, no less than the elected branches, are agents of the People. When they decide legal issues, it is only ever on our behalf, as the true sovereign, as the very source of the laws the courts interpret

We ALWAYS have the prerogative to overrule them

I'm trying to solve problems by buying bookshelves. I'm going to get three but I actually want five. Alas.

Imagine having so much wealth you can buy anything and instead of having five nice bookshelves and three dogs you become a Nazi. What a waste. I'd get some nice plants, too.

Just be safe

I’m trying to be respectful but this is so stupid. A technology made to make human artists unnecessary, in a world that’s already hostile to artists, is not a technology that means nobody needs to have a job. You literally see what it’s being used for and yet are choosing some fantasy situation.

They are humans and human labor as a fundamental problem to their goals — making money. And everything they create is either built on exploiting humans in more extreme ways or doing away with human labor completely. The most essential effect of AI is giving cover for companies to fire workers.

I don't say this lightly: The New York Times should fire the reporter and editor who chose to present a leak from the white house as if it was a leak from Harvard.

Don't print lies in the newspaper

Creeeeeeeepy

I would watch the hell outta that movie

Headline from Harvard Crimson: "Harvard President Garber Tells Faculty He Is Not Considering a $500 Million Deal With Trump."

Text of story: Harvard prez Garber says report of a deal "was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials." NYT ran with it as a story.

Important details from this story:

1) Yet another news-break by student journalists (this time @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social) www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

2) Harvard saying "see you in court," not "let's make a deal."

3) Per Garber, WH/MAGA leaked news of a "deal." NYT then ran with it.

How many rust belt cities successfully halted if not reversed their declines because of their universities and academic institutions? Pittsburgh is the poster child, but Baltimore owes a lot to this too. This is going to be a completely man-made disaster for them.

have you ever been so tired you see a teevee show about excavated bog bodies and you see them just laying there sprawled utterly unmoving for like ten thousand years and you think ah- that's what i need. that looks lovely

increasingly your job as an elected democrat is to be threatened, persecuted, arrested, and possibly prosecuted by elected republicans. which is not great! but we're here now

Oh. It’s going to be THAT kind of month this week, eh?

It's important to note here that we're not just talking about faculty & university staff. 100s of U.S. colleges are in towns or small cities where they form the major industry & lifeblood of the community. Loss of students -> loss of rent $, restaurant $, bars, bookstores, gaming stores...

Feel like its a bad sign about the health of the republic that Pritzker has to talk about TX Dems like they’re the Polish government-in-exile in London

one of the coolest things about America is that every hour or so as you drive across the country you can randomly encounter a bastion of learning filled with oddballs and geniuses of every stripe and character, whose mere presence transforms otherwise typical towns into havens of Idea

I think the toilet is my favorite part of this weird AI.

Yes but nobody cares about educated people losing work

I’m especially pissed off about this mindset because the fascism is incredibly unpopular and we are almost certainly going to get more and more opportunities to push back, but if people on our side assume there’s no point, we won’t be organized enough to take advantage.

Sending her and you all my best thoughts

damn this age is gilded af

I'm not trying to disable the captions. I'm trying to make it so they can't access the entire caption file. I'm not an idiot.

bsky.app/profile/lady...

You guys this is from last September. It's not new

You son of a bitch I'm in.

FYI this article is from last year

Sigh, I’ve been around long enough to remember when *Coursera* was going to take all our jobs! Heartwarming to know their people are getting another bite at the grift.

Imagine a group of 5-year-olds playing a board game. The rules are clear, the goal is fair, and one child edges ahead — until, suddenly, another child starts losing. That’s when the trouble begins. “He cheated!” the losing child yells. “I’m the winner anyway!” he declares. And then, like clockwork, he flips the board. In the world of kindergarten conflict resolution, we expect this kind of behavior. We chalk it up to development. We teach better sportsmanship. What do we do when the president of the United States behaves this way? On Friday, President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the nation’s workaday scorekeeper of employment, wages and productivity. Why? Because the data didn’t make Mr. Trump look good. The statistics were inconvenient. So the president didn’t just challenge the findings; he fired the statistician. That’s not governing. That’s board flipping.

Janet Yellen's husband & Econ Nobel Laureate George Akerlof:

"...when presidents flip the board, it’s not just a game that ends. It’s the pieces of democracy that get scattered to the floor."
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/o...

It's remarkable how the Wall Street guys don't realize if they don't put the fear of god into Trump, he's going to fuck with stuff until he's done something he can't undo

I've been raising a stink about whether OpenAI will hoover up our courses now that they're embedded in Canvas. Mostly i get a lot of shrugs like I shouldn't care