The world's first trillionaire did this

Rep. Joyce Beatty, ftw. www.thebulwark.com/p/the-congre...

Horrific.

The richest man in the world did this, not for any reason, just for the fun of it.

This happened:

The way to understand Trump is he wants to be a mob boss from a movie. He doesn’t care about tariffs or national security, but they’re great tools for shakedowns

That's pretty disturbing.

The Trump-led US government is using federal regulations and national security as an excuse to shake down privately-owned companies for a state share of their business. Now you tell me who the "socialists" are.

This is an incredibly revealing chart about group-based political identities in American politics today. Via @today.yougov.com @dhmontgomery.com

People thinking they’re investing in space travel, when they’re actually investing in fake nudes.

ICY(like me)MI, this account by @rpethe.bsky.social of Big Agriculture's 60-year failed effort to mechanize lettuce picking is full of stuff I didn't know, including (appallingly) that 40-50% of the harvest may be left on the field in the great US lettuce capital of Yuma, AZ.

This is the article that made me realize how insane the orbital data center idea is. The problem isn't that the technical challenges are insurmountable. It's scale. Orbiting the equivalent of THE ENTIRE ISS would get you.. three server racks worth of GPUs. 200 whole chips. taranis.ie/datacenters-...

Miraculously we have invented a kind of factory that has effectively zero industrial byproducts, runs quietly, and can be sited almost anywhere you can find or build an empty room. Naturally what has happened is that everyone has decided it’s the absolute worst thing you can build.

Sometimes it feels like every single debate on here devolves into: “big groups of people are irrational and driven by mob-like delusions and fevers and you should not trust the public at large” versus “no, THIS TIME the public is rationally expressing my exact policy preferences, I’m sure of it”

Translation: The Iranians are much better negotiators than I am and I don’t know what to do

The politics of data centers are insane because progressives have all convinced each other that it’s driven by public hatred of AI and tech capitalism. Then you talk to the actual people worked up about it and it’s straight NIMBYism driven by myths about water use plus 5G-style conspiracy theories

Read @andymasley.bsky.social for context "the water all American data centers will consume onsite in 2030 is equivalent to 8% of the water currently consumed by the US golf industry" or "water usage of 260 square miles of irrigated corn farms, equivalent to 1% of America’s total irrigated corn"

Fuck this guy and fuck you if you voted for him.

Congress passed a law requiring Trump’s DOJ to release all Epstein files, and they just blatantly ignored it.

US consumer prices (CPI) rose +0.5% m/m in May, up +4.2% from a year ago (up from +3.8% y/y in April) - the highest inflation rate in three years.

As someone who was and remains a political conservative, I don’t see this as left vs right anymore. It’s about arrogant incompetence vs grown-ups with some grasp of reality.

NEW: US CPI inflation rose to 4.2% year-on-year in data released this morning, hitting the highest level since 2023 while increasing 0.5% month-on-month Core CPI inflation rose to 2.9% year-on-year, increasing 0.2% month-on-month

Americans are working more hours per week than they were this time a year ago -- and yet still taking home less money each week in real terms, thanks to inflation www.bls.gov/news.release...

Truly one the most spectacular instance of government waste in human history. Dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into a wildly unpopular agency best known for its nonstop domestic terror tactics.

Screwworm, Ebola, measles and other problems are piling up as Trumps degrades the basic functions of the American government. www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-war...

The Republican position is to refuse to accept or acknowledge any result of voting that they don’t like, and use obstruction and violence to enforce their position.

When the Trump Administration says “two weeks” it means “probably never”, so I guess “months from now” means “definitely never.”

The dirty secret of modern progressive politics is that the abandoned viewpoint of “workers should be paid generously for their labor” is the true progressive position, while “affordability” is a slopulist slogan that promises more consumer consumption to the most consumerist society in history

Immigrants have founded or cofounded 59% (455 of 775) of America’s privately held startup companies valued at $1 billion or more, according to a new National Foundation for American Policy analysis nfap.com/research/new...

We elected this unrestrained, delusional, ass-ignorant brat to the United States presidency twice. Our republic is tragedy and farce.

Everyone who watched J6 unfold knew they were watching a shameful attack orchestrated by a President of the United States against our government. There are just some who have since found it convenient or lucrative to forget that they knew.

The United States government is occupied by an ignorant, bigoted, anti-American ideology of white nationalism. It will need to be scoured.

I don't know the full story here. But as someone who served, I really don't like the look of uniformed military doing policing on American streets.

There are tons of industrial and agricultural processes that are intrinsically polluting and use orders of magnitude more water; the idea that running a bunch of electricity through circuits will make water undrinkable is a paranoid public panic on par with believing 5G gives you asthma

Trump officials planned to mark 2.7 million living people as dead, whistleblower claims. A former Social Security executive said the plan, which was not carried out, would have used a death database to pressure immigrants to leave the country. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

This is now the longest stretch of tech job losses in US history—while losses in the dot-com bubble were larger, it took less than 3 years for tech firms to start adding jobs again. Today, the US has already been losing tech jobs for three straight years with no sign of slowdown

Federal government employment is down 333k since the start of 2025 amidst DOGE cuts—that's more than 11% of the Federal workforce The large drop last October was caused by many workers who had been on deferred resignation becoming officially unemployed

"Major Win for Trump's Revenge Campaign" says it all.

ICE is facing pressure to improve medical care in its facilities after reporting the deaths of 18 detainees in the first five months of this year. Its solution: just stop reporting deaths of newly released detainees. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

House bill rolls back food aid for pregnant women, children www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Platner is what happens when we glorify dirtbags simply because they're good at Getting Attention While Democrat. Now to take a big sip of coffee and see what the App is saying about Hunter Biden...

Dozin’ Don

The first of the really bad Platner stories has dropped, alleging abusive behavior, heavy drinking, a violent temper, rapid mood swings, praise of rape .. and calling his tattoo "My Totenkopf". NYT is as careful and lawyerly as they can be, but there are multiple women with a similar pattern. 1/

Local leaders are tempted to build data centers not out of the kindness of their hearts but because they’re a mechanism whereby Amazon pays for the local schools instead of you and I. That turns out to be a pretty big deal and tempting offer.

One thing that really seems to bedevil the data center debate is people being broadly unaware that local government even exists, much less that it provides almost every service they rely on and is reliant on property tax.

I am not saying there aren't reasons to worry about increasing pressure on the grid from tech; I'm not defending the conduct of bad actors like Musk; I'm definitely not defending AI generally. But the actual surge in opposition to data centers looks and sounds like viral NIMBYism, in large part.

Everyone is going to yell at me for this but data centers probably provide more LOCAL economic advantage than most train lines. DCs are generous contributors to tax revenue, while rail revenues are less concentrated, and most trains are just passing through, with associated risk to life and limb.

I absolutely can and will keep saying that. A belief that the public holds some kind of deep wisdom, and we should defer to it, is a highway to a lot of really ugly politics and dark places. You're talking about a country that just elected Donald Trump for god's sake.

Chatgpt continues to be the most popular app in America; the idea that "everyone hates AI, this mysterious technology they hear about in whispers" does not bear any resemblance to reality.