Every technology problem is three social problems in a trench coat

Tech guys six months ago: haha yes we’re cutting all this WASTEFUL spending by eliminating medical research and USAID Tech guys now: yes I think taxpayers will be excited to bailout my non consensual pornography machine

This kind of action is important for many reasons but in particular it demonstrates that students are self-motivated and exposes the lie of supposed indoctrination. Good luck brainwashing THESE folks.

Great read about Chicago’s growing resistance movement against Operation Midway Blitz. Story of community, solidarity, and empathy bringing the children of day laborers together with suburban moms. Gift link. By Andrew Carter @chicagotribune.com www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/08/c...

Dems have the wind at our backs, America clearly knows the GOP owns the shutdown and inflation, and THIS is how Schumer makes the most of it? How about demanding the military leave blue cities and ICE stop terrorizing Americans? I can't with this guy anymore.

The Trump administration is now literally *fighting* to deny food to 42 million people, more than a third of them children. Read that again. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/u...

I don’t know how many times I’ve watched this video. I don’t know how we’ve gotten to the point where men in full balaclavas can abduct daycare teachers while they’re watching children. But I do know that this isn’t sustainable. Abolish ICE. There is no way to reform this.

Excellent op-ed by environmental sociologist Eric Bond and Viktor Newby. "We submitted FOIA requests to every Virginia locality we could identify w/ an existing, approved, or proposed data center. We found that... 25 out of a total of 31 localities have NDAs." virginiamercury.com/2025/04/30/d...

A haunted house but it’s just the country you live in trying to kill you.

Hard to overstate the lifeline this ruling offers in the face of Trump's calculated cruelty. It will not only keep tens of millions—half of them kids—fed this month, but will also prevent the evictions and shutoffs that would have resulted from families being forced to pay for food out of pocket.

A kid at at my niece's (Spanish-English immersion) school costume parade was dressed in a National Guard costume, and that is a CHOICE their parents made to be intentionally provocative in a place that was just girding itself for an ICE surge last week.

we're bringing mesothelioma back folks, it's going to be better than ever before arstechnica.com/health/2025/...

Yet another case of billionaire brain. Increasingly common these days, smh.

Trying to blame the Dems cutting off SNAP (while sitting on billons of available contingency funds) as his boss bulldozes the WH to build a ball room like Saddam's palace, sends $40 billion to bail out Argentines, and eats "gold adorned" brownies in Korea is not gonna work.

IMO democracy becomes impossible in the absence of any social or political norms against lying.

Zohran Mamdani caught lying that he understood Plato’s allegory of the cave, yet when asked to explain it, he seemed to instead explain Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacra and Simulation where reality has been replaced by symbols and signs, which seems similar to Plato’s theory but is not the same

Seems fine

Pretty sure I haven’t seen any news stories about Sam Altman, Marc Benioff, or Jensen Huang calling the president to get him to unlock SNAP benefits, or offering to fund CalFresh themselves. 🧐

Check out "Fear of a Dead White Planet," co-edited by Geography Associate Professor Jake Kosek, now available to read for free! read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/3...

Reply to some great comments on mine and Gavin Wood’s piece on #housing, the asset economy and a resurgence of rentier capitalism www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I've built a socioeconomic system that depends on everyone to do useful work and act ethically except the people at the top, who get unimaginable rewards for being antisocial frauds and criminals. And I think it will stand the test of time

I continue to sincerely want the term “Kavanaugh Stop” to be a badge of shame for the rest of Brett Kavanaugh’s days; the only bit of writing he’s known or remembered for; his sole contribution to the Law; for him to perceive, in little stabs of self-awareness, that this will be his rancid legacy.

Is anyone else uncomfortable that the only reason the Bay Area immigration enforcement surge was called off is because our tech overlords, who are happy to profit from state terror, balked at rolling out the red carpet for the regime's boots on the ground? www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

SNAP isn't about "people who don't work." It's about people who don't get paid enough to live. Of the 40 or so million people who rely on food stamps: * Two-thirds are children, seniors, or disabled * Most working-age adults who receive SNAP are employed—but in jobs that pay poverty wages

SNAP is probably the most effective federal dollar we spend in terms of long term domestic economic outcomes. that isn’t why you should support it; you should support it because it is a moral imperative to feed the hungry. but it’s why even a growth-oriented ghoul shouldn’t oppose it.

OpenAI pitches, in order: 1) It's the beginning of a new age for mankind 2) It will replace human thought 3) You can make cool videos with it 4) You can pretend it's your girlfriend 5) Submit to the Master while you can

At long last, after costly litigation in which UCOP refused to make public the Trump demand letter to UCLA — here it is!!! Many thanks to CUCFA for their appeal of the PRA denial. Here is to shared governance and academic freedom! @aaup ucop.edu/communicatio...

The pattern here is personalism. Trump views the federal treasury as a discretionary fund for dispensing patronage and largesse; he regards the White House as his private property; he regards DOJ as (literally) his personal lawyers, & the military & law enforcement as his personal security team.

One day, the monster ballroom (aka Epstein Ballroom) should not be destroyed, as some Dems have said. It should be severed from main bldg and transformed from a gilded idol of corruption into a “Museum of His Disasters,” one whose motto could be: “nobody’s ever seen anything like it before”

when the executive is unitary

there are good & worthwhile historical & legal arguments for why the unitary executive is nonsense but to my mind the most straightforward argument is that it makes no logical sense that the president has absolute removal power over the people whose job it is to keep the executive branch accountable

Huh maybe it’s not a good idea to have a monopoly on cloud infrastructure. Who would have thought? 🙄

I'm not a West Wing obsessed lib or anything but the more I see pictures of this the more fucked up I think it is. It's like he cut off one of the hands of the Lincoln memorial with an angle grinder so he could add a big gun to it.

Honestly the symbolism is overblown even for this hamfisted regime.

Yay!

“I see just a massive opportunity on the horizon, and not just in Europe but all over the world, to start building a new, good internet outside the U.S. One that’s multilateral, one that’s pluralistic, one that is enshittification-resistant from the start. It’s going to be accelerated by Trump.”

That’s the other thing that baffles me about AI and creative writing, actually. The work IS the joy for me. I don’t want to be able to snap my fingers and have a completed “product.” I want to be transformed by the process. I’m an author but I do this because I enjoy the rigor of being a writer.

Really informative piece arguing “we have reached “peak GenAI”…scaling (building more data centers and using more chips) will not take us further to the goal of AGI…and the AI-LLM industry and the larger U.S. economy are experiencing a speculative bubble, which is about to burst” 💯

In the near future economy, I bet the skill of “can type a prompt into ChatGPT and repeat whatever it says” will be less in demand than “understands things enough to catch when ChatGPT makes an error or hallucinates.”

Pls share: Applications open for Summer Institute in Economic Geography, Toronto, 5-10 July 2026 Featuring: Lars Coenen, Karen Lai, Devika Narayan and Stefan Ouma Early career economic geographers (broadly defined) are welcome to apply. Stipends available. www.econgeog.net/Toronto2026

When I last taught my critical economic geographies course, one of my exam questions asked students to think like a capitalist and devise a spatial fix for an overaccumulation scenario that was eerily similar to today's new rash of data centers. Feel free to offer your own response!

Reminder for this #AAG2026 session. Abstracts due October 20th!

It’s your lucky day! We have identified your profile as a winner, but time is running out to claim your reward. Just send us 250 words within the next three days so we can process your claim. Act now! #AAG2026

Greetings from our editorial board meeting at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research (IBF) in Uppsala, with Hannu Ruonavaara, Timothy Blackwell, @desireefields.bsky.social, @shadeofjuniper.bsky.social, Chris Foye, @brettchristophers.bsky.social and @jiegson.bsky.social!

Exciting CFP alert!

This week in 1988: 1,000+ ACT UP demonstrators shut down the FDA headquarters, demanding (and eventually winning) action on developing HIV/AIDS treatments. ACT UP's militant and creative actions always included powerful visual artwork, and paved the way for movements in the decades to come.

After Trump got his Covid shot, he chose to fire the scientists protecting the rest of us from diseases.