So many people who are otherwise so committed to good things are on Substack, which is very nice to bad people, ideas, and lies. My own newsletter was launched on Ghost because the bad news about Substack isn't new.

I think the White House posting, on the official White House website, what is basically a media proscription list, is quite bad for the civic health of our democracy!

I'm hoping to see Hegseth incarcerated at The Hague at some point for international war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Telegraph, ladies and gentlemen.

"You get out of my seat, or I'm going to roundhouse your ass."

Australia just recorded zero cervical cancer cases in women under 25 for the first time since records began in 1982. The amazing result of HPV vaccination.

Interested in pursuing a PhD in Strategic Management & Organization? Telfer School of Management at U of Ottawa offers a fully funded PhD program with supportive supervisors conducting high-impact research across a variety of fields and topics. Info. session on Dec 2nd (link below)

This paragraph is a journey.

Late stage kakistocracy. Future historians are going to spend years debating whether the key driver was honest stupidity vs. cynical corruption. My working hypothesis: why can't it be both?

try to do something nice for someone and for the next 30 years, you're known as "fart walker" among all your friends

Imagine posing for a photographer friend who sells your image to iStock and a year later, you see this is what The Washington Post has done with the image of you walking on a beautiful fall day

An issue we're seeing at all levels of university is that many students are simply refusing to do *anything*. They aren't reading the syllabus, aren't following assignment guidelines, aren't engaging with material, ignoring deadlines. And this might seem like old news, but it truly has ramped up.

It's easy to see shoddy research as a bad actor problem. But if AI slop like this can make it through editors and peer reviewers, it means there are systemic problems at work. And I'd argue that at least part of the problem is the overwork culture in academia-- pressure to do more while caring less.

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

Experts say it’s highly unusual for the White House to tell agents to give up custody of potential evidence in an investigation, as it did with the Tates. “I’ve never heard of anything like that in my 30 years working,” an ex-DHS official said.

Your universe is a photocopy of a photocopy of a… on.ft.com/4ahkNKa

Kagi is actually pretty good. But it's subscription-based, so you have to pay for it with your money - but not with data you produce.

I'm getting repeated invitations to a conference (called International Conference on Intelligent Machine Age), signed off by a program coordinator called "Johnson". Johnson, that's it.

Russian forces attacked the Ukrainian capital Kyiv early on November 25, killing at least six people, a senior official said.

How much carbon budget do we have left if we want to stay below 1.5˚C? Just 2 more years at current rates. It is essentially impossible to avoid global temperature rise exceeding 1.5˚C. climatelabbook.substack.com/p/the-shrink...

I particularly liked this: "In 10 years we will ask ourselves: why did we not show more courage? Why did we try to slow down technologies that will define this century? Europe is still very good at manufacturing. We should try to compete."

I mean, imagine you're the richest person on earth and the most fun thing about your parties - the most fun party activity you can imagine - is asking a chat bot to roast guests.

It's hard to describe the feeling this clip elicits. The richest dude in the world being such an infantile moron.

Still reeling from the Stanford report on Brexit. Reduced GDP by up to 8% and investment by as much as 18%. The UK Treasury would have £40 billion more each year if Britain had remained in the EU. Devastating self-immolation.

Fantastic trolling by Gavin Newsom based on Twitter’s new account location feature.

Love to see the King of the Manosphere discovering feminist theory from 1983:

My new post has some thoughts on COP30, not as a stand-alone event but as one punctuation point in a much wider climate transition. These gatherings still matter, but they will only ever be one part of a much wider shift. learningforsustainability.net/post/cop30/

Bully state. Always has been.

Your 'bonus moment of doom' for today: "Iran’s capital must be moved because the country 'no longer has a choice,' President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Thursday ... warning that severe ecological strain has made Tehran impossible to sustain." www.iranintl.com/en/202511209...

We saw it with big tobacco, we saw it with the fossil fuels industry. When their own internal research showed the harm from their product, the defunded the research and attacked independent researchers coming to the very same conclusions. #ScienceUnderSiege

It’s amazing to me how many people fundamentally misunderstand cause and effect. People drive into cities b/c they want to go to cities; if you reduce the ability to use cars in certain ways, they’ll still go because that’s where they want to be! The goal is to be in the city, not to be in the car!

One of the giants of social psychology was a serial sexual harasser. This new report reveals how Miles Hewstone touched, bullied, and sexual harassed numerous women during his 18 years at the University of Oxford. It's amazing how often bullying and sexual harassment go together in academia.

When you pay users based on engagement, you'll get content that generates engagement.

Since X pays for engagement and it’s now a right wing cesspool, posting racist rage bait is a great way to earn money if you’re in a developing country. It’s also how Fox News and right wing podcasters make money as well. Sadly, pandering to racists sells.

This is why social media is not a nice thing.

Meanwhile on Hellsite, who knew all the Elon bots were Nigerian? 🤡

One of the most important news about social media this decade! DB: "Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls" www.thedailybeast.com/top-maga-inf...

I died

huh, i thought this was AI because there's no way someone could order such an ugly shirt

This might be the single funniest thing that has happened during this incredibly cursed year

You ever just sit down and realize that the rise of 21st century fascism is capital's answer to climate change?

It's a vicious cycle: LLM use generates further incentives to economize as task completion becomes more efficient, ramping up pressures to perform.

These kinds of patterns create abusive organizations, no matter the field.

The total lack of seriousness that UK elites show while facing an obvious pre-war/ grey war situation in most policy realms is atrocious. Small boats? Yeah whatever mate.

ALL the far-right parties in Europe are Russian-funded, using offshore accounts in order to dodge campaign finance laws: this came out in the Panama Papers of 2016, the Paradise Papers of 2017 & the Pandora Papers of 2020. Putin pays grifters to rabble rouse & undermine democracy abroad. Details:

Russia promised this already in 1994

And Ukraine was promised this in 1994

I literally could not stop myself from inappropriately laughing out loud for real

I am by no means a prominent public intellectual, but my inbox is increasingly filled with messages from people who have been convinced by sycophantic chatbots that they have discovered revolutionary theories that entirely upend our scientific understanding of the universe.