Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla paid just 4.9% of their profits in federal corporate taxes in 2025. They have seen their collective tax bill drop by $95B thanks to two rounds of Trump tax cuts. Meanwhile, they've laid off thousands of workers. Trickle-down economics was always a scam.

Gas only sets Spain's electricity price 15% of the time. When gas costs spike it barely registers on the electricity bill. In countries like Italy and the UK gas sets the price 90% of the time. The difference is enormous. I spoke to @politico.com about this. www.politico.eu/article/spai...

And, nothing has happened. Lawless shadow tanker PEACE has spent today leaving Baltic Sea, a good while on Danish territory. Right now it actually looks like she will anchor up by Skagen (in Denmark) and possibly enjoy some hygge before delivery of oil to India.

The book “Computer Age Statistical Inference” is a great read (and freely available!), and now there’s an R package that makes it easy to get the data for examples.

False flagged “AETHER” leaving the Baltic

The Open Visualization Academy (OVA) IS LIVE! openvisualizationacademy.org Thread follows #dataViz #infographics #dataJournalism #dataVisualization

The UK is rejoining Erasmus+ 🇪🇺🇬🇧 Because it's what we want, what we really, really want! On the International Day of Education, we celebrate the agreement reached on the UK's return to the Erasmus+ programme from 2027. 🎥 Spice Girls - Wannabe (1996)

Kind of surprising that it took the giant solar storm to get me to look closely at the effects space weather has on GPS for the first time.

"The powerful have their power. But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together. That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently." Read the whole speech here. paulwells.substack.com/p/the-carney...

le visionscarto du week-end, ou comme le dit Vincent Capdepuy, l'auteur qui a eu la gentillesse de nous confier cet opus « comme un samedi ! » « Notre hémisphère » de la doctrine Monroe au corollaire Trump, la métagéographie au service des ambitions politiques www.visionscarto.net/notre-hemisp...

Rcpp 1.1.1 on CRAN: Many Improvements in Semi-Annual Update Seamless R and C++ Integration dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/01... #rstats #rcpp /cc @enchufa2.es @kevinushey.bsky.social

#rstats {duckspatial} 0.9 is on CRAN, makes @duckdb.org 🦆 #spatial 🌍 more user-friendly, enabling faster big data spatial ops in R. Adrián Cidree shared a great breakdown of how we (+ @urbandemog.bsky.social) are doing it: ​📖: cidree.github.io/duckspatial/... 💻: github.com/Cidree/ducks... ​#rspatial

A data model for Git (and other docs updates) jvns.ca/blog/2026/01...

New Year, New Colour Tool for you data visualizers and maybe the odd designer obumbratta.com/colour

I’ve been bothering NATO officials for over 2 years with one Q: what will happen if NATO member attacks another NATO member? No answer. Well, soon they’ll have to show us what this, in fact, means.

❗️President Zelenskyy, President Macron and Prime Minister Starmer sign a declaration of intent regarding multinational force deployment in Ukraine in the future.

There are few politicians that I despise more than Marco Rubio, an utterly mediocre and malicious empty shell of a man. After reading this, my contempt for the guy has increased significantly: www.propublica.org/article/usai...

Please join me in a new campaign to help protect Ukrainians in a very special way. My Ukrainian friends chose to call this campaign Freedom is Action. They are making an important point. One way to find our own courage is to act in support those who are showing it snyder.substack.com/p/freedom-is...

🚀 Calling all data scientists & #ML enthusiasts! The PRC Data Challenge is back for 2025! 🌍✈️ 👉 Build Machine Learning models to predict fuel burn at different stages of flight, using open aviation data 🔗 Find out more here: ansperformance.eu/study/data-c...

EXCLUSIVE - Today the Guardian is publishing the Boris Files A trove of leaked data from the office of Boris Johnson. It reveals how Johnson is using the relationships forged in the UK’s highest elected office to facilitate his personal enrichment. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

HUGE NEWS FROM HELSINKI, FINLAND Helsinki, a city of 690 000 people, has now had a full year without any traffic fatalities. None. No pedestrian, cyclist, scooter user or car deaths. This is a huge achievement for a city of our size. 💪🏻 A little background 🧵 1/ yle.fi/a/74-20174831

Notebooks 2.0 is here! 📓🔮 Previewing today:
Notebook Kit, an open file format for notebooks with open-source tooling for generating static sites; and
Observable Desktop, a macOS desktop application for editing notebooks as local files, with a radical new approach to AI. observablehq.com/notebooks/2/

Really great article and visuals from @reuters.com (and the maps...🤩OMG!) www.reuters.com/graphics/USA...

Les espions, ça n'existe pas que dans les films… Il y en a aussi dans votre poche 📱

50 minutes of music blending melodic progressive rock, cinematic live strings, jazz, classical, pop, post-rock, and a touch of melancholy. Even if you don't know Ukrainian, you will feel the emotion. Listen on all platforms ❤️ rain.in.ua/go/vidrada-en

I really like that Wired is opening up the reporting they do that’s based on FOIA requests to non-subscribers. It’s super smart, too.

Bellingcat repeated their experiment of a few years ago in LLM photo geolocation but using modern models. "…in urban settings, LLMs excelled at cross-referencing subtle details, whereas Google Lens tended to fixate on larger, similar-looking structures…" www.bellingcat.com/resources/ho...

Cuts have consequences, illustrated. As seen on TV 📺

Since our first release, GeoArrow has been adopted by GeoPandas, GDAL, Apache Sedona, @duckdb.org, Lonboard, Kepler.gl, and others. It has never been easier (or faster) to get spatial data from one tool into another!

If you want peace in Ukraine, pressure Russia. If you want war, don’t. The Trump people only make concessions. Which is exactly what the Kremlin expected. The US through its astounding weakness is making the war longer and bloodier than it has to be.

Quarto 1.7 is here! 🎉 Now you can easily add light/dark mode to your projects with brand files and control which computational outputs appear in each mode with the new renderings option. See it in action on quarto.org and learn more: quarto.org/docs/blog/po... #Quarto #QuartoPub

Remember when I discussed the idea for a new data visualization framework for Svelte? It is time to get excited! I’ve been secretly working on making SveltePlot possible and will finally share the current state next week at @svelte.dev Summit 2025!!! Stay tuned... www.vis4.net/blog/2024/01...

🚨 Tesla posts a $400M profit, down 71% year-over-year. Revenue is down nearly $2B compared to the same time last year. Wow.

Les paroles et les actes…

Did a quick write-up for non-cyber folks of the NLRB whistleblower filing regarding DOGE covertly stealing 10GB of data and giving their credentials to what appears to be Russian state-sponsored threat actors. On Earth 1, this story, alone, would have […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

« J’ai entendu le président de la République dire qu’il faudrait rendre inéligible à vie ceux qui ont été condamnés pour corruption et fraude fiscale. Ah bon ? Et pourquoi pas le reste ? Pourquoi pas pour détournement de fonds publics ? » — Marine Le Pen, le 5 avril 2013. #PassionArchives

#FreeJavaScript update: Oracle has just filed more on their motion to dismiss the Fraud claim. Here's a summary of where the case stands: deno.com/blog/deno-v-...

For the first time ever, recorded atmospheric CO₂ has exceeded 430ppm! The last time CO₂ consistently reached today’s human-driven levels was ∼14 Million years ago, with shorter periods of similar levels around 3-5 Million years ago. 1/3

Process spatial data and create reproducible maps with R using "Cartography with R" by Timothée Giraud. Covers R Spatial, data manipulation, thematic maps, and more. Read it at: buff.ly/sIqGXss #RStats #Mapping #DataViz #map #rspatial

Here is part 1, which discusses the week in which the USA started working with Putin to help Russians kill Ukrainians. bsky.app/profile/phil...

Time to use Amazon like they used to use brick-and-mortar book stores!

A team of archivists has recreated the pre-Trump CDC website as a live, easy-to-navigate website that should be indexed by Google. The team is hosting it in Europe. Cool project that is sadly necessary: www.404media.co/archivists-r...

French Senator Claude Malhuret: "Washington has become Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a jester high on ketamine... We were at war with a dictator, we are now at war with a dictator backed by a traitor."

Of great interest Never thought we’d see this ukdefencejournal.org.uk/norwegian-fu...

We interviewed Observable's own data visualization engineer Fil Rivière to ask him about all things maps. In our new post, hear Fil's thoughts on what makes a map impactful, why they're hard to do well, and why he's pondering a "slow cartography movement":

Hi All, Just sent out a free update to the weekend one. In the last 24 hours the Trump administration has aligned even more closely with Putin. Turns out Putin was not responsible for the war--the USA and NATO were. Also did Merz declare independence for Europe? open.substack.com/pub/phillips...

Musk's forecast of AfD victory as inaccurate as his prediction that Covid would vanish by April 2020. This genius is an idiot.

@lionelhenry.bsky.social and I are so excited to finally announce Air - an extremely fast R code formatter! 🎉 With Air, you'll never need to worry about styling your #rstats code ever again. All you need to do is save, and Air takes care of the rest. www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/02...

Super nice

A dictatorship hosting another dictatorship to negotiate with an aspiring dictatorship about the future of a democracy that’s not represented.