how did we go from “reduce your carbon footprint” to building data centers everywhere

How it started (March 2025) / how it's going (June 2026)

Too sick to work? Prove it by doing all of these things that are much, much harder when you're sick.

None of my brilliant friends can find decent work that pays a living wage, but all the dumbest pampered chuds on the planet rake in the dough. It rules frankly

“The agents’ communication abilities would have to withstand all the scrutiny that animal-communication researchers have had to defend their work against.“ “it is not building a tool that assists people in their decision making; it is encouraging people to stop making decisions“

New research examines Waymo's California robotaxi trips btw Aug 2023 and Dec 2025. Conclusion: 46% of miles driven involved no one inside the car. That's 40 million miles of deadheading, with Waymo vehicles using road space w/o transporting a human. doi.org/10.32866/001...

Edward Tufte would like a word.

A top contender for what we should heavily stigmatize: Expecting an audience to spend more time giving you their attention than you spent composing what you want to present.

tried to cut it 80%. NSF shut it down anyway. The Irminger Sea station alone was part of an international effort to monitor the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation the global current system whose collapse would mean permanent, severe weather disruption across the Northern Hemisphere.

The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean monitoring network 900+ sensors tracking climate currents, fishery health, ocean carbon absorption, and coastal flooding along the East Coast. Ships go out in June to start pulling it up. Congress funded it twice after Trump

Court blocks Trump/GOP/Project 2025 effort to dismantle NCAR: www.courtlistener.com/docket/72496...

Turning off the part of our mind that questions our thoughts is a good way to practice no longer listening to people who disagree with us. Sounds like AI trains us how to be a less functional, cohesive, collaborative, and empathetic society.

I’m not the first to say it, but I’ve said it over and over: The long term goal of the GOP for decades has been to dismantle and delegitimize the U.S. government so they can resegregate their states, strip women’s rights and privatize and profit from what’s left of America.

Christianity does not belong to the Republicans. They’ve misrepresented it long enough. www.nytimes.com/video/us/pol...

This isn’t a coincidence.     Trump bought millions of dollars’ worth of Dell stock. Nine days later, he told a rally crowd to “go out and buy a Dell computer.” Then he bought even more Dell stock. Three months after that, his Pentagon handed Dell a $9.7 billion government contract.

"[The] social model of disability - it is not the person's condition but the societal and physical environment that holds them back - while conversations around barriers in towns and cities have improved, that is not the case for the countryside." @thelrm.bsky.social www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

If you profess to be a follower of Jesus, I’m not concerned with your politics, and I don’t care about your doctrine. I’m not interested in the Scriptures you can recite or the prayers you utter out loud. Show me a working theology of empathy... johnpavlovitz.substack.com/p/dear-maga-...

It remains baffling to me that we have a clear constitutional requirement that the president can't enrich himself on the job, something we had no problem enforcing strictly for hundreds of years, and then this sweaty conman came by and the nation just sorta shrugged it off.

These tech bastards are going to destroy everything!

Cops busting through a barricade that they set up is pretty tough to misinterpret.

“Google’s AI Overviews are peddling misinformation on a scale that may be virtually unprecedented in human history. A recent analysis conducted at the behest of The New York Times found that the AI-generated summaries, which appear above Google search results, are accurate around 91% of the time.”

They probably have a plan to put all of the books, journals, and papers through a wood chipper and have ai generate the documents from images of all the pieces.

MIT (endowment: $27B) shuttering three of its four main libraries is one of those news items that just knocks you off balance, auguring, as it does, profound and permanent changes to the entire institutional apparatus of higher education in this country.

"Weigh-ins will take place at Lincoln Memorial, officials have said." OH COME ON.

It's odd— this is far from the worst thing, but it's the one that I have the hardest time believing is real. The semiquincentennial is getting marked by turning the White House into a Hunger Games set? Really? What? Naaah.

War is peace Ignorance is strength Freedom is slavery Losing is winning..

Some excellent picking apart of the way that Tesla generates faux statistics around safety in here. So, when you hear the claim that self-driving cars aren't perfect, but safer than human drivers... well, that data is fraudulent

so many things are wrong with this: www.latimes.com/world-nation...

That doesn’t look like the George Washington I know. Maybe he‘s studying the ground and topsoil to advance his ideas on composting, which WAS one of his main interests. He wrote letters home about composting while leading the army.

Good National Press Club statement on the notion of federal employees being required to sign NDAs. An excerpt: "Efforts to impose sweeping secrecy obligations across the civil service do not strengthen the government. Instead, they shield it from scrutiny and weaken public trust."

Wrote a thing. About recent developments plus an overview of the landmark climate case won last July in the International Court of Justice plus some reflections on what we focus on here in the US and what we miss.

Trump officials plan to repeal limits on ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026... As long as I live, I’ll never understand how “it should be easier for billion dollar corporations to poison the water my family drinks” became a politically popular position

Cartoon by @ivan-ehlers.bsky.social Ivan Ehlers

More than a bit worrying that reality seems not to matter anymore. Like, whole political movements rise up out of disinformation campaigns pushed by algorithms and media narratives. www.latimes.com/california/s...

It’s what the headline says: “Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees”. Go figure. But to be perfectly clear, **even if AI was more economical**, it would still be dehumanizing and immoral

There was a substantive role for media orgs and journalists who facilitated the spread of this dangerous disinformation with their irresponsible stenography of regime press releases. Exhibit A @nytimes.com The NYT *never* documented their belated re-write. We did. bsky.app/profile/medi...

The Arlington National Cemetery Memorial apparently has deleted references and information on everyone interred there who wasn’t a white straight man from their database - attempting to sweep their existence under the rug. My thoughts on this obscenity cannot legally be shared on this platform.

Today's Daily Cartoon for @newyorker.com by Kevin Maher and me.

What a fucking mess

It’s worth noting that when Jan. 6 happened, the pro-Trump right used dozens of conspiracy theories to try and offload blame from themselves—e.g., claiming it was “antifa,” “feds.” Now, they seem keen to just admit they did it—all of it—and it was good.

On va vivre quelque chose de difficilement concevable : à quelques degrés près, certaines régions de France frôlent des seuils de canicule*… en plein mois de mai. 1/7

💥 Jon Stewart on Trump’s corrupt slush find: “This is f'n our money! Do we even have a Congress? ..They’re gonna give it to people that sprayed mace at police officers and pretend they’re rewarding patriotism” @weeklyshowpodcast.bsky.social

If you are curious how often Trump has managed to travel on other weekends since the Iran war started (Feb. 28), every colored block is a trip to one of his properties. Every red dot is a round of golf. pbump.com/projects/gol...

i've already ranted about this elsewhere but i'll rant here too: people who talk about AI "inevitability" or say "people doubted electricity, cars etc." too and call us Luddites - what I am saying is that maybe we actually ought to embrace thinking things through before we remake society around them

David Quammen in an interview abt the 2014 Ebola outbreak: “So we need to end this outbreak in West Africa before this virus learns too much about us.” Each sad illness & death is a learning & mutation opportunity for a virus, potentially enabling it to spread more effectively & cause more harm.

my only take on the takeout vs delivery discourse is i really think that middle and high schools should include mandatory cooking classes

If we don’t have time or the inclination to educate students person-to-person, we certainly don’t have time and the inclination to learn to pronounce their names, or even say them the wrong way even once. This AI ridiculousness makes one grateful for the things we used to take for granted.

on my birthday I took to the newsletter to write about the AI commencement address backlash, and how growing anger at AI is now irreversibly tethered to justified rage at the extraction class -- whether AI boosters like it or not