A pox on the House of Microsoft and its lousy Copilot infestation

Wars and other military adventures are always, always environmental disasters

Fuck Microsoft Continually re-installing its shitty Co-pilot into the software required by my workplace

New @stand.earth: Microsoft's 3 new gas data centres will - Increase Microsoft's emissions 160% - Have higher emissions than power sectors of each of Greece, Ireland, Sri Lanka, NZ etc... - Have higher emissions than pwr sector of 15 lowest-emitting countries combined stand.earth/press-releas...

"The right’s characterization of higher education is a fiction. Students across the ideological spectrum feel free to express themselves, think their education is worth the cost and don’t think their views are silenced." Only 3% of Republican students feel out of place on campus for their views.

There's an ambulance market (I could stop there), private equity has rolled it up, and it's now delaying deliveries, tripling the cost for cities & creating shortages across the country. This is what happens as we shout about what podcasts politicians should go on

The IMF calculates that Trump & Netanyahu's war has plunged 45 million people into food insecurity.

Has anyone looked at private daycares in Canada and debt? There is a story here in NL about a highly leveraged private daycare and the figures are eye popping! Rumor has it they are also receiving public funds ...

Libertarians dreamed of the zone as a way to escape the state but it became the favored tool of state capitalism; now the same has happened with crypto.

“Feel free to adapt and reuse. No attribution needed (…) If you make an adaption that you also want to share, I’d love to know about it, too.” irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/04/08/r...

Silicon Valley’s alliance with Donald Trump was a mask off moment and showed the world we can’t depend on US tech companies. For the past few months, I’ve been trying to get off US tech and I put together a guide so you find alternatives too. I hope you find it helpful!

Microsoft, to its billions of customers: You must use this product to be hired or promoted. It is the future. We are spending billions per day, choking the rest of the economy. You cannot avoid it. You cannot uninstall it. It is risky. Do not rely on it for anything important. It is a toy.

Sometimes readers are skeptical when I tell them that retailers would rather pay for self-checkout kiosks and product lockup systems and all manner of other questionable in-store tech rather than staffing because of an ideological preference for capital spending over labor spending and, well,,,

Chat is this good

US car dealers hate EVs because EVs need a lot less maintenance www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/202...

we endlessly debate the optimal ways of getting stronger in the gym. but while debates are many, genuine innovations are few: most methods are variations on the theme of "pick up something heavy, put it down, repeat" and the details are less meaningful to our muscle cells than they are to our egos

#WeAreMUN #WorthFunding @munfaculty.bsky.social

Research at MUN saves lives: "A team from Memorial University of Newfoundland received the Governor General’s Innovation Award for leading research that identified the genetic mutation and the cause of the lethal heart attacks." ottawa.citynews.ca/2018/05/23/m... #WeAreMUN #WorthFunding

Provinces across Canada are investing in post-secondary education. Ontario. Saskatchewan. Meanwhile, Newfoundland and Labrador’s only university faces cuts, fewer courses, and larger classes. The NL budget is coming. This government has a clear choice to make. #WeAreMUN bit.ly/4sbzKD2 bit.ly/4tkgbsX

#WeAreMUN #WorthFunding If Memorial is not, then who? www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Everyone deserves access to affordable and fulfilling public education that offers pathways to a future where we can all thrive. #WeAreMUN

Youths, may I recommend you look up how the subprime mortgage crisis happened? Just, you know, for science

I am looking for recommendations What is a good alternative to the hellscape known as Microsoft Office?

Across Memorial, we are seeing the real impacts of ongoing funding cuts. Programs are changing. Jobs are being lost. Teaching and learning conditions are under pressure. The impacts are not abstract. They affect our classrooms, our colleagues, and our students.1/3 #WeAreMUN

Disturbing. This study suggests that just one encounter with a syncophantic chatbot tends to "erode prosocial motivations," even for sophisticated users.

Another consequence of the war, possible CO2 shortage in the UK. Co2 is used to "used to stun pigs and chickens for slaughter" www.feedstuffs.com/agribusiness...

I’m sorry but be serious www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

When private equity takes over a care home, deaths at the home rise by an average of 11%. When the private equity company is leveraged more than 75% in debt, the deaths double www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Imperial Valley residents protesting the development of a data center just chanted the developer out of the County Board of Supervisors meeting.

Unsurprisingly experiential and active learning beats transactional hands down—AI can help students fake and navigate the latter, but the former (in its many forms) produces more durable outcomes.

Here we go. Same management consultants ruining our universities one by one.

Today in AI: Canada rejected the PR application of a McMaster postdoc from the Sorbonne who works in the immunology of aging because the generative AI being used to process applications (😱) entirely hallucinated her credentials. Everyone involved should be fired. archive.is/ELrCI#select...

This is the way.

But what is significant here is that there are 1000s of cases just like this waiting in the wings. That means even if you multiply $3M across 1000 plaintiffs, up to $3B in damages.

In using "AI" to replace rather than complement workers, Mark Carney is setting Canada up for a repeat of the CFIA listeria debacle that led to the deaths of three people. Expect multiple versions of that, and scandals like Australia's Robodebt. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

Krugman does a recap on the insider trading yesterday open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

In underfunded fields, people tend to do their own work. In overfunded fields, people pay others to do everything, including “their” research and writing. It’s not an accident that AI is an overfunded field that grew out of other overfunded fields.

Anyway, AI is a managerial technology that came out of fields where researchers act more like managers than researchers and this is not a coincidence. It’s fundamentally related to why certain people jumped at the chance to try to build certain kinds of systems that devalued (other people’s) work.

If you are Canadian, sign this petitition to prevent the downsizing of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's research capacity. Now more than ever we need publicly funded agricultural research: www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en...

What an incredible story: Meatpacking workers who speak 57 languages are ON STRIKE against the behemoth JBS in Greeley, CO. Reminds me of historical accounts of the Lawrence, Mass. strike of 1912, where workers spoke dozens of languages, and often sang to communicate.

It isn't just about human health—think about soil health, pollinators, arthropods, worms, mycorrhizal networks, declining bird populations...

I want fully staffed public pools, and libraries that are cathedrals to public goods and a society where walling yourself off with money is viewed as sociopathic.

We can all complain about university library catalogues — why so many book reviews? why? — but when students regularly had to *search* a library catalogue they were developing important research skills and also finding more diverse and interesting resources to read. Which is, you know, the point.

Too many students are convinced by their own universities, by some of their teachers and professors, and by the AI companies themselves that ‘using ai to study is getting ahead of the game’ But the process they seek to get ahead of is the point.

UPDATE: The province’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner began collecting data on gambling as a risk factor for suicide. The policy change came a year after The Independent published an investigation into gambling-related suicides in Newfoundland and Labrador. theindependent.ca/news/lji/n-l...

boys delight apples, painted by bertha heiges, 1904

📚✨ In 10 years in libraries, I’ve never seen 300 Norwegian librarians moved like this. Today, @samhelmick.bsky.social did. The fight against book bans is about democracy. We can’t take our values for granted. 📖 #Libraries #FreedomToRead #Democracy