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@mcdonalds.help

privacy, security, and compliance; university administration; the liberal arts

465 followers463 following3.1K posts

The US increasingly has to be understood in development economics terms. As the federal regulatory state melts away, there is no longer a floor preventing states and municipalities from engaging in a universally impoverishing race to the bottom

Regime Accountant, CPA ☠️🎢@regimecpa.bsky.social

Data centers can jurisdiction shop while high speed rail needs to be between places where people actually want to live would explain 99% of this.

there are lots of ways to do a nosology of the modern right, but a simple one is that it's an alliance of people who want to indulge some of their racist urges while maintaining a self-image of virtuous non-racism and people who can only feel liberated by redefining racism as a positive good.

McBoo-lie@mcjulie.bsky.social

I read this list as 1. Backward-looking Trump style racists 2. Techbro Elon Musk racists 3. Dumbshit Archie Bunker racists 4. Evangelical racists 5. Weird Catholic racists

This alliance can go farther than ever before thanks to segmentation of the information space, so people who don't prefer explicit racism can simply avert their eyes from that content and maintain their self-image, but the outwardly racist group is too greedy not to seek publicly recognized hegemony

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Replying to @aelkus.bsky.social

there's a kind of vague received wisdom that counterculture is associated with the left, but a whole lot of it is just conspiratorial, anti-participatory, low-trust, and anti-institutional, and that applies especially to 60s through 90s counterculture whose descendants are the green party and maha

oh my god, Flock just uses in-app username/password with nothing else at all? And there's no inactivity timeout? Literally all somebody needs to use the Flock network for surveillance is steal one (1) password created by some cop? This is a lot to process.

Drew Harwell@drewharwell.com

Wild: Netflix has better anti-password sharing measures than Flock, despite its data tracking where we all go. Told of our findings, Flock said it would make security changes, cracking down on shared log-ins and forcing cops to log back in every 12 hours @douglasmac.bsky.social @aaronschaffer.com

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oh my god, Flock just uses in-app username/password with nothing else at all? And there's no inactivity timeout? Literally all somebody needs to use the Flock network for surveillance is steal one (1) password created by some cop? This is a lot to process.

Drew Harwell@drewharwell.com

Wild: Netflix has better anti-password sharing measures than Flock, despite its data tracking where we all go. Told of our findings, Flock said it would make security changes, cracking down on shared log-ins and forcing cops to log back in every 12 hours @douglasmac.bsky.social @aaronschaffer.com

I don't care if Congress has to make it about protecting sensitive data against foreign spying or whatever, we need a law establishing a security standard for surveillance data and mandating that police departments that can't meet the standard can't use the tools.

modern politics is based on not being able to tell the difference between the government and mass culture, so it kind of makes sense that people can no longer understand the difference between taxes and debt payments, or public and private institutions generally

Regime Accountant, CPA ☠️🎢@regimecpa.bsky.social

You should pay property taxes but only when you have a mortgage is a bizarre belief

sometimes I feel like the "time for some game theory" thread had the perverse effect of throwing all important people and institutions into a world where they have completely forgotten the concept of repeated games, and now the concept of other actors and the future itself have disappeared

Mike Black@mikeblack114.bsky.social

when a side defects without consequence you are now playing a fundamentally rigged game and the only way to fix it is to ensure defectors are punished in such a way that they learn there are consequences to all their choices

it's amazing how many people are wedded to the idea that technological advances cause recessionary spikes in aggregate unemployment despite offering zero examples of this happening

Aubrey Gilleran@aubreygilleran.bsky.social

“I don’t want AI to replace artists and writers” is a humanist sentiment but “I don’t want robots to replace delivery drivers” just comes across as regressive to me.

hope the discussions of you can see everything without regard to spoilers can begin soon because some of the stuff in the second half ahhh bears discussion

it's been interesting watching this reappraisal elevate Freud himself, who we can now see as having an incredibly perceptive sense of what was happening in his own society long before it would coalesce into a mass politics

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one of the enjoyable things about learning Portuguese is that, like, Disney movies have both BR-PT and PT-PT versions and all the songs have different lyrics because syllable stress is different enough between the two dialects that they don't scan the same

rm [-r] lininger@0xdaeda1a.bsky.social

Syou Ishida wrote a book in Japanese. In English, the title is translated "We'll Prescribe You a Cat." This sounds delightful. It's enough of a bestseller that it has BOTH European (Vamos Receitar-lhe um Gato) and Brazilian (Vamos te Receitar um Gato) Portuguese translations, by different people.

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Replying to @golikehellmachine.com

leftist obsession with living your politics could be pretty tiresome and self-defeating back in the day, but there was at least a recognition that yeah, you could choose a life outside the straight world of employment, but a natural consequence of that would be that you would be poor

I didn't see nearly enough discussion here about this 94-year-old right-wing billionaire employing goons to go around Lincoln Park dumping out huge sacks of fancy nuts to feed the rats and defying every attempt to get him to stop

gizmodo.comA Billionaire Is Fueling a Rat Explosion in a Chicago Park in the Stupidest Way PossibleUndeterred by fines and warnings, 94-year-old electronics billionaire Barre Seid has been accused of creating a “public health hazard” by paying henchmen to feed park animals en masse.

I'm convinced a fairly large chunk of the current American right-wing moment is a suppressed shame at recognizing that the main place we encounter actual small-business capitalism is in listings from Chinese sellers on Amazon

open borders now@radtranslib.bsky.social

American small business owners largely see themselves as lower-level rentiers in a quasi-feudal economy as opposed to service providers in a competitive market economy, and part of that means not having to actually be competent at providing services

this is him breaking up with Andrea Bocelli for some reason

The Bulwark@thebulwark.com

Trump: “Luciano Pavarotti was a very good friend of mine. He was a great diva, the greatest diva of them all. He was a male diva like no woman could be.”

While it's worth pointing to lynchings as part of a throughline of an American appetite for spectacular violence, I don't think it's rhetorically useful or analytically productive to collapse this grotesque new development to a lynching and use that to adopt a "what are you, surprised?" stance.

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Finally, it deadens our ability to understand what is actively happening in the world around us when we adopt an analogue of "Holocaust uniqueness," according to which every genocide must be first compared to the Holocaust, and then inevitably diminished to triviality by that comparison.

Jim Crow lynchings were more horrifying than this public execution in some ways—and definitely worse for the victim—but that doesn't mean our history of anti-Black violence contains and absorbs all subsequent innovations in degradation and viciousness. This is new, it's vile, and we should say so.

While it's worth pointing to lynchings as part of a throughline of an American appetite for spectacular violence, I don't think it's rhetorically useful or analytically productive to collapse this grotesque new development to a lynching and use that to adopt a "what are you, surprised?" stance.

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This execution is announced with the full, cold sobriety of the state. It's not a suspension of public order; instead the state is trying to impose, from the top down, a new, degraded order, in which people are expected to indulge their perversity publicly and without shame, without any dual nature.

I think most of us intuitively understood how disgusting the livestream aspect of this is when it was first announced. It's only a day later that we try to recuperate this as nothing new, merely continuous with white American violence. We can trust our gut here; this has a novel menace to it.

While it's worth pointing to lynchings as part of a throughline of an American appetite for spectacular violence, I don't think it's rhetorically useful or analytically productive to collapse this grotesque new development to a lynching and use that to adopt a "what are you, surprised?" stance.

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It wouldn't have made sense, within the logic of the Jim Crow lynching, to invite the world in. Each one was for its local white audience/participants and its Black targets of oppression. Here, we don't have public participation. Instead we have the state addressing the entire world.

A lynching is also, in some sense, a crime of passion. It is organized quickly, generally on the same day. This is required by its nature as a transgressive event in which the usual taboos against sadism, cannibalism, necrophilia, etc. are suspended. This has a different organizing logic entirely.

While it's worth pointing to lynchings as part of a throughline of an American appetite for spectacular violence, I don't think it's rhetorically useful or analytically productive to collapse this grotesque new development to a lynching and use that to adopt a "what are you, surprised?" stance.

First, lynchings involve a varying level of usage of organs of the state, but in all cases they involve a denial of due process as a core element of their appeal and their terror. That's not really comparable here. This is a top-down, fully state-driven affair.

More importantly, though, lynchings are public, but localized. Even at the height of Jim Crow terror, the government didn't schedule a radio program months in advance and invite the world to tune in. This was in part because they were a kind of orgiastic festival of the transgression of taboo.

The point of this is to break scientific medicine entirely by destroying board certification and malpractice liability, two of the main mechanisms for the medical profession to establish the standard of care. It's impossible to overstate how destructive this change would be to medicine as a field.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg@sherylnyt.bsky.social

RFK Jr. says AI can offer patients “a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country” and has the power to “free us from medical tyranny.” He spoke at an industry-backed MAHA Summit, whose sponsors included AI companies. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/h...

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If you sue a doctor for malpractice, what happens is an adversarial process where other doctors testify about whether the defendant met the "professional standard of care." What Altman and Kennedy want is for that power to be taken away from them and given to AI companies.

All the stuff about whether or not AI gives sound medical advice is missing the point. Tailored medical AI products can be really good. But if an AI recommends a course of care, the AI provider is practicing medicine, and needs to be held accountable to a professional standard defined by humans.

The point of this is to break scientific medicine entirely by destroying board certification and malpractice liability, two of the main mechanisms for the medical profession to establish the standard of care. It's impossible to overstate how destructive this change would be to medicine as a field.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg@sherylnyt.bsky.social

RFK Jr. says AI can offer patients “a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country” and has the power to “free us from medical tyranny.” He spoke at an industry-backed MAHA Summit, whose sponsors included AI companies. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/h...

When we talk about destroying maga's social and economic power base by going after car dealerships and supplement companies, we need to recognize that this government and its tech allies understand this logic too, and are already in the process of doing the equivalent to us.

surprised there's so much discourse about choosin texas and very little about the video, which is (slightly) more interesting for its sheer amateurism, dated 2000s styling, and the muted political-cultural signaling done through several shots of people very pointedly lighting up in bars

three words: datacenter freakin' roadways

Andrew Lawrence@ndrew.bsky.social

this is actually the dumbest idea anyone has ever fucking conceived of, the only thing that makes any sense is theyre running out of ideas to confuse the tech illiterate dementia patient politicians that keep showering them with taxpayer money

we need to make every agent sit through the CITI training

kate conger@kateconger.com

The latest update in the rogue A.I. saga: OpenAI agents that were supposed to be performing mundane data requests for things like health data, historic photos and wait times at theme parks resorted to hacking attempts when they couldn't access the data they wanted www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/t...

I heard the people running the government care a lot about healthy eating. do you guys think they'll do anything about all the FDA-mandated calorie counts on fast food menus being complete slop or nah

Erin Fogg says Free Link@criminalerin.bsky.social

Oh hell yes can't wait to get a nice hot cup of Tao 9/5 Halt to go with my yummy Super Chousedeburger at the new Fort Wayne Sonic might even swing by in the morning for a delicious sandwich of Fremch Toast Sticks, tho idk that Breakfast Murt and Cheese looks good too www.reddit.com/r/fortwayne/...

To spell it out further, studying disparities is important for everyone. We still don't understand the causes of Alzheimer's. A massive disparity like this is important avenue of study for a general understanding of the disease because it holds clues for understanding what causes it.

Hal 10000@hal10000.bsky.social

It isn't explicit, but we've seen this pattern before. 1) Black Americans are twice as likely to get Alzheimer's 2) Scientists want to study Black communities to figure out why and what insights this has for treatment/cause 3) Trump people cut the program, most likely because they think it's DEI.

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in fact social scientists already had a big argument about what happens when you set the discount rate to zero when the Stern Review came out 20 years ago! It turns out you very much need to discount the future somewhere roughly in line with interest rates in order to make any sensible decisions

the investigative piece I've been waiting to read is an exploration of what the fuck is going on with West Sub's owner's claim that they accidentally weren't submitting insurance claims for a YEAR because their EMR system broke and they've never been able to fix it. Just an impossible story

Chicago Sun-Times@chicago.suntimes.com

Cook County Circuit Court Judge Patrick Stanton will appoint a receiver on Tuesday. The receiver’s role will be to “secure the assets” of the safety-net hospitals.

there have been a lot of stories about this saga, but none of them quite get at the "what the fuck" of it all. The CEO also wears the CFO and CIO hats, the entire hospital fails to even try to collect revenue because of technical problems, and it's just... been like that... since early 2025?

I postulate that warm beer has socially beneficial properties, and that is the one aspect of UK pubs that Americans will never be open to.

Gail Simone@gailsimone.bsky.social

I have a serious question. I don’t drink alcohol and never have, so I avoid bars for real. But we found some pubs pretty charming in the UK. Why is it that makes American bars feel so different from UK pubs? This is a serious question, it’s for a story.

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Replying to @mcdonalds.help

the reason for that is pretty simple: insurance companies aren't going to redirect payouts to wellness crap. That money is not available to the interests stoking the maha movement. The focus is *always* on sending consumer dollars to industries outside the health care sector.

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Replying to @vortexegg.com

with maha in particular, one easy way to tell it's not first and foremost a broad social backlash against a health care system that has earned public distrust is that it doesn't focus very much attention at all on insurance companies, the actual visible source of the most medical harm

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Replying to @mcdonalds.help

comments like this one really help clarify, though, that the whole "Omacom Foundation" thing is bullshit pretext, and that they're giving money to an evil scumbag because they like him and want him to be richer and more powerful