A Public Defender

You asked AI for the cheapest flight. It dug through your emails, decided you could afford more, and suggested a ticket costing $100–$200 extra. Lindsay Owens explains ⬇️

Many platforms use your data to train AI. Here’s how to opt out. www.eff.org/pages/i-wan...

MORON OCLOCK zeteo.com/p/its-moron-...

Police have killed nearly 1000 people this year so far. That doesn't include deaths in custody.

People following the Cornell case keep asking the same questions about Jane Doe. Why did she text one of the men afterward? Why didn't she call it rape right away? Why didn't she see herself as a victim from the start? My last three articles take these questions on. 🧵

NYC spends approximately $200,000 a year for every inmate in the corrections system. It spends about $27,000 a year for every student enrolled in CUNY.

NEW: Mike Rogers is campaigning against Abdul el-Sayed based on what el-Sayed supporter Hasan Piker has said. But who's looking at the anti-American radicals supporting Rogers? They’re not hard to find. I found some because I’ve already reported on them.

a Sunday reminder for Washingtonians out there Washington is the only state where a MAJORITY of the state Supreme Court is on the ballot, all at once a very rare situation no party label on the ballot but candidates are still aligned with parties! important to learn: boltsmag.org/your-state-b...

This is pretty fucking wild. I had assumed in a worst case scenario he would target blue zip codes and toss ballots based on technicalities but this is even worse than I imagined.

Hormuz crossings: @bloomberg.com

Are you a journalist who uses FOIA or other public records laws in your reporting? Then you could win $25,000 through our new journalism award, the Penlight Prize. But the deadline is approaching fast! Watch @trevortimm.bsky.social to learn more, and apply today!

Underappreciated: US farmland *already substantially produces energy, not food*, and does so very inefficiently. Corn ethanol (~40% of all US corn) requires about 100 times more land per vehicle-mile driven than solar photovoltaics -> electric vehicles. Shifting corn to solar *would free up land*.

My paper w/ @robmickey.bsky.social & @dziblatt.bsky.social--on how Black migration via the Great Migration led northern cities to replace mayors with appointed city managers--has found a home at Journal of Historical Political Economy (JHPE) ungated page proofs: drive.google.com/file/d/1bFea...

Only Ohioans would pay him for sex.

Does it ever feel like you're in a cage being watched? Well, you are. By Flock cameras, thanks to Mike Rogers.

Last week I posted these national results and messed up the local ones (used US pop as the per cap base for each state). Here are the revised real police spending per 100K. The unit here is state-level aggregates of local (city and county but not state or fed) spending. No real defund anywhere.

US DOJ finds 'unbroken pattern' of sexual abuse by California prison staff A two-year federal investigation found decades of staff sexual abuse against incarcerated women at California correctional facilities.

Future POTUS and Congress will need to enact large middle-class tax hikes, and likely couple it with even further entitlement cuts Normally it wouldn't "really" matter with the dollar as the reserve currency, the petrodollar system, etc -- but Trump is f*cking that up in addition to spending $$$$$

Flock told 404 Media in an email it never executed the partnership with Nexar. But the presentation still shows Flock’s ambitious plan to conscript rideshare and delivery drivers to collect license plate data for its network. www.404media.co/flock-pitche...

You and I — all of us taxpayers — funded this $533 million artillery plant outside of Dallas. It hasn’t produced a single usable shell. Yet the defense contractor, General Dynamics, has never been held publicly accountable. Nor has it had to pay a penny back… 1/

The third category of alleged "excesses" are simply real issues the right disagrees with. However you feel about the slogan "defund the police," shifting police resources to social spending isn't particularly radical — and the need for police reform is still urgent. Also, it didn't happen!

New: We found 50 cops who misused Flock cameras and other license-plate readers for personal purposes, often to spy on their girlfriends or ex-wives. He "watched every single move I made. ... Who do you turn the chief of police in to?" wapo.st/3S6rTuo

🚨 We analyzed the Supreme Court’s decisions over the past 20 years and found that for the first time, the court issued more consequential rulings on its “shadow docket” (unsigned orders often decided without arguments) than the traditional merits docket. www.propublica.org/article/supr...

This also means that the GOP has still not flipped any legislative seat anywhere in the country since the fall of 2024. Dems have flipped roughly 30 in that period.

😶 Democratic Absences Mean Trump Lawyer Is Now a Judge for Life. Reminder that the Dems could have changed the outcome of Trump's disastrous budget bill with the # who died in office. newrepublic.com/post/211954/... via @newrepublic.com

Here's your weekend update, NY-03! Early voting has begun, which means it is time to replace The Fellowship Foundation's Tom Suozzi with a real Democrat (me)! Early voting: 6/13-21 Election day: 6/23 Learn more: votewelch.com

Well my guillotine company goes public next week

Lawmakers must reject VPN bans to ensure that U.S. journalists can rely on this important privacy tool, and that all Americans remain free to access information online. Now is not the time to outlaw resources that can keep our freedoms secure.

The exploit shows the extreme risk of offloading technical support to AI.

Thread. Expanded police surveillance, backed by federal funds, again moving forward, with all Asheville city council members but Roney supportive. Council set to vote on it in May. Comes after APD, surveillance corporations got nearly an hour for presentations. No public comment allowed. #avlgov

One of the question I had after reading this article was, "how much DID this lady look like the photo that the AI thought she was her?" This article doesn't provide the photo, but the WEBP coverage did. www.the-independent.com/news/world/a...

Today is the last day of voting on Virginia's temporary redistricting referendum. Starting in March, a group that received donations from Peter Thiel mailed ads targeting Black voters that falsely compared the proposal to the Jim Crow era.

Well, at least the BBC is covering this.

The California Bar Court’s opinion is 128 pages long discipline.calbar.ca.gov/portal/Docum...

The shopping list included luxury items like $6.9 million for lobster tail, $15.1 million in ribeye steak, and $2 million for Alaskan king crab, as well as musical instruments ($21,750 for a custom handmade Japanese flute), ice cream machines ($124,000), and sushi prep tables ($26,000).

The Supreme Court did not strike down conversion therapy bans today. Not nationwide. Not in Colorado. Not anywhere. Here's what actually happened in Chiles v. Salazar—and why the coverage you're seeing serves the conservative legal movement more than it serves you.

BREAKING: Israel's Knesset has passed a law to execute Palestinian detainees. Death by hanging. Mandatory sentencing. No pardon. 90 days to carry out. It applies through military courts with a 96% conviction rate. It does not apply to Israelis.

Wanna know if your school uses Flock? Through records requests and audit logs, FOIAball found over 75 universities that have surveillance cameras installed on campus. There's almost certainly many, many more. www.foiaball.com/p/flock-came...

OPINION: "When the Japanese Americans arrived at temporary detention facilities, euphemistically called 'assembly centers,' hastily constructed on fairgrounds, racetracks and other government property, they were shocked to be body-searched, fingerprinted and interrogated," Susan H. Kamei writes.