Portion of an FEC contribution receipt:<br>Name of Employer (for Individual): Robinhood Markets Inc.<br><br>Occuptation (for Individual): Senior Director of Financial Crimes
Hey folks - I'm trying to find a video that made the rounds a couple days ago in which an ICE agent tells activists that he's in Minneapolis to arrest people like them so that there won't be enough Democrats to win the next election. Ring any bells?
For #caturday, this finely-whiskered individual is a member of a cat colony living by the Ponte del Risorgimento on the Tiber in Rome.
Under Italian Law 281 (1991), cat colonies are legal entities with specific rights, including the right to live in their chosen location and to be protected from harm or ill-treatment.
I seriously believe that the gray cat is smart enough to wolf down his treat immediately and then pretend that he lost it under the couch, so that we'll give him a second one.
Meanwhile the orange cat is too dumb to realize that supper has been served unless you actually pick him up and put his nose in the bowl.
The brilliance of Apple's industry-leading software developers can be seen in the fact that when I used the “Remove Duplicates” function to clean up my contacts, it didn't simply make a random selection of valid, non-duplicated contacts to delete. Instead, it homed in with unerring precision on some of the most essential.
A restaurant in Southern Italy that I went to once 30 years ago? We'll keep that one. My sister and my partner’s sister? Gone, gone, gone.
I’ve been recording my impressions of visiting EUR, the fascist-inspired business district in the south of Rome, and found myself writing that “the key note of fascist design is outsized but blandly-oppressive kitsch”.
I believe this is a valid summary, and will stand by it.
Attached is Exhibit A, the Palace of Italian Civilization from EUR. Not visible are the gigantic concrete statues that surround it.
A cube-shaped building whose façade is pierced by numerous arches, seen from the foot of a flight of steps that lead up to it. The sky behind it is blue, with white clouds.
One of my favorite categories of scientific discoveries might be loosely classed as "Astronomical objects doing weird shit”, and this one is an absolute doozy.
Briefly summed up, this is a star that had such a good time going supernova that it KEPT DOING IT.
Or at least that's one possible theory. The observations are so weird that they’ve led to a good half-dozen competing hypotheses, not one of which quite fits all the data. Epic.
Cloudflare seems to be having some kind of oopsie (it's probably DNS. It's always DNS) right now.
When you click on the link on their error page, it takes you to a page that says “Do you have a website? Anybody that runs a website should be on the Cloudflare network.”
Uh, read the room, #cloudflare. When people are trying to find out why your product has shit the bed, that's not really the time to make with the marketing copy about how they really really should be using it.
AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. Nowhere is that more true than in customer service:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
@leberschnitzel
@pluralistic “Good news, sir! Since we introduced the new customer support system, reports of broken bikes are down 100%! We now have the lowest reported rates of broken bikes in the entire bikeshare industry!”
"Great work, team! And remember — the first rule of business statistics is ‘if you don't measure it, it doesn't exist!’ So get rid of those inconvenient problems by simply ignoring them, and focus your energies on executive bonuses and shareholder buybacks!”
@Daojoan
@pluralistic I wonder if this is an instance of something I call “amnesiac by design”.
Take Facebook (for those unwise enough to use it). If you want to go back to something you once saw on FB, good luck ever finding it again. FB is designed to feed you new content at random to keep you “engaged”; the web model of stability, bookmarkability etc. is antithetical to Facebook's mission.
More and more media seems to aim for profitable ephemerality, rather than knowledge storage.
Shake Shack has changed the terms of service for its app, adding a "binding arbitration" clause that bans you from suing the company or joining a class action suit against it:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
A black and white photo of man's hand holding a gavel over a wooden table. The photo has been tinted green and the Shake Shack logo has been inserted behind the scene. Beneath the gavel is a Shake Shack hamburger whose meat has been tinted green.
@rndeon
@pluralistic I’m holding out for the adorable plush poop emoji. (Such a thing almost certainly exists already, but Cory can always customize it to make it distinctively his own).
“Hi! Your OS here! See that red badge demanding your attention?”
"What is it?”
"It's sports news! Isn't that great?”
"I don't give a shit about sports. How do I turn it off?”
"If you're not interested in sports, you can customize the alerts to show something you ARE interested in.”
"I'm interested in an OS that does what I tell it. One that works for me. That doesn't track me or try to ‘maximize engagement’ or sell me crap or nag me about using AI or whatever. Got anything for that?”
As Trump rails against free trade, demands public ownership stakes in corporations that receive government funds, and (selectively) enforces antitrust law, some (stupid) people are wondering, "Is Trump a communist?"
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
@pluralistic He DOES have the military doing public service tasks (e.g. the National Guard picking up trash), so we have to ask. Is he instituting a stealth Public Works Administration?
But it’s probably just a “stopped clock” phenomenon: his political ignorance means that he doesn’t have any clear idea what is and isn’t socialism, so he doesn’t instinctively reject anything with even a hint of socialism about it, as a slightly more aware conservative politician would.
@pluralistic The scrapheap of history is so 20th century.
I propose:
*The Diaper Genie of History.
*The Liquid Hog Waste Lagoon of History.
*The Unwatched Informercial for Discount Catheters Running at 3:30 am on MeToons of History.
Sundog, a memecoin by crypto billionaire Justin Sun, just posted a meme depicting its mascot controlling the White House. Sun has spent (or will shortly spend) a total of $213 million on Trump-connected crypto projects.
[AI-generated image of a corgi dog with a collar depicting the Tron logo, paws raised above the White House, with strings attached to the paws like a marionette]
@molly0xfff
@cryptadamist Say, whatever happened to the last techbro who boasted about how he was running the administration? Elton Somebody? How did that work out for him?
I'm not saying you CAN'T buy the policies you want with a large enough donation, I’m just saying it's wiser not to make too much noise about it. That Trump guy is weirdly touchy about any suggestion that he isn't in charge.
It is #caturday, and this is Frankie, who we are looking after for a few days while his regular fosterer is out of town.
Frankie is a delight: affectionate, playful, well-behaved, easy-going, and absolutely beautiful, with elegant gray tabby markings. I do not understand why this cat has not been adopted yet.
His one defect is that he pretends to be more erudite than he is. That’s not his library behind him, it’s mine. As far as I know, he doesn't even know how to read.
This video from
@_elena captures what makes the #fediverse so exciting. You watch it & think “How could anyone NOT think this was a good idea?”
Will it move the needle against all the FUD? (“it’s too complicated", “mastodon’s full of woke scolds”, “how will I know which server to choose?”, "what are all these apps anyway?”)
I don't know. But it's worth sharing with people who aren't already in the Fediverse, just in case it makes them go “Huh. That sounds neat.”
I just learned today that our galaxy is apparently located inside a vast region of unusually low matter density called the KBC Supervoid (more prosaically, the Local Hole).
Which I guess means that wherever you scream, you are in fact screaming into the Void.
Also, KBC Supervoid would make a really good band name. Just saying.
@arstechnica If that image is anything to go by, it's going to be gorgeously unusable. By turning everything milkily translucent, they're throwing away all the distinguishing information that comes from icon colors, and lowering contrast levels to the point where many users are simply not going to be able to cope.
Why “Liquid Glass", and not “Jellyfish”, or “Ectoplasm”?
A view of a large suspension bridge and a park beside a large river. Behind the bridge can be seen half of a double rainbow, the outer arc much fainter than the inner one.
Tweet by Sam Bowman
@sleepinyourhat
If it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, for example, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command-line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of the relevant systems, or all of the above.
Adam Levitin on the GENIUS Act: “[I]n regard to cash deposits, the stablecoin investors will have priority over the claims of ma-and-pa for their bank deposits (and thus over the FDIC's subrogation claim when it pays ma-and-pa). Yes, you read that correctly: Congress is about to put the claims of stablecoin investors ahead of ma and pa's bank deposits. That's just stunning. Now ma-and-pa's deposits are FDIC insured, so they'll be alright, but it means the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund is footing the bill. In other words, the GENIUS Act is subsidizing stablecoin issuance on the back of bank deposits. By subordinating the FDIC's subrogation claim in a bank insolvency to the claims of stablecoin investors, the GENIUS Act is effectively letting FDIC insurance leak out to cover uninsured stablecoins, without any insurance premiums paid.”
A tweet from Joe Wilson criticizing Vladimir Putin, calling him "Woke Putin" and listing social issues in Russia, with a response from Dr. Silas expressing shock: "WOKE PUTIN?!?!?!?"
It's noteworthy that all the most reported & reposted stories about ICE overreach involve young white women from Western nations.
What's happening to them is unacceptable, but they are the media-friendly tip of a much larger & uglier iceberg of rights violations. For every "deserving victim” there are hundreds or thousands of less mediagenic people whose basic rights are trampled in the same way, or worse. (And have been for years).
Coinbase Chief Legal Officer: the critics who think we’ve bought out the government are refusing to engage with the nuanced and complicated fact that Trump used to be anti-crypto before we started spending hundreds of millions of dollars on politics
“I find those comments misinformed at best, if I’m being generous, and defamatory at worst,” Paul Grewal, chief legal officer at Coinbase, told The Hill of the backlash.
Some criticism, Grewal argued, fails to consider Trump was once a critic of crypto and at one point called it a “scam.”
Grewal pointed out how Congress moved major legislation in 2023 on market structure, an issue that was met with bipartisan support. The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act in 2023 received support from 71 Democrats in the House.
“The fact of the matter is that President Trump did evolve and transform in his view on crypto, really starting in December 2023,” Grewal said. “In January 2024, we first started to engage with him and his team, but it was against a much more nuanced, complicated and complete history that I think a lot of the critics just don’t want to engage in.”
@molly0xfff Coinbase spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support Trump may CORRELATE with a dramatic change in his attitude, but can we say with confidence that it CAUSED it? Confusing correlation with causation is a well-known error, and in my Ted talk I will …
@molly0xfff It's ironic that I can still buy a music MP3 entirely unencumbered by DRM (from a few places at least), but apparently DRM is indispensable for ebooks. Yet piracy rates are probably comparable.
Of course, the industry response in the case of audio has been to move to subscription streaming models like Spotify, where the consumer rents access to media, the artists get screwed & the platform keeps the profits. I suppose the next logical step is "Spotify for ebooks”.
This is an ad served by Google Ads. It appears superimposed on a (legitimate) web page, with the rest of the page blurred out. I didn't check to see where clicking the Open button would take me, but I doubt it's anywhere good.
Google does allow users to give feedback on this ad, but the only option is "Seen too many times”. There is no option to flag it as the blatant cross-site scripting/probable #phishing attack that it is.
A screenshot of an in-browser advertisement. The advertisement is a white rectangle with text on it. The largest text reads “Login To Your Accounts”, repeated twice, and “Login Online”. There are buttons marked Close and Open (the default). In the top right, the word ‘Ad’ appears in much smaller letters.
