I’ve volunteered at food pantries and you sometimes get people upset to see someone in a nice car using a food pantry and I need to completely assure you that the person with the nice car actually is in need of that food because people who aren’t in need do not pretend to need food

A really funny complaint about the Zohran discount grocery store idea is that non-poor people could use it when there’s a grocery store half a mile from my grocery store that has everything cost 20% more that rich people go to because they don’t want to shop with normal people.

my takeaway from AES winning is that he needs to drop anything people liked about him, campaign exactly as if haley stevens won and hate himself and his voters as much as her supporters do - The Politics Whiz

exasperated sigh

The OIG report “highlights the obvious: Corporations — not small immigrant-oriented healthcare providers, or undocumented immigrants illegally taking benefits — are responsible for the vast majority of alleged fraud in the American health care system.”

Congresswoman Delia C. Ramirez@ramirez.house.gov · 3h ago

Big corporations and their lackeys in the Trump administration scapegoat immigrants to divert attention from their theft and abuse. While they lie to us about the problem they are the ones stealing from working people. Plain and simple, they want us divided and distracted while they rob us.

a work of art

Paige, TheMaverickGirl@themaverickgirl.bsky.social · 5h ago

What the fuck is this

Data centre boom is feeding conspiracy theories www.nationalobserver.com/2026/08/05/n... via @nationalobserver.com Me: "So many conspiracy theories are tied to a particular political identity. But concern and anger about data centres and A.I. cuts across party lines – albeit for different reasons."

Canada's data centre boom is feeding conspiracy theories

The claims, which have proliferated on social media, are the latest iteration of a widespread right-wing conspiracy positing that a cabal of global elites are trying to control people through various ...

nationalobserver.com

El-Sayed: "We've been talking about an illegal apartheid regime for a very very long time, and that supersedes Netanyahu itself. So I just think we need to treat Israel the way we would treat any other country that behaved the way Israel is behaving."

As the sun peeks over the horizon, a small parcel of books from the interlibrary loan program appears on the roof of the wizard's tower.

as a movement we seem determined to never learn anything from the previous wars, whether we won or lost. its like there's never any institutional memory or anything. just careening from crisis to crisis.

the current left/liberal position on ai feels a lot like the liberal position on talk radio in the mid-80s to early 90s: ignore it, it will go away, nobody pays attention to that. fast forward to 1994 and newt fucking gingrich is speaker of the house.

Parker Molloy@parkermolloy.com · 1h ago

And I worry that there are a lot of people on the left who don't care about this problem because they hate AI. But the truth is that as this technology continues to get jammed into everything from customer service to banking to fast food orders, having built-in fair right bias is bad.

why isn’t the future the way we thought it would be

The lovefest that was that period of time (yes, even with flame wars and JavaScript prompt bombing and all the rest of it) had people making comparisons to the Summer of Love when all we were doing was sharing niche interests and coming out to each other and being weird in ways we couldn't be IRL.

You cannot begin to imagine how fucking exciting the internet was in the mid-to-late-90s. No one's boss was making them get online (this did happen later), and it wasn't about churning out shit no one wanted for a joke someone would forget 10 seconds from now or making money on "content."

Saw someone say that proudly not using AI is like people who were proudly not using the internet 30 years ago and a) the internet was not in widespread use 30 years ago, I remember, I was on it and I had to explain to everyone IRL WTF it was and b) the difference is people WANTED TO USE IT

The comparisons of AI to the early internet are absolutely deranged-- nothing about the environment or the experience or the stated goals is at all comparable. The internet was going to bring us closer; AI is nakedly extractive, the most parasitic and cancerous capitalism.

DNC Establishment Alarmed Over Growing Trend of Radical Muslims Hellbent on Providing Affordable Housing and Healthcare thehardtimes.net/blog/dnc-est...

DNC Establishment Alarmed Over Growing Trend of Radical Muslims Hellbent on Providing Affordable Housing and Healthcare

DETROIT — Progressive Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s defeat of centrist Nikki Haley raised alarm bells for establishment Democrats, according to weeping DNC... Read more nonsense

thehardtimes.net

Banger

We must keep fighting to reunify these kids with their families and make sure they have attorneys & child advocates in their corner who can look out for their best interests. The forces of cruelty will not have the last word. (5/5)

We need to make sure these kids get real representation. Not by some shady fly-by-night firm in Texas like the Trump administration is proposing. (4/5)

26-employee Texas law firm gets $150M to represent 24,000 children in immigration court

None of the Burke Law Group’s lawyers list immigration law as an area of expertise, per the firm’s website.

politico.com

I saw it play out in some of the hearings I witnessed today at 201 Varick Street. How on earth can we keep children in detention, deny them reunification, and not even provide them lawyers? (3/5)

What's even more egregious is that many of these kids have family members here they could be quickly reunified with. But this administration is throwing up as many roadblocks as possible to prevent that from happening. (2/5)

Immigrant Kids Deserve to Keep Their Lawyers

The Trump administration has jettisoned the way thousands of immigrant children receive legal help. On Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services ended the contract with the Acacia Center for...

bloomberg.com

The Trump administration has now canceled the contract that provided legal services for unaccompanied immigrant kids. That means thousands of children across the country, including hundreds being held in detention, are losing access to government-provided legal representation. (1/5)

Dying at the right-wing activists that (1) held a call with Todd Blanche in which Blanche made a lot of anti-abortion promises, (2) said "uh this is off the record" like doing so would magically ward off journalists, and then (3) UPLOADED IT TO THEIR YOUTUBE CHANNEL www.politico.com/news/2026/08...

Or supposed you get banned from using an LLM b/c you create works the company owners disagree with? Or they change the LLM so it no longer does that you want it to do. As I wrote last year, If you become dependent upon a tool, that tool can be taken away. 5/

But if you go down the LLM road, you are bound to that path. If the tech bros who own that LLM begin charging thousands of $ a month to use their program, you're facing a major gatekeeper. And yes, once our current AI bubble breaks the subsidized cost of using LLMs is going to skyrocket. 4/

Right now anyone can learn to write or create art. The price of admission is incredibly, super-duper low. Don't have a computer? You can write or draw on paper. Yes, it takes time to learn how to tell good stories or create compelling art, but there is no gatekeeper. 3/

I say this b/c tech bros are literally attempting to place a gatekeeper program into the creation process for writing and art. Once people normalize that writing and art can't be created without an LLM, what happens when people can't afford to use that LLM? Gee, you then have a true gatekeeper! 2/

Regarding the Horror Writers Association (HWA) newsletter promoting AI usage, why why why do people keep using the term "gatekeepers" to describe those opposed to the use of LLMs in writing and art? The true gatekeepers are the billionaire tech bros whose companies push to normalize AI usage. 1/

Rick Moranis: Are You The Gatekeeper?

Alt: Rick Moranis: Are You The Gatekeeper?

static.klipy.com

BREAKING: The New Mexico Department of Justice has sued Acting AG Todd Blanche and the DOJ, requesting the court for access to unredacted Epstein-related investigative files that the DOJ has been withholding.