Me buying Baumol’s goods: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Me buying Baumol’s services: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

IP maximalists are the barbarians at the gate.

Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · 7d ago

My secret, Cap, is that I'm *always* angry about old books. For instance, here's a tiny slice of the millions of books 1931-1986 that have no commercial value, that are digitized, but that we're unable to use in large-scale research because they are illegal to share or display.

Stephen Miller said just the other day that all asylum claims are "fake." A couple deported from the U.S. to Guatemala were gagged, bound, and shot dead. Their 14-month old found crying next to their mother's body. People like Miller don't care though because this is the point: ethnic cleansing.

Overland couple shot dead in Guatemala after local ICE stop led to deportations

The couple’s 14-month-old daughter was found crying beside her mother’s body in a sugarcane field last week, according to Guatemalan authorities and media.

stlpr.org

Another 'W' for market liberalism. Once wrote a paper about pre-Revolutionary France when internal trade networks were so dysfunctional that even minor supply shocks led to simultaneous starvation and glut in neighboring areas.

Matt Darling@besttrousers.bsky.social · last wk.

Like I definitely went out and bought extra food in case society collapsed. And the actual problem we had was "everyone is building decks at the same time and bidding up lumber prices".

Lemme tell you about the angel of history being blown backwards into the future: The shackles these people have been put in are Hiatt brand, same company founded in 1780 to mass produce shackles for slaver ships.

Joel S.@joelhs.bsky.social · 2w ago

The use of extremely online memetic aesthetics to support far-right political goals is like something out of Walter Benjamin’s nightmares.

For any other president, this would be an all-consuming scandal, leading to impeachment. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/b...

Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him

Federal officials said in court documents that they halted billions of dollars in funding for energy projects to states “based solely” on whether they backed President Trump in the 2024 election.

nytimes.com

You think it would help the litigation strategy of anti-AI activists to pick test cases featuring some actually sympathetic folks who aren't the most gullible people you've ever heard of.

And it could be containerized, streamlining the process and costs. You put your standardized laundry container out on your front step a few times a week, a delivery robot grabs it and hauls it down to the local laundromat, where laundry robots clean, fold, and then redeliver the clothes.

Aaron Webb@aaronwebbdc.bsky.social · 2w ago

Good example of how automation/robotics will create new locking structures: In this example, consider how those goofy little delivery robots could fit in: Dropping a set of dirty clothes in and getting them returned to your door. Much more practical than a general household multifunctional robot!

In the near to medium term, the economics of roboticization will not drive us towards a future with a plethora of generic robot servants helping around the house; instead, it will push more domestic labor out of the home into specialized retail sites.

And Feehan is an Irish name, a nod to the 19th immigrant mass migration that most closely resembles Hispanic migration in the 21st. To be fair, blood and soilers like JD Vance don't really think they're fully American either.

Dr. Mar@boldnewme.bsky.social · 2w ago

19-year-old Pvt. Isabella Gonzales died defending this country. Think about that while politicians demonize immigrants and terrorize Latino communities. Americans with names like Gonzales have always fought, bled, and died for this nation. RIP to her and Lt. Tyler Feehan. 🇺🇸

funny how the cutting edge of the far right is just regurgitated slaveholder agitprop from 1850.

Right Wing Watch @rightwingwatch.bsky.social · 4w ago

Preaching that God has assigned black people to "a civilizational station of subordination and dependence" due to the Curse of Ham, Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge calls for a "return to European Christian colonization of African nations." www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwat...

Trump tried to revoke the birthright citizenship of Folarin Balogun one week and then pressured FIFA to defer his red card the next. In MAGAmerica there are no immutable rights, only privileges, revoked or extended at the will of the Sovereign (exchanged for crypto, jewels, aircraft, or contracts).

To put an even finer point on it, the MAGA Right's project is indistinguishable from the goals of the second Ku Klux Klan.

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff.bsky.social · last mo.

One thing you can see with the reaction to birthright citizenship decision is that Great Replacement Theory is now pretty much the center of the American Right's whole project.

me talking to magically resurrected founding father: and so sir you can see how the supreme court has become a deeply illegitimate institution that threatens the very republic you created founding father: there are *how many* papists on it???

My most basic problem with The Crown tv show is that the most interesting part of any episode is everything *other* than the royal family. For example: Aberfan, where the short depiction of the disaster is the most interesting part, yet it's merely the set-up for the royal visit.

These lawsuits are a sharp pivot away from the last Hail Mary effort to save legacy media by extracting subsidies from Big Tech. I'm almost nostalgic for fall 2022 when the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act had its last, best shot just as ChatGPT upended the world. It's ancient history now.

Steve Herman@newsguy.bsky.social · last mo.

Owners and operators of ~400 newspapers are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for scraping their content to build products like ChatGPT and Copilot without permission or compensation. news.bloomberglaw.com/litigat...

Vance is both correct and wicked. Trump does get away with Watergate-or-worse caliber scandals on a routine basis. But Vance delights in what he should lament.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last mo.

JD Vance: "I think Nixon's historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so. I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12 hours news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy."

Everyone has their favorite black swan existential crisis. Mine is the collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) current, which would in a generation or two give northern Europe the climate of Labrador, dropping average temps by 18-54 degrees F.

What's strange to me about the self-driving rollout is just how patchwork the future is. If you've ever taken a Waymo, you instantly understand that the near future is autonomous. But if you don't live / visit one of those cities where it operates, then avs come across as scary, barely imaginable.

Great piece with useful visualizations from @nytimes.com on the risk posed to pedestrians by our swollen vehicles. But it was a major oversight not to mention the role played by Obama's CAFE standard revisions in incentivizing bigger vehicles.

The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s (Gift Article)

The vehicles on American roads have grown larger — and they are killing thousands more pedestrians, a Times investigation found.

nytimes.com

Car manufacturers shouldn't be liable for their automated systems by default. But given Elon Musk's hyperbole about Full Self Driving, vision-only policy, and haphazard rollouts (timed to meet executive pay deadlines), Tesla should face serious liability under contributory negligence standards.

You can check the extent to which your creative output influences LLMs relative to others. I scored relatively high for someone who's not well-known, which I suspect is b/c I have published in crawlable outlets: journals, editorials, newsletters, podcasts, etc.

Doomers at Anthropic have peddled b.s. about LLM capabilities for years and finally caught the car.

Molly Jong-Fast@mollyjongfast.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Talked to @edzitron.com youtu.be/PwEXVKL4gd0?...

Trump spoke at the Libertarian convention in 2024 in front a big banner with this exact same slogan.

Mike Masnick@masnick.com · 2mo ago

Um. You would think that with an administration this soaked in meme culture that they would... know what "become ungovernable" means and how it's used? But, of course, now that they're arresting people for posting that to FB, I imagine we'll be seeing a lot more of the phrase...

There's something distinctly medieval about the US aggression against Iran. It's aimless wandering the countryside (or in this case, the skies) and hitting things without any clear objective. It's more like a prolonged raiding campaign. A chevauchée.

America spent a quarter millennium fearing the fate of Rome and still wound up with a populist demagogue demolishing republican symbols while building triumphal arches and a personal gilded palace and an arena to host spectacular blood sports in honor of his birthday.

FactPost@factpostnews.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Trump tests the lights on his 92-foot-tall UFC stage on the White House lawn

exactly the right response

James Talarico@jamestalarico.bsky.social · 2mo ago

There’s been a lot of talk in this race about what makes a "real man." A man does what’s right when no one is watching. He upholds his commitments to his family and neighbors. He doesn’t lie, cheat, & steal his way through life. Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.

I appreciate Gary's cautions on AGI hyperbole, but his idea of FDA-style regulation of the AI industry is very bad. The FDA kills thousands of people every year through its extreme risk aversion which delays lifesaving innovation. This is a pathway to stagnation at the technological frontier.

Breaking: When dreams for AI sanity come true

A true life moment for your correspondent

garymarcus.substack.com

Saline, bandaids, and gauze, your classic weapons of war.

Marisa Kabas@marisakabas.bsky.social · 2mo ago

i’ve informed the police.