Sports gambling is a cancer on sports & a cancer on fans. Millions of victims and their families know this. Ask yourself who actually benefits from its existence? cc: @davebidini.bsky.social

Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social · 2d ago

“I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.” -- Nicole Noren, 24-year ESPN veteran and winner of Emmy, Murrow, and Peabody awards. Her grandfather, father and one of my brothers "were pretty much destroyed by sports gambling addiction." www.cjr.org/the-intervie...

Disappointed to remember that a Scaramucci is 11 days, so it can never be evenly divisible by a Zacharia.

She looks like Kash Patel’s sleep paralysis demon

The USA Singers@theusasingers.bsky.social · 3d ago

Say hello to Barbera Thornhill, Trump’s latest State Department appointee.

22 California billionaires have spent a combined $150 million so far to defeat Prop 40. By spending their fortunes trying to stop California from taxing billionaires, they're making the argument for a billionaire wealth tax more clearly and articulately than anyone else possibly could.

Exactly right. Batteries don’t just smooth out delivery, they provide the path to grid resilience and reduce the need for massive investments on an aging grid. Also, a lot of us have a 50-80kWh battery parked in the driveway most of the time.

Jenny Chase@solarchase.bsky.social · 6d ago

7. Batteries are going to grow like crazy for the next five years or so and BNEF’s forecasting team are being cowards about it. Batteries are still expensive compared with no batteries, but they are easy and quick to build, and can sometimes replace hard-to-organise investments like transmission.

You might think there’s not much you can do to stop billionaires. But you can delete your Twitter account, and push to make remaining on the platform (for businesses and politicians in particular) socially and morally unacceptable. Posting = supporting Musk, straight up.

Toon Dreessen@toondreessen.bsky.social · 6d ago

Any Canadian, including any politician who believes in Canada as a country, should leave X. There is no benefit to staying on a platform like this @mark-carney.bsky.social www.theglobeandmail.com/world/articl...

New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854

"We don't want to turn into a banana republic, so we won't try to rein in corporations" is the kind of thing you say if you don't know what makes a banana republic a banana republic, and instead want to be a banana republic where the bananas are data centers.

David Dayen@ddayen.bsky.social · 2w ago

Democrats working hard on precisely how much they should pull their punches against the corporate oligarchy after the election. www.politico.com/news/2026/10...

Let’s hope we hear a lot more about Attribution Science in the next few years. Massive companies have externalized the cost of their harms to people in the planet for nearly a century through lobbying and propaganda. Their time is up. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/o...

That’s @anandwrites.bsky.social right there.

David Roberts@volts.wtf · 2w ago

Holy shit.

Was lucky enough to see @naomiaklein.bsky.social and @astra.bsky.social discuss their new book last night in Toronto, hosted by the perfect moderator in Omar El Akkad. Despite the title, this sounds like a positive book (bought it at the event) 🧵

A Haitian man legally immigrated to Ohio, then was given an ankle monitor bc Trump withdrew his status. He threw himself in front of truck. The trucker, who voted for Trump, is haunted. “Pierre was doing what he was supposed to do. We did not do right by him.” www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

A Reckoning in Springfield

A truck driver out on his route confronts what the country has become.

theatlantic.com

I think it is crucial for the health of the Democratic party that the entire consultant class from previous administrations, including and especially Clinton, be told to go home and stop bothering people. They are wrong about everything and have been holding the party back for decades.

Seems like some version of this runs every day

As you skim the announcement of the $30B expansion of LNG in BC today, consider this thread: “What we need is a massive clampdown on the influence of money over politics, including lobbying transparency, campaign finance reform, an end to the revolving door between politics and lobbying.”

George Monbiot@georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 3w ago

Here is how politics, in most cases, works: Rich and powerful interests, whether in fossil fuels, finance, big tech, media, meat, pharma or foreign governments, make a demand, and use their sophisticated tools to persuade a government to adopt it. The government adopts it. Please read whole🧵

👀

Taras Grescoe 🚇@taras-grescoe.com · 3w ago

#Calgary is one of the Twilight Zones of passenger rail in Canada. The last Via Rail train called here in 1990. But last week I was shown a functioning rail platform (complete with locomotive) next to the city’s most iconic hotel. Read more… 🧵

Music brings me so much joy. Last night saw these goofballs at Massey Hall and today a friend sent a link to a new double-length album from The Drin: open.spotify.com/album/7hX3zk...

Standard regulatory capture playbook: Step one: Major fear mongering campaign. AI must be regulated! Step two: Who besides us massively overleveraged AI companies could possibly write the regulations??? Step three: Regulations shut out new entrants and open-source competitors.

NPR@npr.org · 3w ago

Critics say a slowdown of AI development among the largest companies could consolidate the power of frontier labs, just as many others are trying to catch up. n.pr/4cYIlUK

The moment the AI company is asking you for your bank account data, that’s what we call a “clue.” That’s the ore they’re mining from you. That will become the basis for surveillance-pricing you on everything you buy in the future. Including those groceries

Finally found a product category Wirecutter doesn’t have any reviews on.

Wow. I hadn’t realised how much LLMs had killed StackOverflow (the site where coders traditionally go to ask questions when they’re stuck): “Just before the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, there were more than 100,000 monthly questions asked on the site; last month, there were fewer than 1,500.”

Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

Our obsession with AI code-writing tools is overwhelming the web’s unsung human caretakers

ft.com

The White House Press Corps should've walked out as soon as the Trump regime banned the Associated Press for calling the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of Mexico." That was Feb 15, 2025. The first month of Trump Term II. Not surprising that abandoning principles for weak acquiescence led to more abuse.

Senior CNBC econ reporter @steveliesman.bsky.social: “Insanity is not a strategy”

Brian Tyler Cohen@briantylercohen.bsky.social · 2y ago

A top economics reporter goes off script on national TV: “I am going to say this at risk of my job, but what President Trump is doing is insane.”

When you use framing / communications tactics to re-frame presentation away from your true intentions, that re-framing starts to creep into your soul and your mind; backwards-infecting your ideology. So: renewable deployment *actually* stops being about climate. Fossil phase-out stops mattering.

There is no “AI exemption”.

Timnit Gebru@timnitgebru.blacksky.app · last mo.

The only person in public service who has consistently made 100% sense on issues of "AI," which is why they hate her so much.

Ossoff: "While the world burns & you pay more for everything, your tax dollars become royal family's wealth. Bc it pays to be a Trump, especially when the whole world knows daddy's a crook. Half a billion from the Emirati spy chief... the Mar-a-Lago mafia really has taken corruption to new heights"

Abdul El-Sayed: "Weijia, with all due respect, this is the third time you've asked about a Twitch streamer ... their whole game is to make us fight culture wars so that we don't pay attention to the fact the president has made $2.2 billion ... "

Exactly. "Sandbox" my arse. It's only the public and media's ignorance about how all things computer actually work that prevents the AI industry's mix of incompetence, Machiavellian profiteering, and techbro fanboy fantasy-think being obvious.

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · last mo.

If you showed up at Defcon and gave talk about how your autonomous malware did something unexpected and damaged someone else's computers, the first question from the audience would be "Why are you so shit at making secure sandboxes?" It wouldn't be "How are you so awesome at making hacking tools?"

As usual, @doctorow.pluralistic.net provides a rational, oddly reassuring counterpoint to the broadly irrational coverage of this “incident”. Also the point that OpenAI quietly feeding the Skynet narrative helps them raise more investment is such a sign of the deeply weird times we are living in.

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · last mo.

Which is not to say that the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack is *nothing*. It's something, all right: but it's a *specific* something, with an explicable, even foreseeable trajectory.