Trying to track down an old (mid 2010s?) news story:
These people kept getting accused of having stolen iphones at their house; eventually a news outlet figured out that the "find" function had a bug that put all undefined locations at their coordinates.
Ringing bells for anyone?
*By all means, tread on those people*
Another great high concept. The wordiness of Wilhoit's Law makes this intrinsically funny. There's a public domain vector-art Gadsen flag on Wikimedia Commons. I found a Reddit forum where font nerds had sleuthed out the typeface for the words on the original.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me
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The editorial collective of Money on the Left offers a way to get money into the peoples' hands, *right now*, to allow us the material security we need if we are to organize to overthrow fascism and rekindle American Democracy. Their solution is "Blue Bonds," billed as "A Fiscal Strategy for Overcoming Trump 2.0":
https://moneyontheleft.org/2025/05/09/blue-bonds-a-fiscal-strategy-for-overcoming-trump-2-0/
What's a Blue Bond? It's a municipal or state bond, issued to replace the funds that Trump has illegally impounded.
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(Unfortunately, if you're already a Bluesky user, it's too late, because its ToS says you're still bound to mandatory arbitration even if you delete your account).
Legacy social media is in trouble. Facebook and Twitter are thrashing around, using AI finance-theater in a bid to convince investors not to panic-sell their stock because they no longer have any growth left.
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These new ToS are an absolute dog's breakfast. I wouldn't click through them.
And luckily, I don't have to! Because, to Bluesky's eternal credit, they have shipped the technical components needed to create a Bluesky server that is a full, first-class participant in the Bluesky service, *without* its users having to sign up to these Terms of Service.
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LLMs are like slot machines, in that an incorrect answer (the slot machine eating your dollar) is unremarkable, while the LLM solving a problem (a jackpot) is amazing, and the latter stands out in your memory, causing you to overestimate the reliability of LLMs.
https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html
Delta airlines has announced a new surveillance pricing plan: they're going to feed an AI the nonconsensually harvested personal data that data-brokers and credit bureaux hold on you to predict the maximum you're willing to pay, and then price their tickets accordingly:
--
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:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/#medallion-clubbed
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Which shouldn't surprise us. After all, divination tools, from the I Ching to tarot to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies deck have been with us for thousands of years: even random responses can make us better thinkers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
I make daily, extensive use of my own weird form of random divination:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/
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In reading a fascinating and important discussion of the lack of a termination clause in the new Mastodon.social Terms of Service, I was GOBSMACKED to discover that the new ToS including a "binding arbitration waiver," which takes away your right to sue, no matter how badly the service abuses you.
These are profoundly unethical, terrible clauses. They should never, ever appear in "adhesion contracts" (that is, contracts that you merely click through, rather than negotiating.)
If there's anything that illustrated the hollowness of the Democratic Party as an effective opposition for me, it's this.
Yesterday, I watched a video of a sitting US Senator being thrown to the ground and cuffed by fed goons for asking questions of the fed official he has direct oversight authority over.
Within minutes, I'd gotten DOZENS of texts from Dems and Dem orgs asking for $5-$50 to "fight fascism."
That's it. "Are you terrified that your country is slipping into fascism? Pay me."
Trump's coalition includes a huge number of people who will suffer terribly from his policies, but who voted for him anyway. Trumpism requires that he find ways to keep those Christmas-voting turkeys happy, or at least distracted.
--
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:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/12/greased-slide/#greased-pole
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All that's left is a kind of *caveat emptor* brainworm that insists that if you got scammed, you should have shopped more carefully. And if you got scammed at gunpoint, you just need to understand that the gun was held by the invisible hand, and it was pointed at you in an economically efficient manner.
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Now, that's an audiology bargain!
And what a paranoid world it is! Nayler's world shows two different versions of Oracle boss (and would-be Tiktok owner) Larry Ellison, who keeps pumping his vision of an AI-driven surveillance state where everyone is continuously observed, recorded and judged by AIs so we are all on our "best behavior":
https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveillance-state-police-ai/
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Hey look at this
* DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/doj-google-must-sell-chrome-android-could-be-next/
* Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak says Tesla ‘is the worst in the world’ at improving its technology for drivers https://fortune.com/2025/03/07/steve-wozniak-says-tesla-is-worst-at-improving-driver-tech/ (h/t Hacker News)
* Muskism and McCarthyism https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/muskism-and-mccarthyism/
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I'm trying to extract this video of a speech I gave last night (I want to extract the audio and put it in my podcast):
https://vimeo.com/event/4945872
Every. Single. Vimeo. Downloader. Fails.
They all give some variety of 404 or 505.
Does anyone have a RELIABLE Vimeo download recipe that works with THIS file?
Thank you!
Let me tell you about the most wasteful US federal government spending I know about. It's a humdinger. You and everyone you know are mired in it for weeks, or perhaps months, every year. It will cost you, personally, thousands of dollars over your lifetime. I'm talking about filing your taxes.
--
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:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/11/doubling-up-on-paperwork/#rip-freefile
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nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqgcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqrgz3s4 nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq7faysylnrk86lqph0mc46j3e0cmypdw2rhlm488fmj536vmzczgsgpwsnz because the article literally answers the question. Here I will paste it in for you so you don't have to go and read with your own eyeballs.
While most of the coverage of Musk's wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs "the Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (I told you she was a great writer!):
https://prospect.org/power/2025-02-06-private-equity-hatchet-man-leading-lost-boys-of-doge/
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Krause is a private equity looter. He's the guy who basically invented the playbook for PE takeovers of large tach companies, from Broadcom to Citrix to VMWare, converting their businesses from selling things to renting them out, loading them up with junk fees, slashing quality, jacking up prices over and over, and firing everyone who was good at their jobs. He is a *master* enshittifier, an enshittification *ninja*.
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Journalists like *Wired*'s Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman are crushing it when it comes to Musk's DOGE coup:
https://www.wired.com/author/vittoria-elliott/
Nathan Tankus is doing incredible work all on his own, just blasting out scoops:
But for me, it was Tkacik - as usual - in the pages of *The American Prospect* who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook.
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While most of the coverage of Musk's wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs "the Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (I told you she was a great writer!):
https://prospect.org/power/2025-02-06-private-equity-hatchet-man-leading-lost-boys-of-doge/
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