It’s wild that Aaron Swartz was aggressively prosecuted for scraping JSTOR articles. Meanwhile huge companies routinely scrape the public internet and sell it for $20/month and all is well. Aaron helped create RSS, Creative Commons, Markdown and a little site called Reddit (which now ironically sells its data to AI companies) - all by the age of 26. All he wanted was free and open access to information. Really makes you wonder the dent he’d have made on the world if he was still alive today.

I know a lot of liberal voters think democracy is on the line but I think it’s important to point out that “you only have one choice because every other choice leads to dictatorship” is also not democracy

The TikTok ban is really about who controls the algorithm and what topics are prioritized. The us wants to be able to pull the levers of topic suppression before people get too many ideas or start to organize. This is a free speech and censorship issue.

This Toyota truck is $10k. I would buy 5 of them if I could for our landscape business. Unfortunately, they aren’t selling them in the US. We need cheaper, simplified vehicles in the US.

The Have Nots vs The Have Yachts: Your reminder that teachers can only deduct up to $300 worth of teaching supplies on their taxes, which are necessary to do their jobs, while CEOs can write off their private jets and yachts, which are not necessary to do theirs.

The more Russian oil refineries Ukraine hits, the lower world crude oil prices go. In brief.. 1. Russian crude pipelines mostly travel toward export facilities. 2. Refineries pull what they need to make their products. 3. The less oil that refineries pull from pipelines, the more gets exported. And last week's export numbers confirm this, showing 10% increase in exports. 4. The more refinery damage ukraine does, the more crude gets exported to world markets, driving down price. Ukraine hitting Russian refineries is the magic bullet that hurts ONLY Russia while subsequently lowering world crude prices.

The contrasts between the two sides couldn’t be more clear

Amelia Gray — FOR LARRY the story of lawnchair larry really gets to me for some reason

The "Ship of Theseus" article has been edited 1792 times since it was created in July of 2003. At present, 0% of the phrases in the original article (seen below) remain.

Even if AI does pose a risk, what’s at risk? Capitalism? Coerced labor participation? American hegemony? Are these even things we want to retain? The things I’m most afraid of with AI is it will retain the bias found in our datasets or that people will immediately trust it.

When Notre Dame burned the entire world mobilized within hours to deliver monetary and moral support to France in reconstructing the cathedral. But ancient Muslim sites like this are bombed and destroyed routinely with the international community’s express approval.

Read about the Ben Gurion canal, it will give you a different perspective on the israel Gaza war and the west’s position.

The IRS is building a free digital tax filing system so you won't have to pay for TurboTax etc. The GOP's offsets for the Israel war funds strips funding for it.

I can’t even imagine being trapped in this hellscape like Gazans. This is not justice this is genocidal revenge. How many more innocents will die?! #FreePalaestine

That’s $276 a year for each user, by the way. The thing that blew up negotiations last week? SAG-AFTRA asked for 57 cents of that. #SagAftraStrong

Killing people is bad. War crimes are war crimes. It shouldn’t be controversial. Free speech and neoliberal corpo capitalism are incompatible.

"Israeli leadership must realise that there is no military solution to its security concerns." — King Abdullah of Jordan in Cairo One minute into his speech at the Cairo Summit, King Abdullah switched from Arabic "for our friends in Europe and around the world, my message is for them." Full video of his remarks and transcript below: Peace, God’s mercy and blessings be upon you. This is how Muslims and Arabs greet others: with a wish for the other to be blessed with peace and the mercy of God. Our religion came with a message of peace. The Pact of Omar, issued at the gates of Jerusalem almost 15 centuries ago, more than a thousand years before the Geneva Conventions, ordered Muslim soldiers not to kill a child, a woman or an old person, not to destroy a tree, not to harm a priest, not to destroy a church. Those are the rules of engagement that Muslims must accept and abide by, as should all those who believe in our common humanity. All civilian lives matter! I am outraged and grieved by those acts of violence waged against innocent civilians in Gaza, in the West Bank, and Israel. The relentless bombing campaign underway in Gaza as we speak is cruel and unconscionable—on every level. It is collective punishment of a besieged and helpless people. It is a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. It is a war crime. Yet, the deeper the crisis cuts of cruelty, the less the world seems to care. Anywhere else, attacking civilian infrastructure and deliberately starving an entire population of food, water, electricity, and basic necessities would be condemned. Accountability would be enforced, immediately, unequivocally. And it has been done before—recently, in another conflict. But not in Gaza. It’s been two weeks since Israel put in place the complete siege of the Gaza Strip. And still, for the most part, global silence. Yet the message the Arab world is hearing is loud and clear: Palestinian lives matter less than Israeli ones. Our lives matter less than other lives. The application of international law is optional. And human rights have boundaries—they stop at borders, they stop at races, and they stop at religions. That is a very, very dangerous message, as the consequences of continued international apathy and inaction will be catastrophic—on us all. We cannot let raw emotions dictate the moment; our priorities today are clear and urgent: First: An immediate end to the war on Gaza, the protection of civilians, and the adoption of a unified position that indiscriminately condemns the targeting of all civilians, in line with our shared values and international law, which loses all value if it is implemented selectively. Second: The sustained and uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian aid, fuel, food, and medicines to the Gaza Strip. Third: The unequivocal rejection of the forced displacement or internal displacement of the Palestinians. This is a war crime according to international law, and a red line for all of us. This conflict, my friends, did not start two weeks ago, and it will not stop if we continue down this blood-soaked path. We know all too well that it will only lead to more of the same—a zero-sum game of death and destruction, of hatred and hopelessness played on repeat. Today, Israel is literally starving civilians in Gaza, but for decades, Palestinians have been starved of hope, of freedom, and a future. Because when the bombs stop falling, Israel is never held accountable, the injustices of occupation continue and the world walks away, until the next round of violence. The bloodshed we are witnessing today is the price of that, of failing to make tangible progress towards a political horizon that brings peace for Palestinians and Israelis alike. Israeli leadership must realise that there is no military solution to its security concerns, that it cannot continue to sideline the five million Palestinians living under its occupation, denied of their legitimate rights, and that Palestinians lives are no less valuable than Israeli lives. The Israeli leadership must realise, once and for all, that a state can never thrive if it is built on the foundations of injustice. Over the past 15 years, we have seen how the dreams of a two-state solution and the hopes of an entire generation have turned into despair. This has been the policy of hardline Israeli leadership—to focus solely on security over peace and create new illegal realities on the ground that render an autonomous Palestinian state unviable. In the process, it has empowered extremists on both sides. But we must not—we cannot—write off this conflict as too far gone, for the sake of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. Our collective and unified message to the Israeli people should be: We want a future of peace and security for you and for the Palestinians, where your children and Palestinian children should no longer live in fear. It is our duty as the international community to do whatever it takes to restart a meaningful political process that can take us to a just and sustainable peace on the basis of the two-state solution. The only path to a safe and secure future for the people of the Middle East and the entire world—for the Jewish people, for Christians, for Muslims alike—starts with the belief that every human life is of equal value and it ends with two states, Palestine and Israel, sharing land and peace from the river to the sea. The time to act is now.

I’m having such a hard time thinking about how ready the politicians are to send money for war. Literally destruction and entropy, and whenever we ask about housing or healthcare it’s always how much will it cost? This is just the biggest money laundering grift.

How is it that we can suddenly find 100 billion dollars for war but can’t fund healthcare, education or housing. Even school lunch is somehow an issue! How many Americans have to be hungry and unhoused before anything gets done.