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silveradeptLet's begin with something that should be obvious, and apparently isn't: regardless of what you think about them, if you use someone's pronouns when they tell them to you, you make the person less likely to exit the world early.
An Oklahoma University students decided to stage a stunt and submit an assignment that was a personal attack on the person that was grading it. Unsurprisingly, she failed the assignment. Also unsurprisingly, others have decided to use this as a way to attack the grader and all other trans people, and the grader has been the only one punished for this, because the crime of being trans and in a position where you might pass or fail someone is much greater than deliberately provoking an outrage machine to work on your behalf. Because, of course, the student claims being failed was because she spoke her religious truth, and not because she intended to provoke an outrage machine.
The national Girl Guides organization in the United Kingdom was forced into banning all trans girls from participating in Girlguiding under the threat of being sued into the ground for continuing to admit trans girls. Similarly, the Women's Institute was forced to exclude trans women from their organization because of similar threats. The Labour party says they have to ban trans women from the main events of their Women's conference. The animating problem in all of these decisions is the morally bankrupt UK Supreme Court decision that defined women according to their assigned sex at birth and visible sexual characteristics rather than by some standard that would actually include all people who are women.
Steve Cropper, legendary musician and involved in an awful lot of music that people would know by listening to a few bars, is back with bandmates at the age of 84 years. The only reason I know that name is because Steve Cropper was one of the band members playing behind the Blues Brothers, in both movies, and presumably in many of the other skits involved with the Blues Brothers. Damn good musician.
Some people do not want to recognize the wider message of what you do when someone is performing a genocide, if the people performing the genocide are the political team you desperately want to root for or that you've put a large amount of your identity in. "My country, right or wrong" is a dangerous and toxic belief to espouse, because it allows for so much to be excused.
The people you are in community with are the people you want to be able to resolve conflicts with, if they haven't demonstrated to you they're not capable of doing so. The difficulty of community is that it requires the individual to not default to "do I benefit from this relationship?" but to "is the community strengthened by this bond being in good order?" We can see what devastation is being wrought by people who nearly always think of themselves first over their communities, and the transactional nature of their interactions with others. They are often the kind of people who have gone well past conflict and harm into abuse and leverage social methods to create states where their targets seek closeness and safety, but have to depend on their abusers for their ability to survive. Whether they do so by governmental action or by the threat of "at-will" employment. And, perhaps most tellingly, they are the kind of people who recognize how much nuturance and interdependence is essential to healthy society and a healthy masculinity, and they work instead to stymie it and reinforce outdated roles that insist that men are not allowed to have girly feelings and women are supposed to handle all the load of managing men's emotions toward them and each other.
Those who want to organize and not replicate the power structures they want to fight need to make time for care and spread the responsibility for making community as well as organization among everyone present.
New rules published by the State Department insist that people wishing to enter the United States will have to disclose five years or more of their social media activity, give up their e-mail addresses and telephone numbers, and submit to DNA sampling and iris biometrics, so that the government can determine whether you've ever criticized them in any way. Because these are people with fragile egos who think anyone saying mean things about them should be excluded, rather than thinking about whether it means they should change course. They want to collect data that they really have no business collecting, just so that you'll decide the US is not a place to visit. Gotta love 'em.
A person has been charged with a crime because they chose to erase their phone data before the agents at the border could copy and search it. Since such agents are known for doing searches without warrants and claiming that because they're at ports of entry or other places where the Constitution simply doesn't apply, they probably filed these charges as revenge for being denied the ability to snoop and do whatever they wanted with the data on the phone. So now they want all that data, and they'll charge you if you don't give it to them, possibly.
The kidnapping squad pulled people who had already been approved to take the oath of citizenship and were waiting for the ceremony to do so out of their lines, saying that those citizenship applications had now been suddenly refused, and they would not be able to become full citizens. The article does not suggest they were then summarily deported, but still, this qualifies as a pretty strong dick move on the part of the administration.
The kidnapping squads continue to prove themselves exactly what they claim to be, luring people outside of their houses on false pretenses and then setting attack dogs on them. What we're finding out, to nobody's surprise, is that the rush to fill positions to join the kidnapping squad has resulted in people who shouldn't be anywhere near authority being granted it, and a nice paycheck, too. Yes, it's the Mail, but on this, they're almost certainly spot-on. Because we also have things like kidnappers turning up as part of a sex trafficking sting, and the head of the kidnapping ring repeatedly ignoring judicial orders
Representative Adelita Grijalva bears witness to the ways that the kidnapping squads deploy chemical weapons against those peacefully protesting their actions and the kidnapping they do. She said she wasn't interfering, only inquiring, and that she was pepper-sprayed all the same, because these people don't see anyone as having authority over them, even though she does have that. They also think it's a good idea to assault religious clergy that protest them, believing the commands of the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton tell them so seek justice, resist harm to their communities, and to welcome the people who are not from here. And because they're so keen about showing churches that they're not immune to kidnapping, everyone scatters into the wind when the kidnappers arrive, regardless of their status.
The kidnapping squads turned their attention to Minneapolis and St. Paul, choosing to target the Somali immigrant community in their cities, after the administrator decided he wanted to repeat racist claims about Somali immigrants. As usual, the targeting of the kidnapping squad is based on how much the administration dislikes the presence of people who would stand up to him in public office in the state and the city, especially because the administrator's remarks were repeating racist slanders against an elected Representative as well as maligning the community.
When someone stands up to the kidnapping squads and manages to get their day in court, the case against them falls apart pretty quickly, because the evidence does not support the testimony of the kidnapper and terrorizer, but it's very hard to achieve that day in court if someone gets disappeared instead of being able to contest their interaction.
In response to the ongoing actions of the kidnapping crowds, several churches and religious spaces are adorning their nativity scenes with what the nativity would look like in our current day and age, most of them nodding to the reality that if the kidnapping squads were there, then most of the humans present at the nativity would not be. To those who have made Mammon their god, or possibly this administrator, or maybe a TurboJesus, instead of the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, such timely updates to the Nativity story upset them, they don't want to see them, and they call such displays "politically divisive," instead of realizing where the division truly lies. And the Catholics are not the only ones who are suffering from having changed out the Jesus in their holy writings for the one they see on television. Plenty of protestants, and even those who might call themselves evangelical, have turned away from the idea of a Being that wants them to be in community, aid their neighbors, and do all of that because it is right, not because they will receive accolades and visibility for it.
The Secretary of Defense is issuing orders that are war crimes. Republican lawmakers might finally be stirred to do something about that, but not because they're war crimes, but because they're causing problems for the Republicans.
The crimes involving mortgage applications that the administration tried to get stuck to Letitia James and James Comey are the same crimes the administrator has committed multiple times on his own mortgage applications. "Every accusation is a confession" is certainly a thing with these folks. (Also, much like the charges they attempted to make stick, this happened a significant time ago and nothing would likely come of it.)
Proving there is no depth of pettiness to which they will not sink, the administration determined that it would no longer use Calibri and instead return to Time New Roman, calling Calibri a "wasteful" diversity initiative. Knowing these chowderheads, they probably saw "Roman" in the typeface, went "that's who we want to court, the people who believe that Rome was the ultimate civilization" and made the change.
If the administration bothered to stop and think a bit about their destructive impulses toward anything that might help someone who isn't white, straight, and the right kind of Christian, they might realize that many of the programs they're targeting for destruction actually help those white men a lot more than they do anyone else. Because if they didn't have gender-balancing options, for example, university would become even more dominated by women.
The administration is doing their best to subvert the process by which the public is allowed to comment on proposed federal rules before they're entered into the Register as regulations. Surprise, it's the person at the OMB that's spearheading this, and claiming that they have the authority to roll back any rule they want, without needing public input, or anyone else's input. And then the majority of the Supreme Court seems like they're more than happy to abdicate their role of providing a check on the administration's power exercises, by saying that the administration can fire anyone they want for any reason they want, regardless of law or precedent, and oh, yeah, that will lead to things like industry lobbyists being able to write regulations and have them passed through without so much as a peep from people who know better. As well as a complete endorsement and enactment of the idea that the president is a god-king and nobody can challenge him. And if you want a single person to point the finger at over all of this, it's John Roberts, Chief Justice and atypically disciplined racist.
Computers are being allowed to make management decisions, this time in deciding whether or not to approve or deny Medicaire claims, under a pilot program. And, of course, the people making the thing tout that it's all "AI" and it will make WISeR decisions. (Since it's called "Wasteful and Inappropriate Services Reduction", two guesses as to what the preferred output between approval and denial will be, and the first doesn't count.)
The Congress has decided that they'd rather spend money to bring contractors in to fix military equipment, at a greater taxpayer expense, than to insist that the military has the right to repair its own technology when it breaks. Because this Congress, of course, is about the further enrichment of the rich (at least, most of them are) rather than any kind of services that would benefit the not-rich. Or that might prevent the not-rich from eventually causing problems on purpose for the rich.
Beyond that, surveillance networks and their associated machines are also making management decisions, about who should be stopped and why. Despite being extremely wrong about those things nearly all the time. All the same, several states are still contributing to the surveillance apparatus because they will receive access to that surveillance apparatus in return for their feeding data into it. Or they're using their own personnel in state agencies to assist the kidnapping squads in their kidnapping.
After Netflix had signaled an intent to buy some of Warner Bros. Discovery, the Paramount CEO launched a hostile bid to acquire it instead. Both of them are talking with the administrator about getting the deal done, because he wants to be the broker of such a thing, and make sure that wherever it goes, any assets that could criticize him are told not to.
That said, it looks like someone has moved to impeach the Health and Human Services Secretary that is actively making people less healthy.
And, it turns out an appeals court determined that the appointment of a U.S. Attorney in New Jersey was not legal, because it did not follow the process enshrined in law and instead attempted to get around those processes.
The American Economists Association told Lawrence Summers to take a hike, presumably for what has appeared in the latest Epstein files trove, and not because he was terrible at his job, since he's been terrible at his job for much longer than he's been known to be creepy. The bigger question is why so many people that were in that orbit seemed to want to stay in that orbit, even, presumably, after they had evidence that Epstein was not the kind of person you want to hang out with.
Places that claim to be dollar stores are often charging far more than their listed prices for the products on the shelves, and mostly expecting people to either not notice or not be able to refuse them. Even repeatedly being fined for overcharging shoppers doesn't seem to have done much to curb the practice, perhaps because the people being overcharged are already poor and don't have that many other options that they can access. (Gee, that sounds familiar, doesn't it?)
A teenager had a proposed map for redistricting Alabama approved, beating out the special master who had been tasked with drawing fairer maps to remedy a Voting Rights Act violation. This is not the "little guy beats big law" story it's framed as, it's a blatant admission that the Voting Rights Act is still needed, and that things are already so bent out of shape that involved amateurs can produce adoptable maps. (Also, remember the backdrop of electoral fraud attempts from some elected Republicans, even though there's usually a lot of heat about how it's anyone but them doing the fraud.)
Cars are not a necessity, but car-centric governance and infrastructure does make it harder for someone not to have and use their own car.
A study once hailed as the gold standard on Monsato's Roundup product and its active ingredient;s risks to humans has been retracted after communications came to light that showed the company did significant work to get the supposedly-independent researchers to launder their position and put it out as a proper study.
A new adorably smol and orange pumpkin toadlet discovered, a baby beaver born, the first in four hundred years, and a large and looming problem of having no water because all the industry has drawn it up into themselves,
In technology, a continuous glucose monitor made by Abbott Diabetes Care is now under recall after faulty readings resulted in the deaths of at least seven people.
The continued price increases driven by data center construction and the LLM craze have made RAM sufficiently expensive that one division of Samsung will not sell their RAM to another division of Samsung, since it's more profitable to sell it to the people trying very hard to convince us that LLMs are better than they are.
The Crucial mark, provided by Micron, will stop selling to consumers in 2026, because they're going to be chasing the LLM and datacenter money instead.
With continuing fights over streaming rights, and the general decline of moving materials to physical media releases, the public library may soon be the only place you can get a copy of a show, movie, or documentary where you can watch it without entanglement. Of course, the public library is still constrained by whether or not any given item receives some form of physical release that can be bought and then lent, but the collection management libraries for AV are doing their very best to try and keep things available long after they've been disappeared off streaming services.
For persons looking to not have their mobile phone data tapped without warrants or who would like inexpensive and non data-collecting service, Phreeli is collecting naught but a ZIP code.
Don't gift surveillance devices to anyone for the holidays, and of course, don't buy them for yourself, either. The data is far more valuable than the product, and the privacy controls on such are much less than what you want them to be.
Last out for tonight, drag the Pantone company for the entirety of this upcoming year, as they chose an anodyne shade of white for 2026. While that may be accurate, in that's what the U.S. administration wants to have happen in the year, removing all traces of any color other than white, surely the people picking colors could have done a better job than thinking that whiteness was the way to go in this day and age.
What might happen when the suffering child of Omelas is murdered, and how much Omelas will do its best to put things back the way they used to be, because they all believe the lifelong suffering of one child is better than the possible suffering of many children.
The punk spirit never dies, but Everyone Asked About You had a revival due to an old album having been uploaded, and then discovered, and rediscovered, and then became entirely more popular than they would have ever imagined.
And a story about how a writer was almost ground into paste because people preferred the LLM version of the writing to the authentic thing, and how a friend managed to claw back a space where the pablum was not considered the pinnacle.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
An Oklahoma University students decided to stage a stunt and submit an assignment that was a personal attack on the person that was grading it. Unsurprisingly, she failed the assignment. Also unsurprisingly, others have decided to use this as a way to attack the grader and all other trans people, and the grader has been the only one punished for this, because the crime of being trans and in a position where you might pass or fail someone is much greater than deliberately provoking an outrage machine to work on your behalf. Because, of course, the student claims being failed was because she spoke her religious truth, and not because she intended to provoke an outrage machine.
The national Girl Guides organization in the United Kingdom was forced into banning all trans girls from participating in Girlguiding under the threat of being sued into the ground for continuing to admit trans girls. Similarly, the Women's Institute was forced to exclude trans women from their organization because of similar threats. The Labour party says they have to ban trans women from the main events of their Women's conference. The animating problem in all of these decisions is the morally bankrupt UK Supreme Court decision that defined women according to their assigned sex at birth and visible sexual characteristics rather than by some standard that would actually include all people who are women.
Steve Cropper, legendary musician and involved in an awful lot of music that people would know by listening to a few bars, is back with bandmates at the age of 84 years. The only reason I know that name is because Steve Cropper was one of the band members playing behind the Blues Brothers, in both movies, and presumably in many of the other skits involved with the Blues Brothers. Damn good musician.
Some people do not want to recognize the wider message of what you do when someone is performing a genocide, if the people performing the genocide are the political team you desperately want to root for or that you've put a large amount of your identity in. "My country, right or wrong" is a dangerous and toxic belief to espouse, because it allows for so much to be excused.
The people you are in community with are the people you want to be able to resolve conflicts with, if they haven't demonstrated to you they're not capable of doing so. The difficulty of community is that it requires the individual to not default to "do I benefit from this relationship?" but to "is the community strengthened by this bond being in good order?" We can see what devastation is being wrought by people who nearly always think of themselves first over their communities, and the transactional nature of their interactions with others. They are often the kind of people who have gone well past conflict and harm into abuse and leverage social methods to create states where their targets seek closeness and safety, but have to depend on their abusers for their ability to survive. Whether they do so by governmental action or by the threat of "at-will" employment. And, perhaps most tellingly, they are the kind of people who recognize how much nuturance and interdependence is essential to healthy society and a healthy masculinity, and they work instead to stymie it and reinforce outdated roles that insist that men are not allowed to have girly feelings and women are supposed to handle all the load of managing men's emotions toward them and each other.
Those who want to organize and not replicate the power structures they want to fight need to make time for care and spread the responsibility for making community as well as organization among everyone present.
New rules published by the State Department insist that people wishing to enter the United States will have to disclose five years or more of their social media activity, give up their e-mail addresses and telephone numbers, and submit to DNA sampling and iris biometrics, so that the government can determine whether you've ever criticized them in any way. Because these are people with fragile egos who think anyone saying mean things about them should be excluded, rather than thinking about whether it means they should change course. They want to collect data that they really have no business collecting, just so that you'll decide the US is not a place to visit. Gotta love 'em.
A person has been charged with a crime because they chose to erase their phone data before the agents at the border could copy and search it. Since such agents are known for doing searches without warrants and claiming that because they're at ports of entry or other places where the Constitution simply doesn't apply, they probably filed these charges as revenge for being denied the ability to snoop and do whatever they wanted with the data on the phone. So now they want all that data, and they'll charge you if you don't give it to them, possibly.
The kidnapping squad pulled people who had already been approved to take the oath of citizenship and were waiting for the ceremony to do so out of their lines, saying that those citizenship applications had now been suddenly refused, and they would not be able to become full citizens. The article does not suggest they were then summarily deported, but still, this qualifies as a pretty strong dick move on the part of the administration.
The kidnapping squads continue to prove themselves exactly what they claim to be, luring people outside of their houses on false pretenses and then setting attack dogs on them. What we're finding out, to nobody's surprise, is that the rush to fill positions to join the kidnapping squad has resulted in people who shouldn't be anywhere near authority being granted it, and a nice paycheck, too. Yes, it's the Mail, but on this, they're almost certainly spot-on. Because we also have things like kidnappers turning up as part of a sex trafficking sting, and the head of the kidnapping ring repeatedly ignoring judicial orders
Representative Adelita Grijalva bears witness to the ways that the kidnapping squads deploy chemical weapons against those peacefully protesting their actions and the kidnapping they do. She said she wasn't interfering, only inquiring, and that she was pepper-sprayed all the same, because these people don't see anyone as having authority over them, even though she does have that. They also think it's a good idea to assault religious clergy that protest them, believing the commands of the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton tell them so seek justice, resist harm to their communities, and to welcome the people who are not from here. And because they're so keen about showing churches that they're not immune to kidnapping, everyone scatters into the wind when the kidnappers arrive, regardless of their status.
The kidnapping squads turned their attention to Minneapolis and St. Paul, choosing to target the Somali immigrant community in their cities, after the administrator decided he wanted to repeat racist claims about Somali immigrants. As usual, the targeting of the kidnapping squad is based on how much the administration dislikes the presence of people who would stand up to him in public office in the state and the city, especially because the administrator's remarks were repeating racist slanders against an elected Representative as well as maligning the community.
When someone stands up to the kidnapping squads and manages to get their day in court, the case against them falls apart pretty quickly, because the evidence does not support the testimony of the kidnapper and terrorizer, but it's very hard to achieve that day in court if someone gets disappeared instead of being able to contest their interaction.
In response to the ongoing actions of the kidnapping crowds, several churches and religious spaces are adorning their nativity scenes with what the nativity would look like in our current day and age, most of them nodding to the reality that if the kidnapping squads were there, then most of the humans present at the nativity would not be. To those who have made Mammon their god, or possibly this administrator, or maybe a TurboJesus, instead of the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, such timely updates to the Nativity story upset them, they don't want to see them, and they call such displays "politically divisive," instead of realizing where the division truly lies. And the Catholics are not the only ones who are suffering from having changed out the Jesus in their holy writings for the one they see on television. Plenty of protestants, and even those who might call themselves evangelical, have turned away from the idea of a Being that wants them to be in community, aid their neighbors, and do all of that because it is right, not because they will receive accolades and visibility for it.
The Secretary of Defense is issuing orders that are war crimes. Republican lawmakers might finally be stirred to do something about that, but not because they're war crimes, but because they're causing problems for the Republicans.
The crimes involving mortgage applications that the administration tried to get stuck to Letitia James and James Comey are the same crimes the administrator has committed multiple times on his own mortgage applications. "Every accusation is a confession" is certainly a thing with these folks. (Also, much like the charges they attempted to make stick, this happened a significant time ago and nothing would likely come of it.)
Proving there is no depth of pettiness to which they will not sink, the administration determined that it would no longer use Calibri and instead return to Time New Roman, calling Calibri a "wasteful" diversity initiative. Knowing these chowderheads, they probably saw "Roman" in the typeface, went "that's who we want to court, the people who believe that Rome was the ultimate civilization" and made the change.
If the administration bothered to stop and think a bit about their destructive impulses toward anything that might help someone who isn't white, straight, and the right kind of Christian, they might realize that many of the programs they're targeting for destruction actually help those white men a lot more than they do anyone else. Because if they didn't have gender-balancing options, for example, university would become even more dominated by women.
The administration is doing their best to subvert the process by which the public is allowed to comment on proposed federal rules before they're entered into the Register as regulations. Surprise, it's the person at the OMB that's spearheading this, and claiming that they have the authority to roll back any rule they want, without needing public input, or anyone else's input. And then the majority of the Supreme Court seems like they're more than happy to abdicate their role of providing a check on the administration's power exercises, by saying that the administration can fire anyone they want for any reason they want, regardless of law or precedent, and oh, yeah, that will lead to things like industry lobbyists being able to write regulations and have them passed through without so much as a peep from people who know better. As well as a complete endorsement and enactment of the idea that the president is a god-king and nobody can challenge him. And if you want a single person to point the finger at over all of this, it's John Roberts, Chief Justice and atypically disciplined racist.
Computers are being allowed to make management decisions, this time in deciding whether or not to approve or deny Medicaire claims, under a pilot program. And, of course, the people making the thing tout that it's all "AI" and it will make WISeR decisions. (Since it's called "Wasteful and Inappropriate Services Reduction", two guesses as to what the preferred output between approval and denial will be, and the first doesn't count.)
The Congress has decided that they'd rather spend money to bring contractors in to fix military equipment, at a greater taxpayer expense, than to insist that the military has the right to repair its own technology when it breaks. Because this Congress, of course, is about the further enrichment of the rich (at least, most of them are) rather than any kind of services that would benefit the not-rich. Or that might prevent the not-rich from eventually causing problems on purpose for the rich.
Beyond that, surveillance networks and their associated machines are also making management decisions, about who should be stopped and why. Despite being extremely wrong about those things nearly all the time. All the same, several states are still contributing to the surveillance apparatus because they will receive access to that surveillance apparatus in return for their feeding data into it. Or they're using their own personnel in state agencies to assist the kidnapping squads in their kidnapping.
After Netflix had signaled an intent to buy some of Warner Bros. Discovery, the Paramount CEO launched a hostile bid to acquire it instead. Both of them are talking with the administrator about getting the deal done, because he wants to be the broker of such a thing, and make sure that wherever it goes, any assets that could criticize him are told not to.
That said, it looks like someone has moved to impeach the Health and Human Services Secretary that is actively making people less healthy.
And, it turns out an appeals court determined that the appointment of a U.S. Attorney in New Jersey was not legal, because it did not follow the process enshrined in law and instead attempted to get around those processes.
The American Economists Association told Lawrence Summers to take a hike, presumably for what has appeared in the latest Epstein files trove, and not because he was terrible at his job, since he's been terrible at his job for much longer than he's been known to be creepy. The bigger question is why so many people that were in that orbit seemed to want to stay in that orbit, even, presumably, after they had evidence that Epstein was not the kind of person you want to hang out with.
Places that claim to be dollar stores are often charging far more than their listed prices for the products on the shelves, and mostly expecting people to either not notice or not be able to refuse them. Even repeatedly being fined for overcharging shoppers doesn't seem to have done much to curb the practice, perhaps because the people being overcharged are already poor and don't have that many other options that they can access. (Gee, that sounds familiar, doesn't it?)
A teenager had a proposed map for redistricting Alabama approved, beating out the special master who had been tasked with drawing fairer maps to remedy a Voting Rights Act violation. This is not the "little guy beats big law" story it's framed as, it's a blatant admission that the Voting Rights Act is still needed, and that things are already so bent out of shape that involved amateurs can produce adoptable maps. (Also, remember the backdrop of electoral fraud attempts from some elected Republicans, even though there's usually a lot of heat about how it's anyone but them doing the fraud.)
Cars are not a necessity, but car-centric governance and infrastructure does make it harder for someone not to have and use their own car.
A study once hailed as the gold standard on Monsato's Roundup product and its active ingredient;s risks to humans has been retracted after communications came to light that showed the company did significant work to get the supposedly-independent researchers to launder their position and put it out as a proper study.
A new adorably smol and orange pumpkin toadlet discovered, a baby beaver born, the first in four hundred years, and a large and looming problem of having no water because all the industry has drawn it up into themselves,
In technology, a continuous glucose monitor made by Abbott Diabetes Care is now under recall after faulty readings resulted in the deaths of at least seven people.
The continued price increases driven by data center construction and the LLM craze have made RAM sufficiently expensive that one division of Samsung will not sell their RAM to another division of Samsung, since it's more profitable to sell it to the people trying very hard to convince us that LLMs are better than they are.
The Crucial mark, provided by Micron, will stop selling to consumers in 2026, because they're going to be chasing the LLM and datacenter money instead.
With continuing fights over streaming rights, and the general decline of moving materials to physical media releases, the public library may soon be the only place you can get a copy of a show, movie, or documentary where you can watch it without entanglement. Of course, the public library is still constrained by whether or not any given item receives some form of physical release that can be bought and then lent, but the collection management libraries for AV are doing their very best to try and keep things available long after they've been disappeared off streaming services.
For persons looking to not have their mobile phone data tapped without warrants or who would like inexpensive and non data-collecting service, Phreeli is collecting naught but a ZIP code.
Don't gift surveillance devices to anyone for the holidays, and of course, don't buy them for yourself, either. The data is far more valuable than the product, and the privacy controls on such are much less than what you want them to be.
Last out for tonight, drag the Pantone company for the entirety of this upcoming year, as they chose an anodyne shade of white for 2026. While that may be accurate, in that's what the U.S. administration wants to have happen in the year, removing all traces of any color other than white, surely the people picking colors could have done a better job than thinking that whiteness was the way to go in this day and age.
What might happen when the suffering child of Omelas is murdered, and how much Omelas will do its best to put things back the way they used to be, because they all believe the lifelong suffering of one child is better than the possible suffering of many children.
The punk spirit never dies, but Everyone Asked About You had a revival due to an old album having been uploaded, and then discovered, and rediscovered, and then became entirely more popular than they would have ever imagined.
And a story about how a writer was almost ground into paste because people preferred the LLM version of the writing to the authentic thing, and how a friend managed to claw back a space where the pablum was not considered the pinnacle.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2025-12-20 09:07 am (UTC)Ok, I've read the article and call me crazy but the WI is following orders that haven't been given yet, aren't they? I don't hear that they are actually being sued and an organisation that has around 200,000 paying members should have the fucking funds to battle things in court. It's not like supreme court decicision can't be changed later.
This is fucking outrageous.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-20 04:51 pm (UTC)