Don't "fine" Google. Instead - arrest, convict, and imprison every Google executive responsible. They can't keep getting away with this kind of evil.

No one is ever going to live on Mars. It’s the dumbest fucking idea in history. The. Planet. Is. Uninhabitable. Translation: that shit ain’t happening. Ever.

BBC BROKE EQUALITY LAW AND GOT CAUGHT Carrie Gracie spent 30 years at the @BBC. She spoke fluent Mandarin. She ran the Beijing bureau. She was one of four international editors, two men and two women. Then in 2017 the BBC was forced to publish salary data. Gracie looked at what her male equivalent, the North America editor, was earning. He was on nearly double her salary. She had explicitly said equal pay was a condition of taking the China role. The BBC agreed. Then quietly paid her far less anyway. She asked for equal pay. The BBC offered her a raise that still left her below the men. She turned it down. She resigned from the China post in January 2018 and published an open letter telling the licence fee public exactly what their broadcaster was doing. The BBC then put her through nearly a year of an internal grievance process that went nowhere. It took three meetings with the Director-General and the threat of an employment tribunal before she got a public apology and the backdated pay owed to her. The total came to £361,000. She donated every penny to the Fawcett Society (@fawcettsociety), the gender equality charity. She said the fight was about principle, not the payout. A publicly funded institution, legally obligated to follow equality law, paid women less than men in identical roles, got caught, dragged it out for a year, and only coughed up under threat of a tribunal. That is not a pay oversight. That is a policy. Gracie did not ask for a favour. She asked for what she was owed. The BBC made her fight for it like it was a privilege. Sources: @BBCNews, @guardian, @thetimes, @Independent.

My friends, can you please offer prayers and send some good energy to the Navajo Nation Reservation and surrounding communities. Pilamaya — thank you 🙏🏾 🪶✨

Someone finally put it into words

Homeland Security agents knocked on doors in nine states asking people about voting. Some carried guns. Nurses sued. A federal judge ordered DHS to stop until the polls close. Trump’s regime needed a court order to quit scaring voters. Think about that.

Wow. I don’t know about this take of how it will be received but as a masterful summation about what the nation faces…

🚨 TEXAS VOTING NUMBERS DON’T MATCH. Bexar County reported nearly 18,000 mail ballots. The state showed EIGHT. Fort Bend reported 75,000+ in-person votes. The state showed barely 41,000. Officials cite problems with the state’s election system. Source: Houston Chronicle

At least 18 rural Alaska polling places that were advertised online but hadn’t opened, all in villages key to Democratic voters: “There is no legal excuse for the failure to open these sites” rawstory.com/midterm-electio…

On the fourteenth of April 1935 a wall of dust two thousand feet high and two hundred miles wide came over Boise City, Oklahoma at sixty miles an hour, turned a clear Sunday afternoon into midnight in a minute, and the people in the churches thought the world had ended. The cause was a decision, and it took ten years. The southern plains had never been farmland. They were buffalo grass, roots five feet down, a net that had held the ground through every drought since the ice, under thirty million bison and then under the Texas cattle. Then the Great War sent wheat to the sky, the government opened the land to anyone who would break it, and the tractor could turn two hundred acres a week. Forty million acres of sod went under between 1920 and 1930. Suitcase farmers came out on the train, cut the roots, took a crop at the top of the market and went home, and nothing was left in the ground but a seed that needed rain. In 1931 the rain stopped, for most of eight years. A wheat field in a drought is bare dirt, and bare dirt on the plains, in the wind the plains have always had, is a cloud waiting for a reason. Dust came through the walls of the houses. Families slept with wet sheets over their faces and woke with the shape of their bodies left on the mattress in dirt. Children died of dust pneumonia with the fields packed into their lungs, and the Red Cross handed out gauze masks at the school door. Cattle were found dead with their stomachs full of mud. The static in a storm knocked a man flat when he touched a car, so they dragged chains behind the trucks to earth them. Two and a half million people walked off the plains, and the soil they left came down on the decks of ships off New York. And the government shot the animals. In 1934, with no grass left on the ploughed country, Washington bought more than eight million cattle at a few dollars a head, shipped the ones that could stand, and had the rest shot in the fields and bulldozed into trenches while the families watched. Those cattle had not blown away an acre in sixty years. They died because the wheat next door had taken the grass they stood on. Hugh Bennett, the government's soil man, had been telling Congress the plains were being skinned and nobody had listened. On the day of his Senate hearing that April he knew the dust was crossing the country, so he talked slowly until it arrived, and when the windows went dark at midday he told the senators that this was what he had been saying. The Soil Conservation Act was signed within the month, and what it paid for was putting the ground back the way it had been: grass, and cattle on it, and it has held since. The plough failed in a decade. The pasture had never failed. The cows were shot in between.

In 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed a law protecting Yosemite for public use. Trump’s regime has been quietly weighing a plan to hand a strip of it to a private developer. Lincoln saved it. Trump’s Republican Party wants to list it on Zillow.

So the fact that at this point free market capitalism based on competition is an unrealistic and idealistic dream about what society could look like, seems a strong counter argument. Sadly, arguments do not really work anymore with most neoclassical economists.

Get this: In Hudson County, voting machine screens show two Column A's but no Column B. Democrats are on Column B. This only affects Spanish-language screens. newjerseyglobe.com/local/gli…

"Sześć lat. Właśnie w tym miesiącu skończyła sześć. A jednak tamten dzień, kiedy ją znalazłem, wyrył się w mojej pamięci z ostrością rzeczy, których nie da się zapomnieć. Była maleńka, drżała, z wciąż zamkniętymi oczami. Może miała zaledwie jeden dzień. Pamiętam, że pomyślałem: „Nie dożyje rana”. A jednak przeżyła. Walczyła z niewiarygodną siłą, z wolą zdolną podważyć każde rokowania. Stała się najodważniejszą, najbystrzejszą i najczulszą kawką, jaką kiedykolwiek znałem. Gdy nauczyła się latać, nieraz dawałem jej możliwość odejścia. Życia w wolności, tak jak chce tego natura. I rzeczywiście była wolna. Latała nad okolicą, badała niebo. Ale każdego wieczoru wracała. Siadała na parapecie i dziobem stukała w szybę, jakby mówiła: „Hej, wróciłam!”. Jakby minęły dni, choć w rzeczywistości — tylko kilka godzin. Swoje pierwsze gniazdo zbudowała na dębie za domem. Gałązki, źdźbła trawy, skrawki tkanin, które w tajemniczy sposób znikały z mojego prania… wszystko stawało się częścią jej małego arcydzieła. A gdy wykluły się pisklęta, przynosiła je do mnie — jedno po drugim. Jakby chciała powiedzieć: „Popatrz, co zrobiłam. Razem z tobą”. To był jeden z najsilniejszych i najbardziej poruszających momentów w moim życiu jako rehabilitatora. Z czasem przyszły trudne próby: drapieżniki, urazy, nawet zatrucie, które wydawało się beznadziejne. Ale i wtedy walczyła. Wyszła z tego bardziej krucha, z pewnymi następstwami neurologicznymi, które nie pozwoliły jej wrócić na wolność. Lecz to nie był koniec. To był początek nowego rozdziału — łagodnego, pełnego sensu. Od prawie czterech lat mieszka ze mną. I nie da się słowami oddać, jak głęboka jest nasza więź. Każdy dzień to dar. Budzi mnie cichymi nawoływaniami, bawi się sznurówkami od butów, kradnie przekąski z miną kogoś, kto już wie, że mu się wybaczy. Podąża za mną wszędzie — ciekawa i uważna. Siada mi na ramieniu, gdy robię kawę, a wieczorem układa się na mojej piersi. Dziobem poprawia mi brodę, a potem spokojnie zasypia. W takich chwilach czuję wdzięczność, której nie potrafię ubrać w słowa. Przed nią było całe niebo. A jednak wybrała, by zostać. I każdego dnia dziękuję jej za ten wybór. Bo ona nie jest „po prostu” kawką. Jest rodziną. Jest domem. Jest małą, spokrewnioną duszą z piórami, która jeden gest ratunku zamieniła w jedną z najbardziej niezwykłych przygód mojego życia. Dziękuję, że przeczytaliście jej historię. I dziękuję tym, którzy — tak jak ja — odkryli, jak wyjątkowymi mogą być ci zdumiewający skrzydlaci przyjaciele. Bo czasem prawdziwa miłość nie hałasuje. Ale rozpoznasz ją w cichym trzepocie dwóch skrzydeł, które wybierają powrót. Zawsze. za Kawa z mlekiem"

Proposal: AI services are only allowed to generate video and audio content featuring characters who look and sound like robots from a 1970s TV show. They must look metallic and speak in easily identifiable nasally monotones. AI companies are strictly forbidden from providing any service which simulates real people in video or audio media, and if they can't figure out a way to prevent users from generating those materials then their AI models are not allowed on the market. Full ban on any AI replication of audio or moving imagery depicting humans. I'm serious. We need regulations requiring AI-generated video and audio to be clearly labeled in order to avoid sliding into an information ecosystem where nobody knows what's true anymore, and our universally recognized pop culture depictions of robots would be a perfect way to make it clear to people that they are viewing AI-generated content. Otherwise we're just going to be seeing more and more disinformation, misinformation, fake clickbait YouTube videos, election fraud, scams and AI psychosis until everyone's sense-making faculties are shot to shit. Have you heard Jack Dorsey's speech-trained AI model Dessa? It's completely indistinguishable from human speech. You hear recordings of human conversations with those chatbots and you can't tell which one is the human and which one is the AI. Ban that shit. Their similarity to human speech is going to dramatically exacerbate the effects of AI psychosis as more and more people convince themselves they're talking to a real person, and scammers are going to have a field day conning the elderly out of their life savings using simulated human conversations. Make it extremely illegal to create or use any such technology, permitting chatbots to speak only in a flat robot voice. You can still have AI videos, AI movies, AI audiobooks, and voice conversations with chatbots, they just need to look and sound like something that cannot be mistaken for a real human. If you want your video and audio to look real, you've got to hire real humans to make them. I think that's an entirely moderate and reasonable compromise.

2025 study: Of 102 California AI companies that had raised at least $50M, women held just 15% of board seats. 43% had no women directors at all. Among companies with $50M to $99M in funding, nearly 2/3 had all-male boards. forbes.com/councils/forbesbu…

Imagine being a CEO of an US energy company and thinking that you work with close associates of the Trump family, only to find out that behind them is a sanctioned Russian company, really pulling the strings. This happened in Alaska. Polar Train LNG's CEO, Joel Riddle, stepped down after finding out that the Russian "Novatek" company, which is under US sanctions, has been involved in a $25 billion energy project in Alaska. The CEO thought that he was working with Gentry Beach, a close friend of Donald Trump Junior. Reportedly, that project was also discussed between Witkoff and Jared Kushner when they were with Putin. The White House admitted that the project was talked about "briefly". We are witnessing the greatest corruption scandal the USA has ever witnessed. It all leads to Trump, his family and the Russians, and apparently they were even ready to sell riches of Alaska to the Russians. The people in Alaska just need to look over to Russia, where the richest regions in terms of minerals and hydrocarbon resources have been stripped-mined, transferring all the wealth to Moscow and Saint Petersburg and leaving a scarred landscape in extreme poverty. That is the result of rampant corruption. We are starting to see more details why Trump and his friends are trying so strongly to bully Ukraine into surrender. This is most certainly only the tip of the iceberg.

In a little-noticed webpage update, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year, a move that would wipe tens of thousands of publicly available environmental resources from the web. motherjones.com/environment/…

The same US president who treats our friend Canada as an enemy is trying to give Alaska to Russia, a country whose absolutely overt foreign policy is to destroy us. This superpower suicide has to be stopped. ft.com/content/e9cfbfbb-e65a…