https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/06/trump-corruption-united-states/
It took the Great Depression to drive reform in prior episodes of massive corruption. The corruption needs to be covered relentlessly.
Tag Archives: Pinboard (jgordon)
“ Elon isn’t just the President. In the realm of administering the fundamental structures of the state he’s something quite a bit more than the President.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/new-wapo-piece-on-post-constitutional-america
Only Putin is over Musk.
Derek Lowe summarizes the Musk/Trump hatred of knowledge and science: “… So forget science, forget knowledge. No, what matters is money and power”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/continuing-crisis-part-vii-overview
Excellent summary, well written.
There is nothing in the GOP now save love of power and scorn for those who love discovery, knowledge, grounded truth.
Beyond that is hatred for compassion. Hatred of the weak that cling to life. Endless ignorance and hatred. That is what we oppose.
Mobile radio chips are a nightmare: “every variation of every generation in every country”
https://9to5mac.com/2025/03/06/heres-why-the-c1-chip-doesnt-have-mmwave-5g-says-kuo/
Cables had to more or less conform to a standard. Wireless connections are free to be anything.
K on Trump’s crypto scam
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-planning-the-biggest-heist
American voters are going to give Andreesen dollars for his bitcoins. Because we are so stupid there are no words.
Strong analysis of SCOTUS Foreign Aid Ruling
https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/129-untangling-the-foreign-aid-ruling
‘Alito’s dissent … it combines a remarkable amount of hypocrisy with statements that are either materially incorrect or, at the very least, misleading.”
It’s amazing how little competence is needed to join SCOTUS.
Dark humor laugh of the day – the true SOTU
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-state-of-the-union-is-less-than
“Forty-two days, nine hours, three minutes, and two million years into my second term, we can all agree I’ve done lots of stuff”
Tsai on Apple quality: “I recently set up a brand new iPad for my father, and we ran into a dozen or so bugs just between plugging it in and getting the built-in apps working”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/04/linus-sebastian-switches-to-iphone-for-30-days/
This is my experience. Bugs everywhere. It isn’t going to get better unless Apple gets new leadership.
RFK: “treating measles cases with a steroid, budesonide; an antibiotic called clarithromycin; and cod liver oil”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/health/texas-measles-outbreak-kennedy.html
He is insane. America is insane.
“Musk’s relationship with the Millers has become a subject of great intrigue in Washington”
https://www.bannedinyourstate.com/p/what-the-hell-is-going-on-part-2-ba8
I couldn’t figure out what the rumors are. Jedeed is being cautious, as one must when Musk is mentioned.
Tesla Takedown events
https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/teslatakedown
Join a takedown near you.
Sovereign crypto funds add new dimensions of corruption to American autocrats
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/a-sovereign-crypto-fund-is-a-new
“a relatively small number of people are going to get enormous taxpayer-funded payouts”
Anonymity enables many dimensions of criminal activities, including payoffs to supporters and to leaders. (In addition to transferring tax money to crypto holders.)
Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog: “the people doing the dismantling frequently tell you exactly what they’re going to do … They just wrap it in language that makes it sound like the opposite”
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/why-techdirt-is-now-a-democracy-blog-whether-we-like-it-or-not/
Young mainstream journalists do not understand the technarchy
Zack (SMBC) Weinersmith: on art, Instagram, and why ads are scraping bottom.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/announcement-2
This is important stuff. The ad-supported net is dying quickly.
Homo erectus ruled earth: axes from elephant bones.
Sapiens have a much bigger peak population but erectus ruled for much longer.
Heroes, USAID chapter “Enrich sent another memo to staff, thanking them for their work and telling them he had been placed on “administrative leave, effective immediately.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-3-2025
The villains and their scum get all the attention, but many heroes are making sacrifices to defend America-the-not-evil.
“iPhone 16e also omits … the chip Apple uses for precise location detection — like tracking an AirPod to within a foot”
https://daringfireball.net/2025/02/the_iphone_16e
No MagSafe and no precision detection. It is an annoying product to buy.
Code is not the problem: “most websites, as experienced on phones, are designed and engineered to suck”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/03/keith-web-on-mobile
The design and requirements are the problem. Which usually means a business model problem.
Musk’s AI beliefs: “… A.I. would be smarter than any individual human in the next year or two, and predicted that A.I. would be smarter than all humans combined by 2029 or 2030”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/elon-musk-joe-rogan-podcast.html
Somewhere in his wrecked and tortured brain this belief is important.
It is possible that he thinks AI will be ready to replace the federal bureaucracy.
Canada: “Trump hates them for their decency”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-hates-canada-for-its-decency
Xi is similar. Honor, integrity, courage, compassion — Musk and Trump loathe them. They sense, perhaps, that they are vulnerable. That one day Americans will look in the mirror and rediscover courage. And on that day they will fall.
“a more idealistic political culture offered statesmen with their eyes on the history books an important inducement to better behaviour”
Humans are drawn to narrative. We make stories. We live stories.
We have lost our stories of honor, courage, integrity and compassion. We need to find them again.
“When Bezos spoke in December at the Times’ DealBook conference, it was as if he were a different person. He looked different, more buff. He sounded different, more meek”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/bezos-appease-trump-administration/681899/
Before he became a coward Bezos was a decent publisher. Then he broke.
Dem crisis: their entire political operation depends on Apax Partners, a private equity corporation that runs their voter information database.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/us/politics/democrats-voter-data.html
Might contribute to Dem text spam problem. GOP insourced their operation.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse – GOP SCOTUS is even more corrupt than you thought it was
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/recapturing-the-supreme-court-for
They were chosen for their weakness.
“Putin went through a hell of a lot with me” – Trump stands down US cybersecurity.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-2-2025
With Trump obeying Putin why do we need security from our masters in Moscow?
“general collapse of America’s public morality”
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-is-ruled-by-gangsters-now
Sometimes Noah does say important things most journalist miss.
The corruption and dishonesty feels unprecedented. Nothing like it in my lifetime. It is revolting and despicable and Americans seem not to care.
HCR documents the Day of Infamy. The day we learned we serve Putin.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-28-2025
Bluesky is the home of the resistance for now.
“modern tower blocks within sight of the Thai side of the frontier — continued to weld and hammer into the night, brazenly building new warehouses dedicated to crime.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/world/asia/scam-centers-myanmar-thailand-china.html
China-Myanmar cybercrime industry expands.
“citizens of at least 40 nations have been forced by Chinese criminals to engage in crypto-fraud, online dating deception, TikTok shopping swindles, WhatsApp real estate dodges, Instagram deep fakes and Facebook trickery.”
Documenting extreme corruption and lawlessness of the Trump-Musk administration.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-democracy-index-9d9
Each would have been a red alert event before the war on democracy. Now they are routine.
How Musk perverted USDS: “U.S.D.S. veteran named Amy Gleason rejoined its staff as a senior adviser at the end of the Biden administration”
Emergent Misalignment” in LLMs: a taste of the forbidden sets LLM on the road to damnation
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/emergent-misalignment-in-llms.html
“The emergent properties of LLMs are so, so weird”
The emergents are why predicting near-term AI outcomes is so hard. Outcomes range from barely nudging GDP to destroying the world economy.
Noah Smith’s Econ book list: good and the questionable
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/popular-econ-books-what-to-read-what
Freakonomics now understood as bad.
“The real purpose of work requirements is to create more hoops for people to jump through, to make it harder to collect the benefits they’re legally owed.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/cruel-and-usual-republicans-prepare
This has always been true for many programs — but I have rarely seen a journalist point it out.
“Almost 9 in 10 Americans believe that people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body.”
As America falls will Europe rise?
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/europe-is-the-force-awakening
Maybe … we can only hope.
Schneier’s explainer on the backdoor problem given UK law.
A good reference to share
LLM tech kills homework help company: “Chegg’s stock is trading at just $1 per share today, down from a peak of $113 in 2021”
https://gizmodo.com/chegg-sues-google-says-ai-search-results-are-killing-its-business-2000568061
They are suing Google because that is where the money is. First industry to die.
In classic Trump-Musk con the fraudulent DOGE “savings” are removed and the total savings claim is increased.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/upshot/doge-spending-cuts-changed.html
The MAGA are soooooooo dumb.
After 50y – how HCTZ lowers BP: “membrane-associate protein in the endocannabinoid system whose dimeric structure is stabilized by the binding of hydrochlorothiazide”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/thiazide-target-last
Endocannabinoids again! The diuresis is a side-effect, not the cause of lower BP.
Creating the dog in 15ky: “docile wolves had an evolutionary advantage, allowing them to approach human settlements and eat food waste”
https://gizmodo.com/new-study-backs-theory-that-wolves-traded-the-wild-for-table-scraps-2000567958
Changes so radical some wondered about human guided breeding, but a simulation suggests could happen naturally.
Which makes everyone wonder how quickly humans changed in the past 50ky.
Trump’s Trade War Resumes: all the tariffs you can imagine.
https://www.apricitas.io/p/trumps-2nd-trade-war-begins
China is waiting and watching. It has not yet begun to fight.
“as you get close to a singularity, the strong gravity causes every point in space to decouple from every other one”
New tools and techniques allow physicists to edge closer to the breakdowns.
NK steals another 1.4 billion crypto: “Lazarus managed to use social engineering tactics to trick exchange employees into signing off on a transaction they believed was a routine transfer”
A novel model for economic development.
Wealthy money guy: “The one thing I’ve learned after 40 years of running money is that my idea of where the markets are going is pretty much worthless.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-ai-spending-reminds-jim-chanos
One of my best life decisions back in my early 20s was to invest only with low cost Vanguard index funds and ignore the market news.
Rural despair behind German fascism: “people who moved away from those regions tended to skew younger and female, and were more likely to have advanced degrees”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/world/how-a-demographic-doom-loop-helped-germanys-far-right.html
I believe this is a large driver of American fascism.
A poem: what war is
https://snyder.substack.com/p/what-war-is
“Ostap Slyvynsky, in an original translation from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser”
“When GPT-4 came out it was around $50 per million tokens … now [Gemini 1.5 Flash] costs around 12 cents per million tokens …”
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/a-new-generation-of-ais-claude-37
I cannot think of any historical precedent for this quick a fall in costs.
“amount of RNA G-quadruplexes (rG4s) in hippocampal tissue increases as a function of age, and what’s more, it increases as a function of the severity of diagnosed Alzheimer’s at the time of death”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/neurodegeneration-might-come-down-rna
I have long thought Alzheimer’s is basically accelerated brain aging. If we live long enough we all get disabled.
“rG4 staining is also strongly influenced by the APOE4 status of the individuals”
DOGE hasn’t found any fraud.
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/despite-the-hype-doge-hasnt-found
There is lots of fraud of course, but it is widely known (esp Medicare fraud by providers).
Musk-Trump do not actually care about “waste, fraud, and abuse”. It was always a scam.
Trump-Musk impacts on GOP base (and others): Feb 2025 summary.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/coast-to-coast-the-effects-of-the
These are impacts that impact people with power – red state voters.