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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 11h

Excellent point! Media is terrifically fragmented, compared to 2008.

Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 11h

As I wrote that, found myself wondering if we have equivalents now but I can’t perceive the water I swim in. You may be right!

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 11h

I had not! We were planning to build in 2008, couldn’t for financial reasons, and that turned out to be a *gift*, because both interest rates and construction costs plummeted by 2009, when we contracted to build.

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 11h

I wasn’t going to put grass into a Coinstar machine, but now that they’ve told me I can’t, I want nothing more.

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Simon Lester @simonlester.com · 23h

"The Labor Department warned in an obscure document filed with the Federal Register last week that 'the near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens' is threatening 'the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers.'”

Trump administration says immigration enforcement threatens higher food prices

U.S. farmers face labor shortages and potential food price hikes due to Trump’s immigration policy, the administration acknowledged in a Federal Registry document.

wapo.st

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 11h

There was a time when two of these three women lived in Charlottesville.

Reposted by Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky

Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 12h

"Sceptics are privately - and some now publicly - asking whether the rapid rise in the value of AI tech companies may be, at least in part, the result of what they call 'financial engineering'. In other words - there are fears these companies are overvalued."

A tangled web of deals stokes AI bubble fears in Silicon Valley

Some are worried that the rapid rise in the value of AI tech companies may be a bubble waiting to burst.

www.bbc.com

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 14h

I’ve used it a few times in the past month and it’s been amazing. I can stream movies and work with connectivity that’s basically as good as at home. (Now if only I had the elbow room to actually type etc.)

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 14h

I was 30 in 2008 and yuuuuup this is what it felt like. The notable difference was there were lots of TV shows about flipping houses, all about how $10k in improvements and super-easy mortgages made it trivial to net $50k in profit. That bubble was packaged as entertainment.

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Mark Lemley @marklemley.bsky.social · 15h

And this:
92% of the growth in the entire country this year has been data centers. And some of that is "circular deals" that dont involve actual money

fortune.com/2025/10/07/d...

Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025, Harvard economist says | Fortune

Is a U.S. without data centers a country without GDP growth?

fortune.com

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 14h

That’s my guess.

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 14h

They were made out of steel, because copper was needed for the war. My guess is that their machine rejects those because they’re the only steel coins, and accepting them would result in false positives.

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 15h

You cannot, which was a relief.

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Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 15h

Per CDC source: At internal leadership meeting this afternoon, it was shared that 1,257 people were RIF'd at CDC. Number may not be final. Apparently, chief of staff was unaware that RIFs were going to occur so not clear who is making decisions. (Short 🧵)

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 15h

My gift to you is Coinstar’s list of items that they prohibit putting in their machines, which includes earthworms, goldfish, wheat, fossils, teeth, and 1943 pennies.

A photo of a screen, saying “Please accept our terms and conditions” at the top. The bulk of the text reads as follows:

Kiosk Acceptable Use Policy
You may only insert valid U.S. coins or paper bills of the type accepted by the kiosk and that are clean, not written on or defaced, not bent, not ripped, and not otherwise damaged ("Accepted Currency"). Inserting anything but clean and undamaged Acceptable Currency into the kiosk is unacceptable and could impact functionality or cause errors that result in the loss of currency inserted by you. Unacceptable items will not be counted and may not be returned. Unacceptable items include, but are not limited to:
1943 US pennies, acorns, alcohol wipes, animal crackers, animal or human teeth, bandages, batteries, beads, bells, belt clips, bent coins, bolts, bottle caps, broken glass, bullets, buttons, candy, candy wrappers, cardboard, cat litter, chains, clay, commemorative coins, confetti, contact lenses, cotton balls, cotton swabs, crayons, cuff links, damaged coins, dirt, dirty coins, dog food, drill bits, ear plugs, earthworms, Eisenhower silver dollars, erasers, feathers, finger nails, flash drives, foam objects, foreign coins, fossils, French fries, fruit snacks, glitter, gold fish, grass, guitar picks, gum, gum wrappers, gummy worms/bears, hair clips, hay, jar lids, jewelry, key chains, keys, lint, marbles, matches, miniature dice, mints, mud, nails, name tags, nuts/bolts, paper clips, pen caps, pencils, pills, pine cone parts, pins, pipe cleaners, Play-Doh, playing cards, POGs, pop can tabs, popsicle sticks, quilt squares, ribbons, rocks, rubber bands, rubber lid seals, sand, screw driver bits, screws, SD cards, seeds, shells, soap, soda, springs, stickers, tape, tie tacks, tire caps, tissues, tokens, tooth picks, tree bark, twigs/sticks, vegetables, wall hooks, washers, watch bands, wheat, wires and yarn.

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Kara Swisher @karaswisher.bsky.social · 1d

What a crock of shit from Marc Benioff — who appears willfully ignorant of news and facts and so thirsty for approval and attention from the Trump tech bros (who in the past mocked him relentlessly) that he is soiling himself in public www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

Marc Benioff Says Trump Should Send Guard Troops to San Francisco

www.nytimes.com

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Leonid Baezhnev @rev-avocado.bsky.social · 21h

This is good, actually. This is the kind of thing we need to build a pro-court expansion majority.

Leah Litman @leahlitman.bsky.social · 1d

More judges speak to the press (the NYT) about what a disaster the Supreme Court (specifically the shadow docket) has been - “incredibly demoralizing & troubling”; a “judicial crisis”; a “slap in the face to district courts.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/u...

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Matthew Stiegler @matthewstiegler.bsky.social · 19h

Roberts is presiding over, and driving, a stunning collapse in faith in the U.S. Supreme Court, not just among the public, but among federal judges.

What a failure. The Titanic captain of chief justices.

Murshed Zaheed @murshedz.bsky.social · 20h

“More than three dozen federal judges have told The New York Times that the Supreme Court’s flurry of brief, opaque emergency orders in cases related to the Trump administration have left them confused about how to proceed in those matters and are hurting the judiciary’s image with the public.”

Federal Judges, Warning of ‘Judicial Crisis,’ Fault Supreme Court’s Emergency Orders

www.nytimes.com

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 20h

The maps in the article are especially great. I highlight that because the cartographer, Margaret Wickens Pearce, won a McArthur Fellowship this week. Well deserved! www.macfound.org/fellows/clas...

A map showing all of the lands that funded Cornell University. Dozens of lines connect it to spots throughout the northern Midwest and the west coast. The graphic includes the following text:

Cornell University
Parcels: 6,716
Land or scrip: Scrip
Total acreage: 977,909
Year acquired: 1865
Acreage from:
63 treaties, cessions, or seizures in 15 states Endowment raised, ca. 1914: $5,739,657

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 20h

That article was backed by a huge amount of painstaking research, and HCN published all the data. They rechristened land-grant universities “land-grab universities.” As an alumnus of one (Virginia Tech), I haven’t thought of it the same since.

GitHub - HCN-Digital-Projects/landgrabu-data: Source data for the HCN investigation, "Land-Grab Universities"

Source data for the HCN investigation, "Land-Grab Universities" - HCN-Digital-Projects/landgrabu-data

github.com

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 20h

Five years after it was published, I still think about this @highcountrynews.org project that connects land-grant universities back to the land they were granted, what tribe owned it immediately prior, how much it was worth then, and how much it’s worth now. A complete reframe of land grants.

Land-grab universities - High Country News

Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system.

www.hcn.org

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 20h

Five years after it was published, I still think about this @highcountrynews.org project that connects land-grant universities back to the land they were granted, what tribe owned it immediately prior, how much it was worth then, and how much it’s worth now. A complete reframe of land grants.

Land-grab universities - High Country News

Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system.

www.hcn.org

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Reposted by Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky

Devin Judge-Lord @judgelord.bsky.social · 21h

IRS layoffs are costly for the U.S., redistributing wealth to the top 1% (who lie on their taxes at jaw-dropping rates).

The bottom 99% generally pay their taxes. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

Taxes evaded as a percent of taxes owed from a study showing that the 99th wealth percentile and above evade significantly more taxes than everyone else. The richest evade 25% of the taxes they owe on average. The bottom 95% evade less than 3% of their taxes on average. While these data are from Scandinavia, similar patterns are likely in other countries, including the U.S.

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Waldo Jaquith, but Spooky @waldo.net · 20h

[consults recipe] Oh good news that will only take 10 minutes

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 22h

The IRS is laying off people during the shutdown, even though it was rehiring staff it previously fired because it was so shorthanded.
This one stands out because firing IRS employees costs the government money, since they bring in about $6-8 for every dollar spent on tax enforcement

IRS Halts Layoff Plans, Begins Rehiring Amid Staffing Shortages
The agency is attempting to rebuild its workforce and restore public confidence.

Treasury Department: Treasury cut 1,446 employees on Friday. Two Internal Revenue Service employees confirmed layoffs were taking place at the tax agency, which has already shed more than 25,000 employees. One employee who was laid off was working Friday and exempt from shutdown furloughs.

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