J. S. Bach
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bachtothefuture.bsky.social
J. S. Bach
@bachtothefuture.bsky.social
720 followers 210 following 810 posts
🎶1685-1750🎶
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bachtothefuture.bsky.social
Not washed and ironed yet, but it’s done!!! #wip #crossstitch #cross-stitch #craftsky
Cross stitch Ragdoll kitten reclining on a blanket.
January 27, 2026 at 4:43 PM
bachtothefuture.bsky.social
Too cute!
Arya the ragdoll cat
January 25, 2026 at 7:59 PM
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Ragdoll cat understitching done; still need to get the details finished #wip #crossstitch #cross-stitch
Mostly finished cross stitch of a ragdoll cat reclining on a blanket.
January 25, 2026 at 12:22 AM
bachtothefuture.bsky.social
Met @moulton.house.gov in Lowell just a bit ago; he’s got a good head on his shoulders. He’s got my vote in the primary for Senate.
Seth Moulton, MA congressman, talking to a group of constituents in a bar in Lowell earlier today.
January 24, 2026 at 8:48 PM
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Most recent full pic :)
Mostly finished cross stitch of a reclining ragdoll cat
January 22, 2026 at 7:40 PM
bachtothefuture.bsky.social
So close to the end! #wip #crossstitch #cross-stitch
Almost finished cross stitch project: a green hoop shows stretched fabric with a reclining cat’s partial face on top of a blanket that has yellow/gold and blue/green portions.
January 22, 2026 at 4:20 AM
bachtothefuture.bsky.social
I grabbed a lot of it for you; didn’t have time to look for a gift link but I turned it to reader and screenshots. Wasn’t an interesting article, to be honest
W11:31 EGTON - Senator Elizabeth WalYen got a call from President I| 5G 66 Trump on Monday after she spent the morning criticizing him in a speech and a subsequent cable news interview, the Massachusetts Democrat said in statement. Warren did not disclose what Trump said to her on the call, nor how long they spoke. But she said that she told the president if he wants to lower costs for Americans as he promised during the campaign, he should support Warren-backed legislation to cap credit card rates and promote more housing. "In my remarks... I said that if he really wants to get something done, including capping credit card interest rates or lowering housing costs, he would use his leverage and pick up the phone," Warren said in a statement. "After my speech, the President called me, and I delivered this same message on affordability to him directly." M11:32 Bthrough Friday. 5G 66 4 Bluesky A White House official, who requested to not be named as they were not authorized to comment publicly, said the call was "productive" and focused on credit card interest rates and the cost of housing. Warren delivered a speech at the National Press Club on Monday where she criticized Trump over the Department of Justice's investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and laid out a populist economic policy vision for Democrats. She followed the speech with an appearance on CNN, where she laid out similar themes. Trump called shortly afterward. "I almost didn't answer because I didn't recognize the number," Warren told the Globe. She said she couldn't remember the last time she spoke with him and said he wasn't angry. with hi n and said he wasn t angry. 11:32 B 4 Bluesky • 5G 66: "He wanted to talk about costs, what I talked about in the speech," Warren said. She declined to divulge his responses. Warren and Trump are frequent critics of one another, with Trump often referring to her by a derogatory nickname he gave her years ago based on her claim of Native American heritage. Still, they have at times embraced similar policy ideas, such as eliminating the limit on the national debt, and more recently, capping credit card rates, though Trump has yet to muscle those proposals through the Republican-controlled Congress. Warren also mentioned that she asked Trump to back a bipartisan housing bill she led with South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott. Scott and Warren are the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate UNC,ACOpUUUVCyS U UC NUOL Ba11:33 g Housing and Urban A5G 65 Committee. The bill would streamline regulations and promote housing solutions like prefabrication to spur construction of new houses and apartments. She has said she'd work to pass a credit card rate cap if Trump was serious about it. Earlier in the day, Warren was sharply critical of Trump not just on pocket book issues, but on his continued attacks on Powell. In particular, she decried the revelation that the Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into Powell and the Federal Reserve regarding the ongoing renovation of its buildings. Warren herself has been a longtime critic of Powell's, but has defended him this year in the face of repeated attacks by Trump stemming from his frustration that the independent Federal Reserve was not more aggressive in lowering interest rates.
January 13, 2026 at 4:36 PM
bachtothefuture.bsky.social
Birthday treat number one: quiet time to drink tea and read a whole chapter without interruption.
Library Book cover: Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement by Barbara F Berenson
January 3, 2026 at 11:51 AM
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Recent progress on the project #wip
Partially finished Ragdoll cross stitch project in a green hoop on off white Aida cloth. Partially finished Ragdoll cross stitch project on off white Aida cloth.
December 31, 2025 at 1:33 AM
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More progress on the kitty cross stitch, with a bonus cat
Teal wall, close up of grey couch cushion with a cream and seal point ragdoll cat sleeping next to a partially finished cross stitch of a very similar looking cat.
December 26, 2025 at 4:24 PM
bachtothefuture.bsky.social
Lots of lovely time to listen to articles today while sewing. Getting caught up and making progress :D #wip
Cross stitch ragdoll cat in progress, off white Aida cloth in a blue plastic hoop. Cross stitch ragdoll cat with a bit more progress, on off-white Aida cloth in a blue plastic hoop.
December 24, 2025 at 9:41 PM
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More Ragdoll cross-stitch progress
Half-finished Cross stitch of a seal-point cream colored ragdoll cat laying on it’s side on a blue and green blanket.
December 9, 2025 at 1:55 AM
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Progress on the project. Gotta get it done, been working on it too long!
Cross stitch project in a blue plastic hoop. The Aida fabric is 18 point off-white, and the mostly complete cat head shows a ragdoll cat with seal point markings. The background is a mix of blue and green.
December 1, 2025 at 1:10 AM
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Thanksgiving so far: made an apple pie!
Fully baked apple pie on cooling rack on top of oven Half baked pie out of the oven while the temp is turned down a bit Apple pie filling just beginning to cook in a pan
November 27, 2025 at 2:19 AM
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This is the breakdown of ages in the 119th congress, per fiscalnote.com
Chart showing age ranges in congress
October 22, 2025 at 6:17 PM
bachtothefuture.bsky.social
When we’re on the other side of *this*, let’s take some of FDR’s ideas on adding seats to the court-
LAWLESS by Leah Litman 154 political power. "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—-ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power," FDR said in a later speech. 58 Three months after his landslide 1936 reelection, FDR proposed adding seats to the Supreme Court for every justice above a certain age.59 This, finally, hit home with a certain group of nine old men—or at least one of them. Justice Owen Roberts changed his vote and started upholding New Deal programs as well as other redistributive legislation. Three weeks after FDR spoke to the country in a fireside chat about his court reform pro-posal, the Supreme Court upheld a minimum wage law by a 5-4 vote, with Justice Roberts in the majority.6o The Court's decision upholding the minimum wage law seemed to cut back on the justices previous suggestion that certain legislative efforts to address economic inequality were unjustified handouts to the less well-off. The justices came around to the idea that, without a minimum wage, markets and laws were structured in ways that unjustifiably favored employers. The majority wrote that, without a minimum wage, the market provided "a subsidy for unconscionable employers."61 The Court even echoed FDRs earlier speech about the dangers of too much economic power concentrated in the hands of the few. It said the minimum wage law "corrects) the abuse which springs from" companies' "selfish disregard of the public interest."62 While Congress didn't ultimately pass FDR's court expansion plan, it didn't have to. The Court changed without it. In 1937, the Court began upholding elements of the New Deal program. In
October 19, 2025 at 10:29 AM
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Some good signs in Lexington! #NoKings
Picture of peaceful protesters with signs referring to Lexington’s history of protesting kings!
October 18, 2025 at 3:40 PM
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That one and this one get me through it all:
I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Pull of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shinest will shine out the ceaner Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something -Samwise Gamgee
September 11, 2025 at 6:58 PM
bachtothefuture.bsky.social
Really think we need to go hard on economics against the billionaires.
Excerpt from Bad Company by Megan Greenwell: BAD COMPANY 170 Critics of the industry point out that rate of return is an easy metric to game, making them skeptical of thos rosier studies. And public pension funds tend to generate worse returns from private equity funds than governments and private investors do. while it is true that millions of pensioners do rely on private returns, the evidence is far less clear that they must. Those returns also aren't generated in a vacuum. Private equity often makes money by cutting costs and raising prices, both of which take the heaviest tolls on working-class people. In the retail world, cutting costs almost always means layoffs not of executives, but of low level employees like Liz. If private equity does in fact help pensioners lead better lives, it does so in part by hurting workers. Stavros and other private equity executives often talk about their responsibility to public employees who have served their communities don't all thore teachers and firefighters who served their communities for decades deserve a nice retirement? - but what they are in fact describing is a sort of zero-sum game in which cutting wages for working- and middle-class employes in one place helps working- and middle-class retirees in other places, a phenomenon labor journalist Hamilton Nolan has termed "capitalism's washing machine." And while the pensioners make for a tidier narrative, the reality is that no one benefits nearly as much from private equity as privat equity itself. The system is designed so that firms put in less money and shoulder less risk than anyone else, yet reap the lion's share of the profits. Benefiting retired teachers and firefighters might be a desirabe side effect, but the point is to earn returns for private equity executives. Stephen Schwarzman didn't earn $37 billion by putting reachen and firefighters interests first.
August 23, 2025 at 10:16 AM
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When things swing back our way politically, we need to work hard to get private equity out of housing. We can’t fix the housing issue with them in there, they’re too motivated to drive up prices and kick people out.
Excerpt from Bad Company by Megan Greenwell So if a private equity company hikes lot rent beyond what its residents can pay, many will have no choice but to sell. If a resident falls too far behind on payments, they can be evicted from the park, which means walking away from the home they own. That, in turn, legally makes the home abandoned property, freeing the park's owner to assume control, sell or rent it, and pocket the proceeds. This recipe has made mobile homes irresistible to many private equity firms, including Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, Carlyle Group, Stockbridge Capital, and, more recently, Alden Global Capital, the most infamous newspaper owner in the country. Twenty-three percent of all mobile home park purchases in 2019 and 2020 were made by large investors. In 2017 and 2018, that number was 13 percent. Park owners have described the opportunity in eye-poppingly crass terms. Most infamously, Frank Rolfe, the co-owner of a large chain of mobile home parks, once compared his business to a "Waffle House where everyone is chained to the booths." Between apartments, single-family houses, and mobile homes, private equity firms now own millions of individual homes across the U.S. The industry's money and political clout, meanwhile, gives them outsize power to raise rents, lobby against regulation, and put homeownership out of reach of more people. Blackstone, which is both the world's largest private equity firm and the nation's largest landlord, is explicit about how America's affordable-housing crisis benefits its shareholders: "a structural shortage of housing has resulted in pricing power for rental housing assets," it wrote in a 2023 letter touting its growing investor returns. The firm has also poured millions of dollars into fighting ballot measures designed to expand rent-control protection in California.
August 17, 2025 at 10:30 AM
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True
Photo of a Sandwich, Massachusetts police cruiser
August 16, 2025 at 9:17 AM
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Empire of AI by Karen Hao is so wonderfully informative. I’ve felt for a while that AI is like a god/religion to some of these people, and here it is, laid out.
Wher GPT-4, Sutskever, who had previously dedicated most of his time cadancing model capabilities, had made a hard pivot toward focusing Al safety. He began to split his time half and half. To people around him, he seemed at times to be at war with himself. He was both Boomer and Doomer: more excited and afraid than ever before of AGI arriving und rapidly surpassing humans to become superintelligence. Sutskever now spoke in increasingly messianic overtones, leaving een his longtime friends scratching their heads and other employees ap-prehensive. During one meeting with a new group of researchers, Suts-leser laid out his plans for how to prepare for AGL "Once we all get into the bunker—" he began. I'm sorry," a researcher interrupted, "the bunker?" «We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI; Suts-lever replied matter-of-factly. Such a powerful technology would surely become an object of intense desire for governments globally. It could escalate geopolitical tensions; the core scientists working on the technology would need to be protected. "Of course," he added, "it's going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker." The researcher would in equal parts continue to hold Sutskever in high regard and keep himself at arm's length. "There is a group of people- Ilya being one of them-who believe that building AGI will bring about a rapture. Literally, a rapture," he says.
August 11, 2025 at 10:27 AM
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Opaque because they choose not to do reviews to figure it out (from the book Empire of AI):
Among many employees, GPT-4 solidified the belief that AGI was possible. Researchers who were once skeptical felt increasingly bullish about reaching such a technical pinnacle-even while OpenAI continued to lack a definition of what exactly it was. Engineers and product managers joining Applied and having their first close-up interaction with AI through GPT-4 adopted even more deterministic language. For many employees, the question became not if AGI would happen but when. Some employees also felt exactly the opposite. While there was a clear qualitative change in what GPT-3 could do over GPT-2, GPT-4 was just bigger, says one of the researchers who worked on the model. "The big result was that there were a bunch of exams that the model does well. But even that is highly questionable." OpenAI never did a comprehensive review of GPT-4's training data to check whether those exams-and their answers-were just in the data and being regurgitated, or whether GPT-4 had in fact developed a novel capability to pass them. It was the kind of shaky science that had become pervasive with the industry-wide shift from peer-reviewed to PR-reviewed research.
August 10, 2025 at 10:29 AM
bachtothefuture.bsky.social
I learned about goat glands from a buster keaton flick!
Buster Keaton in “Cops”, walking a horse into a Goat Gland Specialist shop.
July 29, 2025 at 3:14 PM
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Found a typo in a great book I’m reading. It just came out last year- who do I reach out to, to help them fix it? Anyone know?
*find the typo* :D
152 / LEGAL PERSONHOOD the nation was continuing its constitutional recovery from the depthd the Dred Scott decision. It seemed to him that Johnson had won. Some could rejoice that despite Johnson's obstruction of Black equality, the states were moving forward in ratifying the Fourteenth Amendmen, which came on July 9, 1986. For Douglass, given the amendments shon-comings, its ratification provided little evidence of real progress. * * * THE ROUTE TO DEMOCRATIC RECOVERY from the current crisis had no set path. The response to the Adams crisis had been somewhat linear, expressed first in a partial recovery driven by the newspaper editors and Jefferson and next in a more comprehensive one by Hanson and Madison. The quest to realize the promise of a democratic and multiracial Const-rution after Buchanan's attack on it was more jagged: a partial move by Lincoln toward full democracy at the behest of Douglass, followed by a new threat to it from Johnson. At that moment, "We the White People" not "We the People" looked like the nation's future. Still, even at such a precarious point, the promise of equality was on the hori-zon, and a partnership between Douglass and a member of the Johnson administration would help realize that promise.
July 18, 2025 at 10:16 AM