Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Apr 25

27 crypto wallets acquired ~$1,000,000+ of the president's memecoin after top holders were invited to a special dinner with Trump.

It "creates the specter of a pay-to-play deal". So who are payers? There are hints that many aren't even American.

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

How Trump team turned a dinner invite into a crypto boon worth millions

Nearly two dozen crypto wallets acquired more than 100,000 $TRUMP meme coins, worth roughly $100 million, after the team said top buyers could join the president for dinner.

www.washingtonpost.com

6 32 52

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Apr 1

Newsmax just went public. Its 10-K annual report says:

"A diverse and inclusive workplace is not merely a strategy or business objective; it is fundamentally woven in the fabric of the Company."

www.sec.gov/Archives/edg...

Document

www.sec.gov

1 2 35

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Feb 7

why are you characterizing me as "having a meltdown"?

1

Reposted by Jeremy Merrill

ence morse @ence.bsky.social · Feb 7

One more thing to note about the USAID cuts: Project 2025's text actually recommended *more* USAID programs to counter China’s Belt + Road Initiative. and criticized Biden for discontinuing particular Trump-era USAID programs.

Speaks to how quickly all this blew up.

The next conservative Administration should restore and build on the Trump
Administration’s counter-China infrastructure at USAID, end the climate policy
fanaticism that advantages Beijing, and assess bilateral aid through the lens of
U.S. national security interests, rewarding those countries that resist China’s
debt diplomacy. It should finance programs designed to counter specific Chinese
efforts in strategically important countries and eliminate funding to any partner
that engages with Chinese entities directly or indirectly. USAID’s Bangkok-based
Regional Development Mission for Asia should focus its strategic attention on
supporting cross-border initiatives designed to counter Chinese influence.

4 3 12

Reposted by Jeremy Merrill

ence morse @ence.bsky.social · Feb 6

Who put USAID on Elon Musk's radar? @sarahellison.bsky.social and I found that Musk only began posting about the agency after ⁦right-wing influencer Mike Benz appeared on Joe Rogan, calling the organization a CIA front. More: www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

www.washingtonpost.com

2 4 8

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Feb 7

I don't think you've proven your headline.

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Feb 7

There’s no more Gulf of Mexico Division of the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s now the Gulf of America Division. As of Wednesday, the agency has also renamed the body of water even on obscure pages about mangrove swamps.

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

A screenshot of EPA's Mangrove Swamps website, saying "Four species of tropical mangroves can be found around the Gulf of America. Their extensive root systems protect the coast from erosion and storm damage. The mangrove here (inset) is a red mangrove."

2 2 7

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Feb 4

analytics.usa.gov says the US Government's official National Strategic Dad Joke Reserve website only got 861 pageviews in the past month. I think we can do better than that.

1 2 10

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Feb 4

... ... did you know the US government has a dad joke website? www.fatherhood.gov/for-dads/dad...

Dad Jokes | Fatherhood.gov

www.fatherhood.gov

1 3 11

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Jan 23

Huh! Fascinating.

Reposted by Jeremy Merrill

Aaron Schaffer @aaronschaffer.com · Jan 23

Fun fact: there used to be a different Gulf of America...in the Sea of Japan archive.org/details/grea...

Great Soviet encyclopedia : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

v. : 29 cm

archive.org

2 2 2

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Jan 22

"Gulf of America" first sprung up in a pretty unexpected place. One of the first references I can find to the idea of renaming the Gulf of Mexico? Comes from Stephen Colbert and partially sponsored by... Bing.

From 15ish years ago:
news.softpedia.com/news/Bing-Do...

news.softpedia.com

1 1 5

Reposted by Jeremy Merrill

Doug MacMillan @douglasmac.bsky.social · Jan 14

I've spent the past year obsessed with how police are using facial recognition. What I found: Police in 12 states have used these tools to find and arrest suspects when they have no other evidence, leading to wrongful arrests

wapo.st/4fQYlXn

🧵 what I learned from 1,000 docs & dozens of sources ->

Arrested by AI: Police ignore standards after facial recognition matches

Confident in unproven facial recognition technology, sometimes investigators skip steps; at least eight Americans have been wrongfully arrested.

wapo.st

10 120 250

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Jan 6

more like justin trudeaun't amirite

1 9

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Dec 20

Yeah, it's fair question! The view count metrics act right, in that there aren't any sharp discontinuities and many US-focused accounts (i.e. not Elon and Trump) have slower increases overnight and faster increases during the day in the US.

1

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Dec 19

gift link: wapo.st/3Dp2cO5

Musk’s influence on X eclipses all members of the incoming Congress, combined

The tech billionaire’s X account blasts his political messages to an audience far bigger than Trump reaches on the platform, data analysis by The Post shows.

wapo.st

5 10

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Dec 19

Elon Musk's total view count on Twitter is way way bigger (16x) than that of Congress as a whole.

chart by @kevinschaul.bsky.social

A bubble chart shows one huge orange bubble for Elon Musk's 127.6 billion views and a bunch of small and tiny green bubbles for Congress's 7.1 billion views

5 7 17

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Dec 18

I don't think there's any evidence he's just making it up.

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Dec 18

This was actually one of my research questions for this project: do view count stats over time make sense? And they do! Elon's follow a very consistent pattern. US-centric less-popular figures' view count growth slows overnight and accelerates during awake hours.

1

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Dec 17

Elon Musk has a political megaphone unmatched in modern society. He got a total of 133 billion views since July, and ~1/3 of his posts are about politics.

His typical tweet gets more than 2.4 million views in just one hour, according to our novel view-count time-series dataset.

🎁: wapo.st/3VLjlI6

A chart shows the view count trajectory of Elon Musk's and Donald Trump's tweets, titled "Views of each X post in 26 days around the election". Elon Musk has many above 100 million, while Trump's are all less than 100 million.

2 14 21

Reposted by Jeremy Merrill

Crypto is the Solution @cryptosolutions.bsky.social · Nov 30

The problem of single women learning to cope with the scarcity of suitable men? blockchain fixes this. #web3 #crypto #blockchain #defi

2

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Dec 2

I was so tempted to buy this when I got the email about it the other day.

1

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Dec 2

This one is not actually all that exciting! This is from an examination of TikTok. The x-axis is something like "average proportion of video watched" (I don't totally remember; old chart) and so the big cluster is regular videos and the lil cluster on the left is ads... which on average people skip.

1 2

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Dec 2

I like this chart. It tells a story. It's a bimodal distribution, which is my favorite kind of chart. It tells me that I've got two kinds of things: A bunch of the things on the right, centered at 0.8 and some of the things on the left, around 0.1 to 0.2.

an untitled bimodal distribution, with a bit spike around 0.8 and a much smaller spike around 0.1. y-axis goes to 350 from 0.

1 1 4

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · Nov 29

Genuinely jazzed to un-forget about this bot, which proposes fixing literally every problem every discussed in (IIRC) 10 years of NYT articles, with crypto/web3/DeFi/Bitcoin.

1 1 6