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musicmaker5.bsky.social
@musicmaker5.bsky.social
1.2K followers 1K following 1.5K posts
Democratic socialist. Healthcare as a human right. End the genocide in Gaza now.
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Reposted
propublica.org
Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents.

They’ve had their necks kneeled on.

They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear.

At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them.
More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days.
The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. Our tally — almost certainly incomplete — includes people who were held for days without a lawyer. And near...
www.propublica.org
December 4, 2025 at 4:00 AM
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thetnholler.bsky.social
If you think Paramount is just trying to buy Warner Brothers so Ellison can stop CNN from criticizing Trump… you’re right!

www.wsj.com/business/med...
December 9, 2025 at 3:15 AM
musicmaker5.bsky.social
Tantamount to injecting poison into children's veins.
December 9, 2025 at 3:15 AM
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christyceeck.bsky.social
The op-ed writer is Canada’s former ambassador to NATO and a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa.

Canada and Europe could be in real trouble here.

#GiftLink 🎁

www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/90e3098...
The NSS views the Western Hemisphere (notably, not limited to Latin America) as a zone of exclusive U.S. economic and strategic influence. The U.S., it says, will “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces… and to own or control strategically vital assets in our Hemisphere,” defining “strategically vital assets” broadly to include critical minerals, cyber communication networks and infrastructure, too. It makes U.S. alliances contingent on countries in the Hemisphere “winding down adversarial outside influence” and buying American. The sentiment might be aimed primarily at China but the language of the NSS would apply to any outside power. This runs counter to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plans to diversify Canada’s trade and defence relationships away from the United States. The NSS delivers a vision of extraterritorial economic nationalism that sees the sovereignty of allies, including Canada, as something “lesser” to be dominated – particularly worrying in the context of Mr. Trump’s repeated musings about using economic coercion to make Canada the 51st state. Those who thought the age of imperialism ended more than a century ago might have just been proven wrong.
December 9, 2025 at 12:32 AM
musicmaker5.bsky.social
Don't visit the US if you value your freedom.
dave1agar.bsky.social dave1agar @dave1agar.bsky.social · 20h
More Canadians, including children, detained in U.S. for immigration violations, new data show

“An estimated 207 Canadians have now been held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody at some point since January…”

www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...
More Canadians, including children, detained in U.S. for immigration violations, new data show
Immigration crackdown south of the border increasingly ensnaring Canadians with no criminal record
www.theglobeandmail.com
December 9, 2025 at 3:01 AM
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parismarx.com
our government should be speaking out about this but they don’t want to piss of donald trump
dave1agar.bsky.social dave1agar @dave1agar.bsky.social · 20h
More Canadians, including children, detained in U.S. for immigration violations, new data show

“An estimated 207 Canadians have now been held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody at some point since January…”

www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...
More Canadians, including children, detained in U.S. for immigration violations, new data show
Immigration crackdown south of the border increasingly ensnaring Canadians with no criminal record
www.theglobeandmail.com
December 8, 2025 at 6:01 PM
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zhugeex.com
The real takeaway here is that if Elon was to say this about China, the govt would shut down his business overnight and revoke access to the market.

But he can openly say this about the EU knowing full well any response will be slow, ineffective, and offset by US political backing.
joniaskola.bsky.social Joni Askola @joniaskola.bsky.social · 2d
It’s funny how Elon Musk has no problem with Chinese regulation, which is much stricter than European regulation.

Have you ever seen him call for the abolition of the CCP?
December 8, 2025 at 10:18 PM
musicmaker5.bsky.social
At first, I thought this might be from The Onion. This is so funny.

www.theguardian.com/film/2025/de...
Jim Caviezel to play Jair Bolsonaro in ‘heroic’ biopic
Actor, who starred in The Passion of the Christ, will play the disgraced ex-Brazilian president in film written by his one-time secretary of culture
www.theguardian.com
December 9, 2025 at 2:58 AM
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annakornbluh.bsky.social
"The rapid, largely unregulated rise of datacenters to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate and water security."

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
More than 200 environmental groups demand halt to new US datacenters
Exclusive: Congress urged to act against energy-hungry facilities blamed for increasing bills and worsening climate crisis
www.theguardian.com
December 9, 2025 at 2:35 AM
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mcopelov.bsky.social
👇🎯 It is all but impossible to have sensible discussions about 🇺🇸 power & hegemony, whether we’re talking here about military things or elsewhere about money/finance, because any change in the world as it was c.1991-2001, no matter how incremental, instantly is treated as the End Of All Things.
davidalman.bsky.social David Alman @davidalman.bsky.social · 23h
This is a wild framing.

The US can dominate everywhere in the world except 7000 miles away at an island 100 miles off another superpower’s coast.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
Opinion | Overmatched: Why the U.S. Military Must Reinvent Itself
Investing in the old ways of war leaves America at risk.
www.nytimes.com
December 8, 2025 at 7:34 PM
musicmaker5.bsky.social
Doubling down on a dying industry is foolish. Fewer and fewer people work in oil and gas and even if they were to build ten new pipelines, it wouldn't create more jobs.

increase 'thttps://youtu.be/-KlP5nSbgO0?si=gopVeh6FdfvI_lZI
New Pipeline Won't Save Disappearing Oil Patch Jobs
YouTube video by Energi Media
youtu.be
December 9, 2025 at 2:44 AM
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rbreich.bsky.social
What I always hear: “We can’t afford to pay our workers more than $15 an hour.”

What I never hear: “We can’t afford to pay our CEO millions of dollars a year.”

Funny how that works.
December 7, 2025 at 10:01 PM
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attackerman.bsky.social
They're using the confinement box, one of the most horrific methods of CIA torture in the post-9/11 black sites, against migrants now. This is the direct result of the lack of consequences for the architects of the torture program. Either there will be criminal penalties for this or it will expand.
Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz
Amnesty International, interviewing migrant detainees, identifies use of the confinement box. There can be no denying it is a torture prison
www.forever-wars.com
December 8, 2025 at 9:40 PM
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repdwightevans.bsky.social
Thousands of Pennsylvanians are giving up their health insurance as premiums skyrocket.

The GOP majorities in Congress haven’t acted. And Trump is more focused on building a ballroom to entertain his billionaire buddies than ending this GOP-manufactured crisis.
For every person who enrolls in ACA coverage through Pennie, two drop their plans
Open enrollment runs through the end of January.
www.inquirer.com
December 8, 2025 at 6:07 PM
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karlbode.com
it would probably be wise for the extraction class to stop talking
As AI wipes jobs, Google CEO Sundar Pichai says it’s up to everyday people to adapt accordingly: ‘We will have to work through societal disruption’ | Fortune
AI isn’t just coming for entry-level workers. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says no job, not even his own, is safe. But those who don’t adapt will be the first to fall.
fortune.com
December 8, 2025 at 6:49 PM
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akelacooper.bsky.social
Make no mistake—both Netflix and Paramount are fucking awful choices in the continued consolidation of our industry but if it comes down to Kushner and the Saudis, Netflix is the lesser of two evils
karlbode.com Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 20h
Jared Kushner's involvement was "not mentioned in Paramount's press release on Monday morning about its $108 billion bid, nor were participating sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar."

fancy that
Jared Kushner is part of Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery
Paramount is telling WBD shareholders that it has a smoother path to regulatory approval than does Netflix.
www.axios.com
December 8, 2025 at 6:53 PM
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jackjenkins.me
UPDATE: Another Chicago-area church has put up an immigration-themed Nativity scene.

A church member at Urban Village Church sent this one along, where Mary, Joseph and Jesus are gone and replaced with a sign that reads: “Due to ICE activity in our community, the Holy Family is in hiding.”
A Nativity where Mary, Joseph and Jesus are gone and replaced with a sign that reads: “Due to ICE activity in our community, the Holy Family is in hiding.”
December 7, 2025 at 10:31 PM
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woodsideful.bsky.social
Employment in oil and gas is in terminal decline and won’t be saved no matter what Carney and Smith cook up, according to new research from the Centre for Future Work provided exclusively to @nationalobserver.com.

The only responsible choice for governments is to plan for the transition.
Exclusive: Fossil fuel workers won’t be saved by Carney’s oil and gas boosterism
A new pipeline won’t lead to new jobs in the oil and gas sector, and the only question for government officials is whether or not to plan for the inevitable energy transition, according to new researc...
www.nationalobserver.com
December 8, 2025 at 2:13 PM
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cfiesler.bsky.social
I mean we are absolutely in a place now where the only solution to this information disorder is for everyone to constantly evaluate the source of information. Never trust a chatbot, but also don't believe a video unless you know and trust where it comes from.

Unfortunately... that's a lot of work.
December 5, 2025 at 11:18 PM
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miriamposner.com
Incredible book, if you haven’t seen it. I think about the “technologically precocious boy” all the time.
December 7, 2025 at 4:26 PM
musicmaker5.bsky.social
💯

youtu.be/qbCxcEA1Ifw?...
Trump's Asserting US "Dominance" Over Western Hemisphere. Canada, Too?
YouTube video by Energi Media
youtu.be
December 8, 2025 at 3:24 PM
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adamserwer.bsky.social
The “garbage” destroying America isn’t in Minnesota’s Somalian community. It’s in the Oval Office. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...
There is a difference between inheritance and action. I cannot help who my ancestors are, but I can make my own choices. That so many Americans chose to place in power a man who holds people in contempt on the basis of race, religion, and national origin; that so much of the mainstream media conveys this bigotry through tired, obfuscating euphemisms; that there is so low a political price for the president’s racism that he and those around him see little risk in its expression—well, that does say something about America, and Americans. Immigration isn’t breaking our society. That’s a job Americans can do on their own.
December 4, 2025 at 5:08 PM
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edzitron.com
LLMs are the final insult from a tech industry that fundamentally turned on the customer, the ugliest form of the Rot Economy that defied consumers’ wants and needs in favor of what would inspire a market disconnected from any real value creation. May they burn.
wheresyoured.at/premium-the-...
It feels like the final insult from a tech industry that fundamentally turned on the customer, the ugliest form of the Rot Economy that defied consumers’ wants and needs in favor of what would inspire a market disconnected from any real value creation. They’ve watched the tech industry spend 10 years making its products worse as a means of expressing growth, and then crested that era by adding the world’s least-reliable, most-annoying software in ways that have become all but unavoidable. Technology is no longer synonymous with progress, but with a kind of parasitic gaslighting that tells us that if we don’t pray at the feet of whoever “the geniuses” are at any given time that we’re morons, that we’ll get replaced, that we’ll be poor, jobless, ignorant or unworthy of having any part of the future. The products being made by the tech industry no longer feel like they’re made for any living human being, but the abstraction of a person created in the mind of a product manager in Palo Alto or a venture capitalist that hasn’t set foot in a city in a decade. These people believe that the best products are the ones that must be forced upon users, who in turn will adapt to how the product works versus making products that solve a problem that a customer already has. Silicon Valley no longer leads us — it attacks us with ideas until we either give in or are tricked into engaging with Copilot on Word or Gemini on Google Docs or accidentally brush an AI button or because our bosses tell us “you need to be AI-first” without knowing what the fuck that means. This is no longer the industry that created the iPhone or Facebook or Google. It’s a gaggle of management consultants that believe software must be sold through abusing and manipulating customers until they give up and give in. The tech industry is well-known for finding ways to keep people on platforms, but has never had to face an era where it had to get people to come back, and after three years of insulting, offens…
December 5, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Reposted
edzitron.com
The post-LLM era may be characterized by companies willfully walking away from AI, realizing many customers find it offensive, expensive and unreliable. What will remain will be a paired-down version of chatbots we use today, if any of them still exist.
www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-...
Part 5: What’s Left At The End (A Scenario) Though there’s a lot of talk about Amazon’s Trainium or Google’s TPUs, I strongly believe that the end of the AI bubble will be one where these services are vastly paired back, especially if costs are as dire as I believe they are. Even with a vast array of custom silicon, generative AI still doesn’t appear to be profitable — if it were, we’d hear nothing but Sundar Pichai and Andy Jassy screeching about the incredible benefits of their custom GPUs. I also find it laughable to hear people suggest that TPUs are some sort of “$900 billion secret sauce.” Literally one company has been able to make money selling AI GPUs, and it isn’t clear where they’re even fucking shipping them to or why they’re even able to sell them. Once the bubble bursts, I expect hyperscalers to start slashing their many, many leases of AI data centers, and trying to reduce usage across the board, either through raising prices, reducing access to models, or funneling people to the cheapest, shittiest ones while hiding features like “AI mode” from the public. While Google claims hundreds of millions of users of Google Gemini, it did so by literally replacing Google Assistant with it — kind of like how it will happily claim that it had 2 billion users of AI overviews, a feature it forced upon literally every single Google Search user. I imagine there will be a period where these companies attempt to find the cheapest, shittiest version of generative AI that they can put out there while keeping the services up until the markets give them permission to pull the plug, which will also include drastically slashing capital expenditures, which will be much easier when there’s no pressure to build more data centers or buy more NVIDIA GPUs. The only reason these companies are embarrassingly shoving AI into everything is that they have staked their brands on doing so after being rewarded by markets with the minds of toddlers. Once “AI” becomes anathema, they w… The remains of ChatGPT will likely forward to a bastardized, Copilot-powered version, or, as a chaos bet, a version of Google Gemini that barely functions in the same way. In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that there is any kind of profitable version of an LLM that can be accessed at scale by consumers, and I imagine that whatever is left behind will be the most ghostly, basic version of what we’re used to. I also believe that many consumers truly hate AI, and will be happy to see it gone. A lot of what happens next will depend on how much further this era goes. Both Microsoft and Meta are asking for federal approval to get into energy trading — a worrying, Enron-adjacent idea that takes both companies out of their core businesses and throws them into something entirely different, though considering Apple has also received approval, I might be overreacting. I imagine Meta will also be the last man standing of the AI boom — its awkward, shitty and actively harmful AI integrations becoming the dead malls of the LLM era until the drain on operating expenses eventually becomes too much. NVIDIA, as a company, will survive, but look very different. It will have to return to its core businesses — gaming GPUs, robotics, and the like — and will have much, much smaller revenues than before, though with a much larger warchest if it plays its cards right. I could also see Satya Nadella getting fired. Microsoft has staked its future on AI in a big, embarrassing way, and has spent two years stepping on rakes as story after story runs saying “Microsoft fucks up big time in AI” or “Microsoft customers “do not like its AI software and do not want to pay for it” or “Microsoft spends even more money on AI,” and in October, Microsoft promoted Judson Althoff to “CEO of commercial business” so that it could “free up Satya Nadella to focus exclusively on technical work as the company races to dominate AI,” also known as “go and stand on that pile of leaves Satya, I swear it’s sta… I also think the aftermath will be absolutely horrible for startups. 2021 and 2022 involved billions of dollars of wasted venture capital being pumped into useless cryptocurrency, NFT and metaverse plays, leading to brutal rounds of layoffs and locked-up capital sitting in investments that would never sell. 2023, 2024, and 2025 involved hundreds more billions flowing into AI startups, the majority of which are unsustainable and have no path to profitability, making them unlikely to get acquired or go public, making them terrible investments. Outside of a remarkable series of acquisitions, I expect a lot of VCs to have to face their investors and get told to go fuck themselves. The problems of the AI bubble were obvious as early as 2023, but VCs chose to build hype despite the numbers staring them in the face, in part because a lot of people ignored the same numbers. Venture took an absolute beating post-2021, but things rebounded with the AI hype cycle. My greatest worry is that LPs will take this opportunity to fully pull out of venture capital, leaving an already-barren startup ecosystem desperate for further funds at a time when the tech industry will desperately need something new. I felt compelled for a second to say “if I’m wrong,” but I’m stopping myself because at this point where I’ll be “wrong” will be bits and pieces of history rather than the overall era. The only thing that gives me pause is that the ramifications of me being right will involve such a fundamentally different tech industry to the one we see today — one where the one thing everybody is talking about won’t be there, where funding will be tighter than it’s ever been, and where being in “tech” will feel a little embarrassing after years of screaming about how LLMs were the future. And I fundamentally believe the generative AI era is one where the tech industry has gone too far. Regular people are furious about AI. They hate it, it upsets them, it’s revolting, in part because of what it …
December 5, 2025 at 5:36 PM
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bhaggart.bsky.social
Giving ministers the power to exempt pet projects from any law on the books except for the Criminal Code isn’t nation-building. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
The fact that they‘re trying to sneak this through without any explanation is particularly incriminating.
Althia Raj: Mark Carney is quietly giving sweeping new powers to his ministers
Sneaking a change of this magnitude into a 600-page bill that will not get parliamentary scrutiny raises a red flag, Althia Raj writes.
www.thestar.com
December 7, 2025 at 1:22 PM