u/NoTimeForInfinity
The US electrical grid is facing a stress test like never before. Thanks to a perfect storm of AI power consumption, climate crisis, crony capitalism, and a president bent on uprooting perfectly good energy infrastructure, the country's already-struggling power system is rapidly crumbling as costs balloon into the stratosphere.
In a private group chat in June, dozens of Democratic political influencers discussed whether to take advantage of an enticing opportunity. They were being offered $8,000 per month to take part in a secretive program aimed at bolstering Democratic messaging on the internet.
According to copies of the contract viewed by WIRED, creators in the program must funnel all bookings with lawmakers and political leaders through Chorus.
“If I get Zohran and he wants to [do an] interview with me, I don’t want to give that to them.”
the ability to force creators to remove or correct content based solely on the organization’s discretion if that content was made at a Chorus-organized event.
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‘The Red and the Green’ Casey A. Williams
The Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito’s proposal for “degrowth communism” as a solution to the climate crisis has inspired fierce debate, including among other Marxists.
“I do know that a society which seeks fulfillment only in mindless material expansion does not fit into this world for long. There simply is no place for infinite growth on a finite planet.”
For Saito, treating the Earth as a “commons” means using its resources more prudently and distributing them more equally.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants all Americans wearing a wearable within the next four years, he told House members Tuesday.
Kennedy promised “one of the biggest advertising campaigns in HHS history” to reach that goal during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee.
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The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html
as someone who has tracked the advantages and perils of technology for human rights over the past ten years, I am nevertheless convinced that digital ID, writ large, poses one of the gravest risks to human rights of any technology that we have encountered. Worse, we are rushing headlong into a future where new technologies will converge to make this risk much more severe.
https://www.wired.com/story/digital-ids-are-more-dangerous-than-you-think/
Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”
And it was just another day in Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right. That same week in Chatham House, Lonsdale and the Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban sparred over affirmative action, and Cuban and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro discussed questions of culture and work ethic.
“If you weren’t in the business at all, you’d think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently — and [they’re] not. It’s a small group of people who talk to each other and overlap between politics and
motherjones.comA diehard Donald Trump supporter, Ton-That envisioned using facial recognition to compare images of migrants crossing the border to mugshots to see if the arrivals had been previously arrested in the United States. His Border Patrol pitch also included a proposal to screen any arrival for “sentiment about the USA.”
Ton-That, who obsessed over race, IQ, and hierarchy, solicited input from eugenicists and right-wing extremists while building Clearview, and how, from the outset, he and his associates discussed deploying the tech against immigrants, people of color, and the political left. All told, this new reporting paints a chilling portrait of an ideologically driven company whose po
The architects of projects like Próspera are drafting legislation to create US cities that would be free from federal regulations.
According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
https://www.wired.com/story/startup-nations-donald-trump-legislation/
By the second month of treatment, those in the semaglutide group had reduced the quantify of alcohol consumed on drinking days by an average of nearly 30%, compared to an average reduction of about 2% in the placebo group. Also, nearly 40% of people in the semaglutide group reported no heavy drinking days
You can chart historical/cultural trends by what drugs were broadly popular at the time-alcohol, coffee, cocaine, speed, psychedelics, weed, Prozac etc. What happens to nsociety and culture with less impulse, hunger and lust? What does this portend for the overmorrow?
while liberalism vastly expanded the scope of its citizens’ personal and sexual freedom, the cost to many was the obliteration of community life along with any kind of greater sense of metaphysical meaning. The resulting epidemic of mass atomization, loneliness, and ennui have eaten through western societies like an acid, a story compellingly illustrated in recent years in the fiction of Michel Houellebecq.
But that’s all over now. The ‘arc of history’ that liberals insisted inevitably bent ‘toward justice’ turns out to have been little more than a transparent fantasy, a bedtime story they told themselves to scare away the boojums as the darkness closed in, vise-like, around their necks.
But instead of creating awkward tension as I feared, these exchanges led to meaningful dialog. Chinese users explained their questions about U.S. income: they were curious because Chinese “American dreamers” – Chinese who talk of moving to the U.S. – often paint an exaggerated picture of American salaries and living standards. Americans were surprised to learn that while same-sex marriage remains illegal in China, the city of Chengdu is known as the country’s “gay capital.”
David Corn
After outlining these areas where dogma purportedly rules, Thiel asserted that part of the solution to the trouble at hand is “nationalism.”...he called nationalism “a corrective to the sort of homogenizing brain-dead one-world state that is totalitarian and where there is no dissent and no individualism is allowed.” He spoke of a “globalist future in which individuals will not exist. It will just be some kind of a brain-dead borg.” Thiel’s nightmare is a Star Trek movie.
fiat money”—currency created by governments—is “heading toward some crisis point.”...Thiel appeared to be advocating smashing the Fed, relying on crypto, and ginning up nationalism