Poor Jeff. All he always seems to achieve is sort of 2nd place or worse, isn’t it.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/23/defense-in-depth/
learn how a “leaderless” group is actually led by its least scrupulous, most Machiavellian schemers
Seems apropos
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/24/enforcement-priorities/#enemies-lists
Replacing Chopra is hard for [Fuckface] in part because [von Clownstick] has imposed a federal hiring freeze. That means that anyone who replaces Chopra has to already be working for the US government, and all the finance grifters are cashing out of the government to go work for giant financial institutions they’ve been carrying water for while drawing a public salary. Even the people who might take the job can’t, because then no one could be hired to do their job – for example, there’s a ghoul at the FDIC who’d fit the bill, but if he takes over from Chopra, then the FDIC will have just two members. If the GOP stooge on the FCC quits to take the job, then the Democratic commissioners will have a majority. You love to see it, really.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/
Don’t forget to go shopping for those cute winter boots
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The core regulatory proposition of the tech industry is “it’s not a crime if we do it with an app.”
In a nutshell.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out
before we can occupy the Dems, we have to occupy the unions. We need union bosses who are committed to signing up every worker who wants workplace democracy, and unionizing every workplace in spite of the NLRB, not with its help. We need to go back to our roots, when there were no rules.
Unions will only be effective again when they are illegal?
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Or you need to organise as if they are?
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/04/citizen-lab/#nso-group
Today, Simon and Schuster publishes Hunting Shadows, Deibert’s pulse-pounding, sphinter-tightening true memoir of his battles with the highly secretive industry whose billionaire owners provide mercenary spyware that’s used by torturers, murderers and criminals to terrorize their victims:
Chasing Shadows | Book by Ronald J. Deibert | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster
Mercenary spyware companies are based all over the world, but the global leader in providing these tools is Israel, where the signals intelligence Unit 8200 serves as a breeding ground for startup founders who grow wealthy serving dictators around the world, thanks in part to Israel’s lax export standards for cyberweapons.
Canadian, eh? They should go after the dickheads infiltrating the US payment systems
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Walking in through the front door and loudly proclaiming what they are about to make the people running the systems do is hardly “infiltrating”.
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True, poor word choice on my part. Highjackers?
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/04/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools
people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That’s why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for “leads” and “customers” and to use the language of social solidarity (“women helping women”) to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don’t need and can’t afford.
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Pretty sure they’re high on something…
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/
These people are committing grave crimes against the nation and its people. They should be known for this. It should follow them for the rest of their lives. It should be the lead in their obituaries. People who are introduced to them at parties should have a flash of recognition, hastily end the handshake, then turn on their heels and race to the bathroom to scrub their hands. For the rest of their lives.
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broccoli hair brownshirts
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/11/doubling-up-on-paperwork/#rip-freefile
Nearly everyone who pays a tax-prep place or website to file their tax return is just sending data to the IRS that the IRS already has. This is insanely wasteful.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/12/you-and-what-army/#student-debt
the point is, the president defied Congress, which is a thing that Very Serious Grownups told us radicals Joe Biden mustn’t do under any circumstances, lest the resulting constitutional crisis tear the country apart, or, at the very least, alienate so many voters that Donald Trump would become the next president.
We let Very Serious Grownups call the shots, and Donald Trump is president. Maybe we should stop listening to Very Serious Grownups?
This is the kind of crisis where I’d expect Democrats on the Hill, at a minimum, to be refusing to give Trump and the GOP anything. Call quorum on every vote. Debate every amendment. Raise every objection. Vote against everything. Do not confirm a single appointee. And any elected Dem that refuses to play along? Kick 'em out of the caucus. Oh, we can’t afford to do that because we can’t afford to lose a single lawmaker? How did that work out with Kirsten Synema and Joe Manchin? Shoulda kicked them out after the first vote, shoulda raised money for any real Dem willing to primary them. Should have shunned them in the hallways and refused to invite them to the Christmas parties. We should do that to Fetterman. Party unity got us nothing under Biden. Party unity got us Trump. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome isn’t actually the formal definition of insanity, but it is nevertheless very, very stupid.
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TODAY (Feb 15): a virtual event with Cory Doctorow and Yanis Varoufakis:
Should be good!
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/
Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers’ personalities based on their faces
It’s junk science at scale, with a business model. The purpose of this automated eugenics is the same as every “rational” account of hierarchy in human history: to retroactively justify winners, and to condemn losers before the game even starts.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/
in economies both good and bad, the people who emerge from lucky orifices will get wealthier than anyone else, wealthier than the people who do things that grow the economy. And because they’re getting wealthier faster than the economy grows, they come to command ever-larger shares of the economy, so that even when the pie gets bigger, their slices gets bigger still, and the remainder that we all share isn’t just proportionally smaller – it’s actually smaller. We don’t just have less relative to the rich – we have less relative to our parents.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/19/gimme-five/#jeffty
Five years and two weeks ago, I parted ways with Boing Boing, a website I co-own and wrote for virtually every day for 19 years ago. Two weeks later – five years ago from today – I started my own blog, Pluralistic, which is, therefore, half a decade old, as of today
Do people really allow their devices to interrupt them on a random reinforcement schedule? I mean, no wonder the internet makes people go crazy. I’m not a big believer in BF Skinner, but I think it’s well established that any stimulus that occurs at random intervals is impossible to get used to, and shocks you anew every time it recurs.
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