“That surgery date got cancelled because what with the coma and all, she exceeded the number of sick days her company allowed. So they fired her and she lost her health insurance. Surgery cancelled.”
“[Ben Franklin] believed that the more you helped people, the softer they got, and the less success you would see. That’s a very American idea, but it’s been proven false again and again. If you give people a little bit more support, they tend to do better, and we all prosper as a result.”
“Are these programs efficient? In the case of Social Security, the answer is a flat yes: it simply sends out checks, with very low overhead and very little fraud.” — Paul Krugman pointing out that whatever the DOGE committee is going to do, it’s not targeting wasteful programs.
““Drawing lines around content moderation was always a political enterprise,” said Klonick, an associate professor of law at St. John’s University and scholar of content moderation policy. “To pretend these new rules are any more ‘neutral’ than the old rules is a farce and a lie.” — a look at Facebook’s new approach to tolerating hate speech.
If you think that’s bad, wait until you read Karen Attiah’s account of talking to Meta’s new black-personality AI.
“Needless to say, Meta’s commitment to “free speech” involves adopting Elon Musk’s definition (i.e. everybody has to view Nazi content whether or not they want to, everyone else is subject to arbitrary restrictions.)”
“The proliferating data centres that house AI servers produce electronic waste. They are large consumers of water, which is becoming scarce in many places. They rely on critical minerals and rare elements, which are often mined unsustainably. And they use massive amounts of electricity, spurring the emission of planet-warming greenhouse gases.”
“To fail to appreciate that baseball is supposed to be boring most of the time is to miss something fundamental about the game. That boredom is the background frame that makes the rare moments of supreme pitch by pitch tension during, say, the late innings of a close World Series games what they are. This is, in the end, a question of aesthetic preferences, which aren’t very amenable to the ruthless logic of the Market, which demands always more . . . more stimulation, more excitement, more immediate gratification, more happenings, and less waiting for something to happen.”
“This week, Disney agreed to settle the class action lawsuit for $233 million, the largest settlement for wage theft in California history. The settlement includes over $100 million in back wages.” — a happy moment in the much darker world of corporate wage theft.
“Costco called out the group for “inflicting burdens” on companies through “policy bias” and said their proposal did not aim to address financial risks but to strike down DEI efforts.” Good for CostCo!
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