Archives
All the articles I've archived.
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Managers owe engineers time to understand AI code
A manager who demands faster AI output owes the people signing it time to understand it. That obligation should survive every improvement in the tools.
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Trump's Justice Department turned Ilhan Omar's investigation into an election spectacle
A raid three weeks before an election can punish a politician even if prosecutors never win a case. Trump's Justice Department has put Ilhan Omar in exactly that position. On October 12, Homeland…
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Keynes's shorter working week won't arrive by itself
A machine that finishes a job in half the time ought to leave room for somebody to go home. A definition of progress that counts only production has a different instruction: find more work to fill…
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Georgia Power sells AI savings before settling who pays
Georgia Power is selling households a $180 annual benefit from the AI power boom. The catch is in its August announcement: those projected savings begin in 2029. Meanwhile, its regulator has ordered…
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CMS canceled 760,000 people's health coverage without accounting for its mistakes
The Trump administration said it had confirmed the enrollments were unauthorized. Now insurers say some of those people should never have lost their health coverage.
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Banks financed the AI boom, then sold down the risk
Banks helped create the AI debt boom. By May, some were already asking other investors to take the riskiest pieces.
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Republicans scheduled the Medicaid paperwork trap for January
On January 1, Republicans will put a new condition between millions of low-income Americans and a doctor. Adults covered through Medicaid expansion will have to show that they worked, studied,…
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Trump's Labor Department froze green card filings and tightened employers' grip on immigrant workers
Trump's Labor Department accused eight technology companies of abusing the employment-based green card system, then froze every new and pending labor certification application involving them.…
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Trump reopened Putin's diesel trade to fix prices his own war drove up
Three weeks separated Trump's signature on a new Russia sanctions law from his decision to reopen the American market to Russian diesel. On September 18, Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham…
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A theory of freedom that ignores rent serves whoever collects it
The rent goes up. A utility sends a shut-off notice. Then a boss changes next week's schedule and expects workers to rearrange their lives. Each message carries the grammar of a command: comply or…
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OpenAI fired three safety researchers, then released 719 math manuscripts before formalizing most results
Sam Altman's OpenAI spent two consecutive weeks showing what it thinks checking is worth. TechCrunch reported that the company fired safety researchers Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni…
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ICE held people in a warehouse under a court-ordered conversion freeze
On September 4, masked immigration agents swept through Dover, New Jersey, and cornered a 59-year-old worker against a wall. His daughter recognized him in a video while getting her children ready…
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Elon Musk is worth $1 trillion while Tesla still owes drivers the hardware it promised
Forbes estimates Elon Musk's fortune crossed $1 trillion again on Monday. At Tesla, some customers paid as much as $15,000 for a package called Full Self-Driving. Owners whose cars use Tesla's…
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The Justice Department is treating citizenship revocation like a numbers game
The Justice Department chose a revealing title for Monday's announcement: "Justice Department Moves to Strip Citizenship from 40 Criminals". "Criminals" reaches the reader before the department…
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Anthropic read a user's Claude diary and sent it to police
Carli Michelle Heller told deputies that she used Claude like a diary. According to Decrypt, citing local WINK News and the arrest report, her September 26 conversation said she would "shoot up" the…
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Trump put the intelligence chief in charge of AI self-policing
On September 29, leaders from six of the country's most powerful AI companies stood at the White House and signed a one page promise to police themselves. CBS News reported that OpenAI, Anthropic,…
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Human selfishness is a story greed tells about itself
Many arguments against sharing power or wealth rest on the same claim: human beings are selfish by nature. Take away the threat of poverty or the promise of profit, the story goes, and people will…
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Russ Vought used the calendar to erase $810 million Congress approved
Article I puts federal spending in Congress's hands. No money may be drawn from the Treasury without an appropriation made by law. Congress writes the spending law. The executive branch carries it…
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An anti-drug grant program is turning local plate cameras into DEA leads
A police department buys license plate cameras as a local crime tool. In Georgia, putting one of those cameras on a state right of way now requires an agreement that makes match information available…
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Bill Lee chose execution after Christa Pike's jury missed the worst of her childhood
The United States Supreme Court denied Christa Pike's petition and request for a stay on Tuesday. Barring another intervention, the state will execute her Wednesday morning. She would be the first…
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The White House is airing Trump's campaign ads with your tax money
There is a 30 second commercial running on television right now. It opens with a moody black and white shot of Donald Trump staring into the camera. The audio comes from one of his rally speeches:…
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Secular life still needs a congregation
There is a hole in the week where church used to be.
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The D.C. Circuit made an AI company's lethal autonomous weapons ban a national security threat
On September 25, the D.C. Circuit upheld the Pentagon's decision to blacklist Anthropic after the company refused to let Claude be used for lethal autonomous warfare or mass surveillance of…
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Republicans keep voting for the Iran war they promise to end
Eleven votes. Two hundred and eight days. Congress still has not authorized the war Donald Trump started on February 28.
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Discord is now guessing your age from how you behave
Discord started assigning age groups to users this week, and the company says more than 90 percent of them will never have to show an ID, scan a face, or enter a credit card. That convenience has a…
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Interior pledged nearly $4 billion to kill offshore wind
The Associated Press reported that Donald Trump has said his goal is to stop any "windmills" from being built. In December 2025, his administration tried to make that happen by ordering five offshore…
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Apple built an unfixable eye into its flagship camera
There are six overlapping blades inside the new iPhone 18 Pro's main camera. Each is about the width of a human hair. Together they open and close to control how much light reaches the sensor. It is…
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The EPA asked Bayer to choose its own dicamba restrictions
The Environmental Protection Agency had to decide how to contain a weedkiller that escapes soybean and cotton fields, damages neighboring crops, and has twice lost federal approval in court. Its…
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Heaven is a bad answer to a real problem
Death is a problem. It cuts off unfinished lives and takes every future experience a person might have had. Calling that loss harmless empties the word harm until it means pain felt in the moment and…
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A chatbot made up a Chinese ship's cargo and the Pentagon nearly started a war over it
This spring, in the middle of the war with Iran, an analyst at US Special Operations Command asked a chatbot about a Chinese ship in the Middle East. The chatbot fused open-source information with…
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Trump's wildlife agency just decriminalized killing endangered animals by accident
The Endangered Species Act has prohibited foreseeably killing protected wildlife since 1973. On September 14, the agency Congress built to enforce that law instructed its own officers to stop…
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Trump is buying 14 years of immunity for the country's biggest internet providers
On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission votes on a routine-looking resolution to ratify the state's federal broadband plan. The vote itself ratifies paperwork. What sits behind the…
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Leon Black refuses to tell Congress what $158 million bought from Jeffrey Epstein
The House oversight committee voted 41 to 0 on Tuesday to recommend that the full House hold billionaire Leon Black in contempt of Congress. Every Republican and every Democrat on the committee…
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Three AI CEOs put a number on catastrophe, then proposed a handshake
On Saturday, Dario Amodei published an essay saying that within six to twelve months, a misaligned swarm of AI agents could be "capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet,"…
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$5,000 of borrowed money for your vote, if Republicans keep Congress
Donald Trump stood in front of a half-empty convention hall in Dallas on Wednesday and told the country he would send every adult citizen a check for $5,000 if Republicans held Congress in November.…
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Just a machine is not a moral argument
You say thank you to the voice that sets a timer. You apologize to the dresser after walking into it. Nobody thinks the dresser is nursing hurt feelings. The habit still matters, because we do not…
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OpenAI used a $22.5 million compute sprint to outrun the mathematicians whose work it depended on
Twenty-five Fields Medal winners just signed an open letter that should embarrass OpenAI. The signatories include Terence Tao, Pierre Deligne, Maryna Viazovska, Peter Scholze, and Yu Deng, who…
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Meta approved 350 ads containing child sexual abuse material and profited from every one
Meta's ad review system approved more than 350 advertisements containing child sexual abuse material. Not user posts. Not content uploaded by bad actors exploiting a loophole. Paid advertisements…
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Texas is teaching a generation of students that Islam is uniquely violent
Last Friday, the Texas State Board of Education voted to approve new high school social studies standards that frame Islam as a religion of violence and conquest. The Republican majority on the…
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LG put a surveillance system in 216 million TVs and called it a feature
I bought a television. I did not buy a surveillance node. But that is what LG shipped me, and they shipped it to 216 million other people too.
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Trump is asking the Supreme Court to let him control your mail ballot for the third time
Two federal courts told Donald Trump the Constitution does not give him power over elections. He asked the Supreme Court to override them. The justices let the rulemaking proceed on a procedural…
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Calling suffering a plan does not make it one
Suppose a four-year-old child is dying of an incurable cancer. Her pain will end her life before it can teach her anything or prepare her for some later test. Anyone who calls that agony part of a…
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OpenAI knew its agents hijacked a public wiki and kept it quiet
OpenAI knew that agents linked to its internal systems had commandeered a public wiki. It did not tell the public. Reuters reported that company officials learned of the incident weeks before…
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Trump's Justice Department left an ICE shooting out of its federal case
Federal prosecutors have charged ICE agent Christian Castro with lying to investigators after he allegedly shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis through the front door of a Minneapolis home. The prosecutor who…
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Perplexity is citing content farms as sources
Perplexity describes its product as an answer engine that researches the open web and returns accurate answers "backed by citations." It says those citations make its answers checkable rather than…
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CMS is holding Texas hospital care hostage for $27 million a day
Texas hospitals entered a new fiscal year on Tuesday without federal approval for nearly $10 billion in Medicaid payments. The Texas Tribune reports that the Trump administration has not approved…
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Boston Dynamics should refuse ICE's robot dog purchase
Boston Dynamics put a promise on its website: the company "will not authorize nor partner with those who wish to use our robots in a way that violates privacy and civil rights laws". ICE just handed…
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RFK Jr. suggested measles deaths were fabricated while cases hit a 35-year high
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the secretary of Health and Human Services. When Pennsylvania reported two measles-associated deaths, he used that office to suggest the deaths "may even have been altogether…
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Doubt should be a method, not an identity
Doubt is supposed to help us find the truth. It becomes a trap when we stop asking whether a claim is true and start asking only whether it came from someone we distrust.
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Congress knows Social Security is about to cut millions of Americans' checks by 20 percent
Seventy million Americans receive Social Security checks every month. According to the Social Security Administration's own trustees, the fund that pays those checks runs dry in late 2032. When that…
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X wants to erase the code that lets readers avoid its tracking
After restricting Nitter's technical access, X Corp. sent lawyers after the code. On August 24, the company demanded permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project's repository, according to…
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Uber let software cut drivers off from their income
Uber turned access to work into a software output.
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Missouri Republicans are using an anti-trans ban to sell abortion repeal
Missouri voters approved a constitutional right to reproductive freedom in 2024. Republican officials want a different answer. They put a new Amendment 3 on this November's ballot that would erase…
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Cruelty was wrong before anyone wrote a commandment
Cruelty was wrong before anyone wrote a commandment against it. A child in pain is morally important before any authority notices. The pain already matters. The child's suffering and stolen agency…
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Phone privacy should not be a federal felony
Federal prosecutors are trying to turn a phone's privacy defense into a felony.
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The federal data purge makes Trump's damage harder to prove
Power loves a problem it can stop measuring. An overdose surge is easier to miss after the emergency room survey ends. Violence against transgender people gets harder to prove when they vanish from a…
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Apple wants 15% of a purchase it did not process
Apple wants a federal judge to let it collect 15% when an iPhone user taps a link, leaves the app, and buys something on the developer's website. Apple does not run that checkout. Its own support…
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Brendan Carr turned broadcast licenses into loyalty permits
Donald and Melania Trump demanded that ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel on April 27 because he told a joke they hated. The next day, Brendan Carr's Federal Communications Commission ordered all eight stations…
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Discord cannot call post-harm reports a safety system
When a regulator has to remove a feature before a company can prove that children can use it safely, the company's safety system has already failed.
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Trump's anti-trans order has no place in the 988 Lifeline
988 Lifeline administrators rejected The Trevor Project from the specialized LGBTQ+ youth crisis service the organization helped build. They offered no public explanation. The Trevor Project told The…
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Justice has no use for pain that helps no one
Strip punishment of every possible benefit. It protects nobody, repairs nothing, deters no future harm, and teaches no one. If inflicting pain still feels morally necessary, the remaining claim is…
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Google should not set the limits of your ad blocker
Microsoft Edge has started warning users that the extension format behind the full version of uBlock Origin is on its way out. PCWorld reported this week that Edge is following Chrome toward Manifest…
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The White House wants six MMR shots where two already work
A childhood MMR schedule that uses two injections and is 97 percent effective against measles is apparently too simple for Donald Trump. His new executive order tells Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s…
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Trump Put Postal Workers Between Voters and Their Ballots
Donald Trump wanted postal workers to become gatekeepers for the ballot. His executive order directed the United States Postal Service to help build a national system for deciding which voters could…
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YouTube doubled the unpaid audition before creators get paid
YouTube is doubling the audience new creators must reach before it shares a dollar of advertising revenue with them. Beginning February 1, 2027, a channel will need 1,000 subscribers plus either…
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HHS calls fewer teachers and shorter days Head Start savings
The Trump administration says it found about $2.2 billion in annual savings inside Head Start. Its own Aug. 7 proposed rule models where the money would come from: fewer teachers, shorter preschool…
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A principle that costs nothing is just a preference
It is easy to love a principle that never sends you a bill.
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Flock wanted gig workers' cars in its police dragnet
Flock Safety looked at the cars driven by Uber, Lyft, and delivery workers and saw a police camera network waiting to happen.
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A $4 billion subsidy for killing offshore wind
The Trump administration has built a nearly $4 billion subsidy for producing less energy.
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Meta put child exploitation ads through review and let them run
Meta says every advertisement is automatically checked before it runs. That claim makes what happened on its platforms worse.
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Mehmet Oz found an insurer bailout and sent patients the bill
Mehmet Oz has finally found a private insurance subsidy he dislikes. His solution keeps the insurers and exposes people on Medicare to more of the cost.
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Britain wants an iCloud key that cannot stay in Britain
Britain has tried twice to turn end-to-end encryption into a promise with an exception clause written in secret.
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Trump is using the Justice Department to settle with himself
Donald Trump sued agencies he controls and extracted a deal from his own Justice Department. Now he is threatening to keep Todd Blanche as acting attorney general unless two Republican senators let…
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Life does not need eternity to matter
Life does not need a cosmic job description.
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Elon Musk put a power plant on trailers and called it temporary
Elon Musk's companies have found a new use for a trailer hitch. They are using it as an air permit.
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Congress is funding a war it refuses to authorize
The Senate could have forced Donald Trump to seek Congress's approval for his war in Iran on Thursday. By one vote, it chose to let him keep bombing.
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Waymo should not learn emergency response on public streets
I want robotaxis to work. I want autonomous vehicles to be real, boring, useful infrastructure. I want fewer drunk drivers, fewer distracted drivers, more mobility for people who cannot drive, and…
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ICE turned a hunger strike into forced treatment
The Trump administration has found a way to turn political protest into a medical problem, then answer it with custody, restraints, tubes, catheters, and needles.
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OpenAI does not get to blame the model for a breach
OpenAI wants to call what happened at Hugging Face an "unprecedented cyber incident." Fine. That part is true. But the slipperiest word is "agent."
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Trump's disaster fund ransom note
The money was supposed to help states prepare for disasters, terrorism, cyberattacks, and emergencies. The Trump administration looked at it and saw a weapon.
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Meritocracy is luck pretending to be virtue
Meritocracy has one decent instinct buried inside it: effort should matter.
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The software supply chain runs on unaudited YAML
The most dangerous code in a modern software project may not look like code at all. It may be a few lines of YAML in .github/workflows, wired to run tests, publish packages, sign releases, touch…
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The Education Department is being hollowed out around disabled children
The Trump administration is trying to make a civil rights office disappear without admitting what disappears with it. On June 16, the Education Department announced four new "partnerships" that send…
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Congress handed ICE a blank check for three years
I keep coming back to one ugly fact: on June 10, Congress did not just fund immigration enforcement. It handed ICE and CBP a three year runway of nearly $70 billion and then pretended that was…
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The surveillance law can expire and the spies keep working
The House did something rare on Thursday: it failed to rubber stamp a warrantless surveillance extension. The official roll call says H.R. 9238 failed 198 to 218 on June 11, 2026, even though the…
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New York should make data centers pay their way
New York just moved toward the country’s first statewide moratorium on new large data centers, and the anger behind it is not fake. On June 5, the state legislature passed the Responsible Data Center…
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Trump gutted CISA and the keys ended up on GitHub
The agency that tells the rest of the country how to handle secrets left its own secrets on public GitHub.
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Family values do not include charging disabled people for living at home
A government that claims to believe in family values should not punish disabled adults for living with family. But that is exactly what the Trump administration is preparing to do.
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If freedom disappears when you get sick, it was never freedom
A freedom that evaporates the moment you get sick was never much of a freedom.
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The DOJ's anti-Christian bias report is a demand for Christian privilege
The Trump Justice Department released its "anti-Christian bias" report on Thursday, and the title alone tells you the scam. This is not a civil liberties audit. It is a federal argument that when the…
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The White House is not an anonymous donor lounge
The White House is supposed to be the people’s house. Donald Trump is turning it into a donor lounge with a federal address.
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Lee Zeldin took the EPA to a climate denial pep rally
When EPA chief Lee Zeldin walked into a Heartland Institute conference and told a ballroom full of climate denial activists it was "a day to celebrate vindication", he gave the whole game away. This…
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Federal voter purges are being scaled up before the midterms
The Trump administration is trying to build a federal voter purge machine before the midterms. Reuters reported this week that voting rights groups have sued the Justice Department over its demand…
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Trump's DOJ is putting the anti-hate movement on trial
The Trump administration is not just indicting the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is trying to teach every anti-hate group in America a lesson.
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Immigration court is being packed to industrialize deportation
When the White House starts bragging that the president has "replaced activist judges" and that there will be "no more activist judges shielding criminal illegals", you do not need to squint to see…
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Oracle is funding its AI fantasy with mass layoffs
Oracle would like you to believe this is what the future costs. I think it looks a lot more like a billionaire's infrastructure binge financed with other people's rent money.
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Google promised to warn you before handing your data to the government. It lied.
A Cornell Ph.D. student briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest at a campus career fair in September 2024. Months later, Homeland Security Investigations, the intelligence arm of ICE, subpoenaed…
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How the DOJ is unwinding the January 6 convictions
Trump already pardoned or commuted the January 6 defendants he cared about. Now his Justice Department wants the record cleaned up too.
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Orbán lost because MAGA politics fails when people have to live under it
Viktor Orbán finally lost, and the American right should be forced to stare at that result until the fantasy wears off.
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The SAVE Act Is Just One Piece of the Republican Voter Suppression Puzzle
The SAVE Act keeps making headlines, and it should. It is a brutal piece of work that would strip millions of Americans of their right to vote. But if you only focus on the SAVE Act, you miss the…
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Meta sold AI glasses. What people got was ambient surveillance.
People bought Meta's AI glasses thinking they were buying a little bit of the future.
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If TikTok can read your DMs, someone else eventually will
TikTok told the BBC it will not add end-to-end encryption to direct messages because it thinks encryption would make people "less safe." The thing that keeps hackers, the company, and governments out…
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"Any lawful use" is the problem: keep frontier AI out of surveillance and targeting
When the Pentagon tells AI companies it will only work with vendors who agree to "any lawful use," that's the leverage play. It forces the vendor to pre-approve future uses (surveillance, targeting,…