Congressman Issa falsely claims ‘criminal illegals’ are enrolled in Medicaid

Which ‘wow’ skill is secretly super easy to learn? : r/AskReddit

I am a regular user of an LLM chatbot (ChatGPT). It’s becoming essential to my work and life. And I also hate vendors' efforts to stuff AI into everything.

If I do a Web search, I want search results, not an AI summary. Likewise, Gmail email summaries are an abomination.

LLM chatbots like ChatGPT are good for answering questions. Search engines are good for finding websites. Two different jobs. And I know how to read email — I don’t need AI help with that.

Prices of Both Housing And Rent Are Decreasing In China. “In 2016, Xi said that houses were for living in, not for speculating. The Chinese government took steps to reduce prices, those steps took time to bear fruit.” By Ian Welsh.

When an Internet service is not responding the best thing you can do is click the button over and over again, dozens of times if necessary, getting more angry and frustrated. Follow me for more helpful tech tips.

Warnings that AI will take people’s jobs re the latest way for CEOs to keep workers afraid and submissive.

Trump’s Immigration Enforcement: Free The Criminals, Jail The Innocent:

They’re literally freeing dangerous criminals while manufacturing cases against innocent people…. The Trump admin is literally freeing a repeat violent offender in exchange for testimony against Abrego–a man with no criminal history who was working and raising a family.

And Trump cut a deal with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele “to let actual top MS-13 gang leaders go free.”

— Mike Masnick at Techdirt

Dave Winer: New York City is “a tough place to govern.”

The thing about NY that people might not understand is that the politics are dirty and fucked up. Dems tend to elect handsome young heros who when they have to deal with NYPD and the sanitation workers, the teachers union, and the federal government, also the ancient infrastructure, melt.

How do you save your best AI prompts for reuse? Do you just drop them in a text document on your desktop, or is there a better way?

Currently reading: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin 📚

Currently re-reading: Getting Things Done by David Allen 📚

Currently reading: Mark Twain by Ron Chernow 📚

”american leftists seem extremely focused on anti imperialism (good) but rarely- if at all- discuss decolonization in their own fucking country, despite acknowledging that it is a settler colonial state. “

 Mamdani and Zionism. 

On r/AskReddit: What things in porn actually happen in real life?. Pizza is delivered.

Seriously, use the browser you like, don’t worry about battery. Matt Birchler has advice for Mac users.

Nations Are People. Do you deserve to die for your own bad government?

Hamilton Nolan:

If you live in America, your government is run by Donald Trump. Ugh. You might despise that guy. You might have worked hard against him during campaign season. When you visit another country, and tell them that you are American, you might add, “But don’t judge me!” You would not want to be branded with the weight of the various stupid and despicable actions of your own government. You understand, first, that you do not agree with those things, and second, that you as a regular person have little power to affect those things. You are just living your life. You want to be respected as a human being.

“Unfortunately, this simple and intuitive understanding of the difference between the government and the people of your own country often evaporates–or gets erased–when the discussion turns to foreign countries. When someone says “Russia,” you probably think of Putin, not of the teenage girl dreaming of what she will do after graduation. When someone says “Iran,” you probably think of something that is often referred to as “the regime,” rather than of the laughing family gathering for a holiday meal. This mental mistake, this unwitting juxtaposition of one thing for a different thing, is like a steamroller that paves the way for you to accept unacceptable things. You would never nod sagely and agree that a bomb should be dropped on a child. But air strikes to “cripple” the “command and control” of a “hostile regime?” Well, of course, serious people understand that this may be necessary in the grand chessboard that is geopolitics.

…

Are you willing to be killed for your own government’s sins? Are you willing to have your house destroyed and your child hit by shrapnel and your elderly parents lose access to medicine because of the policies of the latest president? If that seems unfair for you, it is unfair for anyone, anywhere. From this perspective, it is easy to see that the hurdle that a war must clear to be truly moral is so high that it stretches up into the clouds. Grounding ourselves in this perspective–always holding people, and their right to live, in the forefront of our minds–is the only way to make clear judgments about what our own government does with its killing machines.

Promises The ‘Trump Phone’ Would Be ‘Made In USA’ Lasted 1/100th Of A Scaramucci. The Trump organization has scrubbed its website of claims that the phone would be made in America. Now the site has handwaving about how the phone will be infused with “American values.” By Karl Bode at Techdirt.

What is a democratic socialist?

Cross the Courts Off the List: We have enough information to conclude that the law won’t save us.

Hamilton Nolan:

The most significant remaining opportunity for course correction is the midterm elections. It is not so much that the elections (which if history is any guide should cause Republicans to lose control of Congress) are a magic wand that will fix our broken democracy, any more than, you know, Obama’s election fixed America. It is instead the much more modest but vital hope that Republicans can still lose power in elections. The midterm elections will be a test not so much of whether the Democratic Party will finally become the heroic resistance heroes we need–they won’t–but rather a test of whether Trump and Co. will have it together to suppress the vote to the degree that elections, also, need to be crossed off the list of fruitful avenues of opposition.

We are going to see ICE agents at polling places, and politically motivated government investigations of political opponents, and possibly a number of non-Republican politicians and activists arrested and put in jail. That will be the setting of the midterm elections. Trump is a man who does not believe in even the abstract concept of losing an election. He is surrounded by yes men top to bottom in the federal government, and he has armies of armed agents at his disposal. The midterm elections are going to be a very, very important gut check for our democracy, and the extent to which it still functions. We, all of us, all of civil society, must protect the integrity of those elections at all costs. If the Trump administration is able to suppress the vote so severely that the midterms cannot be seen as fair, we are in an even worse place than we are now.

Having given up on the possibility of a Supreme Court line in the sand, I am now looking at those elections as the next most important data point about how much hope is left to return to our traditional standard of “normal.” Apart from the elections, the other meaningful source of opposition is: Us. People. I have hoped that organized labor could be the rallying point for popular opposition to dictatorship. So far, that hasn’t happened. Institutionally, the long decline in union power has rendered organized labor extremely ineffective, disorganized in the face of a war on the existence of public sector unions, and unable to act in a powerful, concerted fashion on a nationwide scale. It is still possible, however, for unions to be one part of a grassroots coalition that forms to battle this out. The national protest movement we have seen arise–most recently the “No Kings” protests–shows me that the bulk of public opinion is on the right side here. The fascists are a minority. Stopping their advance, though, will require funneling the public opposition into organizations, into all facets of direct actions. What we have now is the sentiment, but not the organization. It can be built. The situation is not, in any sense, hopeless. There is much more to be said about the mechanics of all this, but for now, join an organization that is in the fight, and fight.

It’s just that the path is narrower. We don’t gain anything by telling ourselves fairy tales about what is coming. If the courts won’t do their ostensible job of saving us then it is time to think of the law not as the arena of our salvation but as a minefield to pick our way around carefully en route to a more promising destination.