I assert that these this is the greatest run of three consecutive NYT Pitchbot posts ever.

RE: https://lipn.info/@cazencott/117240358136063772

I strongly share these vibes. My career has been a combination of getting to be good at running infrastructure in data centers so that people could use and share data more easily, while simultaneously pursuing an academic track of trying to learn how to analyze geographic and environmental data with nuance and care.

I felt very good about doing that for a long time.

But now it seems like to work in anything like what I've done before, you have to at the very least get close to generative AI, the very premises of which feel like taking everything I've painstakingly learned about data for 25 years and throwing it out the window and saying, "NEVER MIND LET'S JUST WING IT!"

I hate it. I absolutely deeply despise it so much. But I'm over 50 now and I have a mortgage and I'm really not sure what I'm supposed to be doing.

RE: https://turtleisland.social/@Yehuda/117213905488848259

The GIS nerd/professor in me always wants to point out that the Mercator projection is still extremely useful in the right circumstances, but it absolutely should be phased out for making maps of the globe.

The projection is very good at retaining shape and angles, and so is good for localized maps and is extremely good for navigation. The Mercator *shapes* of Greenland and Africa are far more accurate.

But how important is shape really when studying a map of the earth, where one of the most important lessons is comparisons between regions?

For that reason, any general educational use of Mercator global maps is pretty much bad.

Now . . . let's talk about this whole "seven continents" nonsense. (Boy do I ever have a Take on that. . . )

My solution to all this remains the same. Regulate tobacco and cannabis like we regulate alcohol.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@inthesetimes/117192131796003906

The libertarian bent of the legalization movement was always frustrating as hell to me. It was like, if we're free to grow weed everyone will just be having their own plant in their back yard and it'll all be groovy . . . . . exactly how everyone used to have a tobacco plant in their back yard, amirite?

All you had to do was look at the trajectory of tobacco and capitalism to understand what was going to happen when capital got its hands on weed. And here we are with the shittiest possible version of legalization because potheads were too damn lazy to think out the assertion that the solution to bad regulation was no regulation.

And now about getting rid of zoning . . . . .

And now the wait begins for Tressie McMillan Cottam to publish the definitive public eulogy.

Raising a glass to Dolly Parton. Not many celebrities can say they lived a life as well as she did.

All of those cash reserves (plus the accompanying stock price increases, executive bonuses, buybacks, and so forth) of course are money from increased productivity that could have gone more broadly into wage growth, but didn't. Instead it sat in corporate bank accounts.

During the past two years in particular, the flood of it getting let loose propped up what has otherwise been a pretty sick economy, particularly since last March, and it was able to do so without needing to tap into investment dollars.

We've all been wondering what starts to burst the bubble. This seems like a decent candidate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/business/bond-yields-tech-ai-debt.html?unlocked_article_code=1.61A.3oEv.IU7jBTvGHgeJ&smid=url-share

This is such a good insight into how "AI" is sorta kinda actually propping up the economy (for now).

Everyone has known that the tech giants were making money hand-over-fist, to the point that they had no idea what to do with their gigantic cash reserves (that their board and major shareholders would agree to).

The "AI" investment binge has meant dumping those cash reserves. We're in the third year of the cash dump, but it's coming to an end.

The general political climate is a big part of it, but it helps that the Democrats have managed to find what appears to be a great candidate in Jamie Ager, grandson of staunch progressive Jamie Clark, who represented the district when I was growing up there. (Somehow he was only in the seat 3 terms but through the lens of memory I thought he was an institution.)

Since Clark lost to Taylor in 1991, the only Democrat to hold the seat was centrist, "blue dog" extraordinaire, NFL draft bust Heath Shuler.

But Ager has raised a ton of money and suits the district perfectly, which makes me think that the normal GOP field aren't willing to take the risk of a potentially career-derailing loss there.

#uspol #nc11

What's going on in the 11th congressional district, most of western North Carolina, is kind of extraordinary.

Even setting aside that the shock that Chuck Edwards actually paid a price for being a gross creep to his female staff, what happened looking for his replacement is even more surprising.

Following Edwards dropping out, a number of obvious Republican contenders for the seat just dropped out. On the face of it, the candidate the GOP just selected, Jennifer Balkcom, is unsurprising. But what's surprising is that she had initially passed on the seat and only stepped up after basically every other option also passed.

The 11th has been redrawn a bit but it's still the seat that held Mark Meadows, Madison Cawthorn, and further back, 18 years of the super-corrupt Charles Taylor.

The general should be seen as pretty straightforward for a GOP candidate in normal circumstances. But the candidates clearly don't see it that way.

#uspol

RE: https://hcommons.social/@jnl/117004441279957034

Just riffing on this . . .

I have an AI/VR solution that could actually save the world.

Take all the billionaires and invite them to a conference where they're told they're going into augmented reality chambers that allow them to more effectively manage their assets and gain maximal oversight of global trends.

Then we plug them into a basic version of The Sims and tell them it's the new Metaverse, feed them cafeteria food and tell them its nouveau bespoke cuisine, let them fight over major issues in control of an imaginary world, and surround them with highly trained actors breathlessly feeding them updates.

Then we take all their money and feed the world, transition to green energy, and give everyone health care.

RE: https://wandering.shop/@adapalmer/117004100207131652

This is such great news. Africa really is the poster child for where solar *should* be breaking through. Most of the continent is tropical, large swaths are desert, and its grid-based power infrastructure still trails far behind most of the rest of the world. With oil's ongoing instability, I had real hope that we'd see an African solar boom.

And lo and behold, we have.

Wait they're putting Ross Douthat on 60 Minutes, what stage of jumping the shark is that?

https://www.404media.co/ai-fiction-is-easy-to-detect-because-its-stupid-and-bad-research-finds/?ref=the-abstract-newsletter

RE: https://social.coop/@ZaneSelvans/116905949173214025

Fantastic. I've been watching sodium ion batteries for the past couple of years as an essential step forward in battery storage.

Lithium is terrific for small batteries but rare and damaging to mine, so getting enough for grid-scale batteries was always problematic. Sodium, to put it mildly, is neither.

Portable electronics batteries and probably car batteries will continue to be lithium for the foreseeable future but it's a huge step forward to have grid scale electricity in volume using sodium.

In endorsing El-Sayed, AOC is continuing to do all the things that it always pissed me off that Bernie never did. She's not just sitting in her safe position yelling at people to adopt her views or whittling around legislation with amendments. She's actively, effectively building up a caucus of winning candidates to expand progressive power.

#uspol

RE: https://discuss.systems/@dev/116807460725864716

Always good to have a reference for "why is everyone suddenly talking about geese and eggs today?" questions?

RE: https://journa.host/@bolts/116806624741081523

If you're not following Bolts, you should be. They have a fedi account and they're doing some of the most outstanding nitty gritty tracking of state-level politics of anyone.

@josephcox Just reading (or trying to read) your "tokenpocalypse", and man I love 404 Media but will you please implement some other kind of sign-in other than magic codes? I have a password manager that generates random passwords and it's very easy to use. Passkeys would also be fine.

As it is, I have to re-login to your site like once every two weeks and it's a freakin' pain. I get that magic codes are generally better for people who are setting passwords to "mypassword123" but giving us some other alternative would be great.