- Eating Yass
- Losing boomers in the AI-generated funhouse
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Population crash (in big blue cities only)
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Billionaire TikTok investor Jeff Yass has (so far!) donated $46 million to Republicans this election cycle to save “free speech,” aka to save his Chinese spy app fortune. This not only makes him the top donor in U.S. politics, it means the highest concentration of Republican “tech money” in the country is fundamentally out of alignment with American tech interests. With Democrats long hostile to the concepts both of “tech” and “industry,” Silicon Valley is looking forward to another incredible election year of scapegoating, in which the country’s most important fount of productivity will be blamed, by everyone, for just about everything. Buckle up.
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Losing boomers in the AI-generated funhouse |
Millennials on Twitter are scandalized by the thought of Facebook engagement farmers feeding their Boomer parents endless AI-generated images of cabins, food, castles, etc. — and truly, the app is absolutely flooded with this stuff. Can our democracy survive such a state of total, unrelenting bullshit? I don’t know, the virality of cheap-to-produce engagement bait is practically a law of physics on Facebook (see: pretty much anything Buzzfeed has ever created), and at this point they probably have entire university programs dedicated to producing this crap in the Eastern Bloc. Always has been. My sense is mom and dad will make it out alive.
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Population crash (in big blue cities only) |
The nation’s largest, most important cities have still not recovered from their self-inflicted Covid death spiral. But what’s interesting here is less that people are choosing not to spend all of their money to live in crime-ridden hell holes once they have kids, it’s that rent — especially in New York — has been skyrocketing for years, indicating the opposite of decline. Why? Local political thugs have built bad housing policy for decades (anti-building regulations, disincentives to rent, free housing for the least productive members of society). These policies have compounded, and we are finally reaching a kind of idiot singularity. If the local despots aren’t removed and these policies aren’t gutted, our cities are going to break.
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How San Francisco Attracts and Traps Homeless Transplants |
new from sanji: the grim story of how san francisco captures drug addicts so they can get high until they die |
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Neuralink, Starship, Moral Inversion, Kara Swisher & Don Lemon Insane Interview, & Liz Warren Tax |
watch the latest pod where the pirate wires crew discusses the big neuralink breakthrough, don lemon’s latest shenanigans, and elizabeth warren’s plan to destroy the u.s. tech industry |
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TikTok’s Battle for the Swamp |
why did trump flip on tiktok? why are people advocating for a chinese spy app on free-speech grounds? follow the money |
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