Fasten your seatbelts, sky babies — tomorrow, it’s legal to drive your flying car in Minnesota, which makes the North Star State the second with a “Jetsons Law,” following New Hampshire (they said “live free or die,” did they stutter?). While you still can’t take off or land your flying car on state roadways (booo), and they’re also still expensive as hell (booo), this is a great step forward for the future our grandparents promised our parents, and I’m looking forward to the next chapter: Jetpacks? Deco bullet trains with ultra lux cabins? Underwater cities? I don’t know, I’m feeling optimistic. With our sci-fi fantasies slowly catching up to reality, we’re almost ready for a future as imagined now, in 2024: solarpunk skyscapes of living, genetically-modified architecture, AI-generated ancestral spirits guiding us through our relationships, a quiet leaf blower that doesn’t make me want to die. The future is bright. 

Yesterday, in a kind of preamble for its regulatory pitch, Microsoft published a blog post warning against AI deepfake election interference. Setting aside the evergreen danger of regulatory capture — like, you should always be worried when giant corporations are asking for more laws — I really am mystified by this disinformation bogeyman. One day, a viral deepfake might influence an election, but it’s worth noting they’ve been possible for years, and we still haven’t seen one work. Literally nobody believed that stupid Kamala clip was real, my God, let it go. Meanwhile, partisan shills are currently producing enormous amounts of misinformation via simply lying about shit (“Trump said he’ll end elections,” “JD Vance f***ed a couch,” etc). Focusing on information hygiene as it relates to theoretical distortions is a worthy task, but the deepfake problem has, to date, mostly only served as a smokescreen for actual malfeasance.

Tuesday, authorities announced they charged Kyra Worthy, the beleaguered ex-director of SF SAFE, a San Francisco ‘public safety nonprofit,’ with 34 felonies related to misappropriating over $700,000 in taxpayer funds. The “progressive,” police-skeptic left is thrilled, primarily because the charges embarrass both SFPD and DA Jenkins. They’re right that Worthy’s crimes — which include spending over $350,000 on “luxury gift boxes” for friends — deserve punishment. But a bit of perspective is in order. Squandering $700,000? Bad. But wasting $120 million on a race-based grant-giving program with, essentially, no oversight? Or over $660 million per year on “homeless services” that only ever seem to lead to a net increase in homelessness? That’s the evil we don’t tend to look at. It’s time to slash funding for the most obviously inept government programs, reallocate that money to a thorough audit, and call the prosecutors. You’ll be amazed how good a bit of accountability feels.

If one were founding a payroll company and one were talking to customers to discover the biggest pain points to solve, one would find that payroll compliance is the worst part of the job. Strangely, no payroll startup has elegantly tackled this problem until now. Warp is the payroll solution that puts this state-level compliance on autopilot, so founders and startups can focus on more consequential things. It’s what we use here at Pirate Wires, and while Warp never asked for our comment, they did happen to build a product that solves our biggest pain point. 

Get started with Warp here.

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this week, john coogan joins the pod to talk about the battle of the billionaires that played out on 𝕏. plus, we discuss biden officially dropping out of the presidential race, democrats replacing him with his vp, kamala getting an image makeover, the crowdstrike global tech outage, and more

for years, the eu has weaponized regulations to extract billions from u.s. tech companies. with their most recent batch of laws, they’ve positioned themselves to destroy tech’s profit margins

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