onfocus

There are many theories swirling around for why they have increasingly chosen to abandon their basic duty to legal transparency. And the likeliest one is also the simplest: They’re cowards.

I believe the Roberts Court will be known as the court that brought down the institution in this form. Only significant restructuring will restore faith in this thoroughly captured enabler of authoritarianism.

In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court kneecapped the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the landmark civil rights law that restricted racial gerrymandering and racial discrimination in voting for sixty years.

This isn’t justice based on careful deliberation. This is corruption in the service of white supremacy.

Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be.

This isn’t too far off from the software brain mindset that Nilay Patel was warning about in the previous post. Maybe software brain is intensified by the fact that tech culture is run by billionaires who never face consequences.

You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.

Nilay Patel explains the disconnect between tech culture and culture at large around AI.

“I think this is a creative and ambitious bill,” he said. “It tries to get around Citizens United by arguing that corporations only have the powers the state chooses to grant them, and that Hawaiʻi can decline to grant the power to spend money on elections. That’s a genuinely innovative idea.”

Nice to see a state even contemplate asserting its power to regulate. Fingers crossed.

The NASA flickr account has stunning high-resolution images from the Artemis II trip around the moon.

The Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg has done this measurement for more than a decade, establishing a consistent metric that allows for comparisons between and within nations and determinations of how democracy has changed over time.

Nice liberal democracy we used to have here. Too bad we couldn’t keep it.

The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.

What could we have done with $80 billion dollars? People like Zuckerberg shouldn’t control what we spend that amount of resources on.

Lithium-ion battery prices don’t get constantly discussed the way crude is, but these declines add up to a decisive shift that will determine the energy landscape of the next decade. Solar and wind have been cheaper than fossil fuels for a while, but the last time we had an energy crisis like this, oil and gas still drove the prices paid by consumers. The falling cost of battery storage changes that.

You can argue with math and even try to fight it, but the numbers aren't going to change. Solar and batteries for storage are the future.

Rivera was brought to the U.S. illegally from Mexico when he was 2 years old. He's enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, better known as DACA, which granted him permission to legally work in the U.S., among other benefits, and allowed him to get a commercial driver's license in 2014 and start his own trucking company.

Taking out around 5% of truck drivers for no good reason? Racism is a hell of a self-own.

Most of the Americans surveyed believe that datacenters are bad for the environment, home energy costs, and the quality of life of people living nearby and the numbers aren’t close. Only four percent of people thought datacenters were good for the environment, six percent good for jobs, and six percent good for people’s quality of life.

Oh, here’s another thing Americans can agree on.

More and more Americans are voicing unhappiness with billionaires’ enormous power. According to the Harris Poll’s annual Americans and Billionaires Survey, conducted last November, 53% of Americans believe billionaires threaten our democracy. What’s more, 71% of Americans, including 64% of Republicans, say there should be a wealth tax on top earners, and 53% (up from 46% in 2024) say there should be limits on wealth accumulation.

Turns out Americans can all agree on something.