#Data-Driven-Hosting

[achieve25moreclientsdaily]

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[technologyequality]

From Chaos to Conversion: The Virtual Event Strategy You Didn’t Know You Needed

From Chaos to Conversion The Virtual Event Strategy You Didn’t Know You Needed Let’s talk about virtual events. You plan the whole thing, invite all the right people, maybe even grab a killer speaker or two and yet, it somehow still feels like you’re hosting a digital séance no one RSVPed for. If you’ve ever hit “end meeting” and wondered, “Was that even worth it?”…this one’s for you. In the…

[hanasatoblogs]

Data-as-an-Asset: Unlocking the True Value of Information

In today's digital economy, data is no longer just a byproduct of business operations—it has become a critical asset that drives innovation, efficiency, and competitive advantage. As organizations increasingly recognize the strategic value of data, they are adopting the concept of "Data-as-an-Asset" to leverage their information resources more effectively. This article explores the key components of Data-as-an-Asset, focusing on MDM Modernization, Data Governance, and Data Hosting/Warehousing.

1. MDM Modernization: Ensuring Data Accuracy and Consistency

Master Data Management (MDM) modernization is a crucial element in treating data as an asset. MDM involves the centralization and governance of critical business data, such as customer, product, and financial information, to ensure a single source of truth across the organization.

Key Aspects of MDM Modernization:

Cloud-Native MDM Platforms: The transition to cloud-native MDM solutions enables organizations to scale their data management practices seamlessly. Cloud-based MDM systems offer flexibility, real-time data integration, and improved accessibility, allowing businesses to respond quickly to changing data needs.

AI and Automation: Modern MDM systems are increasingly leveraging AI and machine learning to automate data quality checks, anomaly detection, and data matching processes. This reduces manual effort and enhances the accuracy and reliability of master data, ensuring that the information used for decision-making is up-to-date and trustworthy.

Real-Time Data Management: With the demand for real-time insights growing, modern MDM platforms are designed to handle dynamic data environments. This capability allows businesses to maintain consistent and accurate data even as it changes rapidly, supporting better and faster decision-making.

2. Data Governance: The Framework for Data Stewardship

Data governance is the backbone of treating data as an asset. It involves establishing policies, procedures, and standards that ensure data is managed effectively, securely, and in compliance with regulatory requirements. Strong data governance frameworks are essential for maintaining the quality, security, and usability of data across the organization.

Key Components of Data Governance:

Policy Development: Data governance policies define how data is to be managed, who has access to it, and how it should be protected. These policies help ensure that data is used ethically and in compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.

Data Stewardship: Appointing data stewards who are responsible for maintaining data quality and integrity is a critical aspect of data governance. Data stewards oversee the implementation of governance policies and ensure that data is consistently accurate and reliable.

Compliance and Risk Management: Effective data governance frameworks help organizations mitigate risks associated with data breaches, non-compliance, and inaccurate data. By ensuring that data is governed according to best practices, businesses can avoid costly legal penalties and reputational damage.

3. Data Hosting/Warehousing: The Foundation of Data-as-an-Asset

Data hosting and warehousing are fundamental to the concept of Data-as-an-Asset. These practices involve the storage, management, and retrieval of large volumes of data in a way that supports business intelligence, analytics, and operational efficiency.

Key Trends in Data Hosting/Warehousing:

Cloud Data Warehousing: The shift to cloud-based data warehousing solutions has transformed the way organizations store and manage data. Cloud platforms offer scalability, cost-efficiency, and the ability to handle large datasets without the limitations of on-premises infrastructure.

Data Lakes and Warehouses Integration: Modern data management strategies often involve the integration of data lakes and data warehouses to provide a comprehensive view of both structured and unstructured data. This approach enables businesses to leverage all available data for analytics and decision-making.

Real-Time Data Access: As businesses seek to harness the value of data more rapidly, real-time data access and processing capabilities have become critical. Advanced data warehousing solutions now support real-time data streams, enabling organizations to act on insights as soon as they are generated.

Conclusion: Building a Data-Driven Future

Treating data as an asset requires a holistic approach that encompasses MDM modernization, robust data governance, and efficient data hosting and warehousing practices. By adopting these strategies, organizations can unlock the full potential of their data, driving innovation, enhancing decision-making, and gaining a competitive edge in the marketplace.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, businesses that prioritize data-as-an-asset will be better positioned to capitalize on new opportunities, mitigate risks, and achieve sustained growth.

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #28

July 19-26 2024

The EPA announced the award of $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants. The grants support community-driven solutions to fight climate change, and accelerate America’s clean energy transition. The grants will go to 25 projects across 30 states, and one tribal community. When combined the projects will reduce greenhouse gas pollution by as much as 971 million metric tons of CO2, roughly the output of 5 million American homes over 25 years. Major projects include $396 million for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection as it tries to curb greenhouse gas emissions from industrial production, and $500 million for transportation and freight decarbonization at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The Biden-Harris Administration announced a plan to phase out the federal government's use of single use plastics. The plan calls for the federal government to stop using single use plastics in food service operations, events, and packaging by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035. The US government is the single largest employer in the country and the world’s largest purchaser of goods and services. Its move away from plastics will redefine the global market.

The White House hosted a summit on super pollutants with the goals of better measuring them and dramatically reducing them. Roughly half of today's climate change is caused by so called super pollutants, methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and nitrous oxide (N2O). Public-private partnerships between NOAA and United Airlines, The State Department and NASA, and the non-profit Carbon Mapper Coalition will all help collect important data on these pollutants. While private firms announced with the White House plans that by early next year will reduce overall U.S. industrial emissions of nitrous oxide by over 50% from 2020 numbers. The summit also highlighted the EPA's new rule to reduce methane from oil and gas by 80%.

The EPA announced $325 million in grants for climate justice. The Community Change Grants Program, powered by President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act will ultimately bring $2 billion dollars to disadvantaged communities and help them combat climate change. Some of the projects funded in this first round of grant were: $20 million for Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association, which will help weatherize and energy efficiency upgrade homes for 35 tribes in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, $14 million to install onsite wastewater treatment systems throughout 17 Black Belt counties in Alabama, and $14 million to urban forestry, expanding tree canopy in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The Department of Interior approved 3 new solar projects on public land. The 3 projects, two in Nevada and one in Arizona, once finished could generate enough to power 2 million homes. This comes on top of DoI already having beaten its goal of 25 gigawatts of clean energy projects by the end of 2025, in April 2024. This is all part of President Biden’s goal of creating a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pledged $667 million to global Pandemic Fund. The fund set up in 2022 seeks to support Pandemic prevention, and readiness in low income nations who can't do it on their own. At the G20 meeting Yellen pushed other nations of the 20 largest economies to double their pledges to the $2 billion dollar fund. Yellen highlighted the importance of the fund by saying "President Biden and I believe that a fully-resourced Pandemic Fund will enable us to better prevent, prepare for, and respond to pandemics – protecting Americans and people around the world from the devastating human and economic costs of infectious disease threats,"

The Departments of the Interior and Commerce today announced a $240 million investment in tribal fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. This is in line with an Executive Order President Biden signed in 2023 during the White House Tribal Nations Summit to mpower Tribal sovereignty and self-determination. An initial $54 million for hatchery maintenance and modernization will be made available for 27 tribes in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The rest will be invested in longer term fishery projects in the coming years.

The IRS announced that thanks to funding from President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, it'll be able to digitize much of its operations. This means tax payers will be able to retrieve all their tax related information from one source, including Wage & Income, Account, Record of Account, and Return transcripts, using on-line Individual Online Account.

The IRS also announced that New Jersey will be joining the direct file program in 2025. The direct file program ran as a pilot in 12 states in 2024, allowing tax-payers in those states to file simple tax returns using a free online filing tool directly with the IRS. In 2024 140,000 Americans were able to file this way, they collectively saved $5.6 million in tax preparation fees, claiming $90 million in returns. The average American spends $270 and 13 hours filing their taxes. More than a million people in New Jersey alone will qualify for direct file next year. Oregon opted to join last month. Republicans in Congress lead by Congressmen Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina have put forward legislation to do away with direct file.

Bonus: American law enforcement arrested co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada. El Mayo co-founded the cartel in the 1980s along side Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. Since El Chapo's incarceration in the United States in 2019, El Mayo has been sole head of the Sinaloa Cartel. Authorities also arrested El Chapo's son, Joaquin Guzman Lopez. The Sinaloa Cartel has been a major player in the cross border drug trade, and has often used extreme violence to further their aims.

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week - November 28, 2023

🐑 - Why did Fiona the sheep become a mountaineer? She was tired of the "baa-d" jokes at sea level!

1. Pope Francis dines with transgender women for Vatican luncheon

Pope Francis hosted a group of transgender women — many of whom are sex workers or migrants from Latin America — to a Vatican luncheon for the Catholic Church's "World Day of the Poor" last week.

The pontiff and the transgender women have formed a close relationship since the pope came to their aid during the COVID-19 pandemic, when they were unable to work. Now, they meet monthly for VIP visits with the pope and receive medicine, money and shampoo any day, according to The Associated Press.

2. New York just installed its first offshore wind turbine

The first wind turbine installation at South Fork Wind, New York State’s first offshore wind farm, is complete.

The 130-megawatt (MW) South Fork Wind will be the US’s first completed utility-scale wind farm in federal waters.

3. Anonymous businessman donates $800k to struggling food bank

But this Thanksgiving, a longtime prayer of food bank leaders was finally answered: an anonymous benefactor donated the full $800,000 they needed to move out of a facility they've long outgrown. That benefactor, however, preferred to stay anonymous.

"Very private company, really don't want attention," said Debbie Christian, executive director of the Auburn Food Bank. "It's a goodhearted person that just wants to see the work here continue, wants to see it expand."

4. Empowering woman saving hopes and mental health of suffering Ukrainian kids

Kenza Hadij-Brahim is at the forefront of promoting Circle of Toys

Hadj-Brahim is helping to launch the Circle of Toys initiative. A project that provides Ukrainian children in need of some normality with preloved toys. This new initiative connects people with old toys they might otherwise throw away, with Ukrainian families in need who want to provide some comfort to their children in this distressing time.

Find Refuge said : “The endeavour is driven by a sincere purpose: spark joy, foster play, and bring a hint of normalcy back to the young lives in Ukraine.”

5. TWO LOST CITIES HIDDEN FOR CENTURIES WERE JUST DISCOVERED IN BOLIVIA

Researchers have found these areas not only housed structures and pyramids but it has been uncovered that there were advanced irrigation systems, earthworks, large towns, causeways, and canals that cover miles.

Dr. Heiko Prümers from the German Archaeological Institute, who was also involved in the study comments that “this indicated a relatively dense settlement in pre-Hispanic times. Our goal was to conduct basic research and trace the settlements and life there. The research sheds light on the sheer magnitude and magnificence of the civic-ceremonial centers found buried in the forest”.

6. Sheep dubbed Fiona rescued from cliff in Scotland where she was stuck for more than 2 years

And at last, some positive climate news:

7. Three positive climate developments

Heating

When the Paris Agreement was adopted, the global reliance on fossil fuels placed the world on a path towards a 3.5C rise in temperature by 2100. Eight years on, country commitments to reduce their carbon footprints have pulled that down slightly, putting the world on a path for a 2.5C to 2.9C by the end of the century.

Peak emissions

Annual greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change have risen roughly nine percent since COP21, according to UN data. But the rate of the increase has slowed significantly. Recent estimates by the Climate Analytics institute find global emissions could peak by 2024

Rising renewables

Three technologies—solar, wind and electric vehicles—are largely behind the improved global warming estimates since 2015.

---

That's it for this week :)

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[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

By Julia Métraux

Voters are asking questions—and the Harris campaign needs a plan.

Three years ago, after developing Long Covid, 62-year-old Martha applied for Social Security Disability Insurance, which provides a modest monthly benefit to aging and disabled adults. Martha has no health insurance, which prevents her from getting the medical treatment she needs, and is homeless.

On Thursday, when she asked Vice President Kamala Harris about the issue at a town hall hosted by the Spanish-language news network Univision, she still hadn’t received a decision.

In the twelve-month stretch from October 2022 through September 2023, 30,000 people died while waiting for federal disability determinations, according to Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley. Martha asked Harris what she would do as president for people, like herself, who are waiting for disability decisions while in desperate need of health insurance.

Delays in those decisions, driven in part by understaffing and a Covid-related rise in disability rates, have driven the typical wait time from four months in 2019 to seven months today, often coupled with the need to appeal an initial rejection, which can take years. The processing times represent a mounting crisis for the more than 1 million Americans who apply for disability in a given year.

Harris, starting off on track, highlighted her recent push for Long Covid to be recognized under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the vice president didn’t acknowledge the issue of wait times for federal disability benefit determinations, talking instead about how medical debt impacted credit scores.

Harris’ push to incorporate Long Covid into the ADA is welcome. Latino people are the likeliest of any racial group to report having Long Covid, according to Census data; many also participate in SSDI, and her Univision non-answer on wait times was eyebrow-raising.

But a Long Covid–friendly ADA doesn’t mean any change in Social Security practices, which are separate. Securing disability income is a much more complex, demanding process than securing ADA accommodations (which can be hard enough). Separate action is needed on both—and within Harris’ grasp, should she land in the White House.

That’s not to say that Democrats have made no moves to address challenges around Long Covid and Social Security disability delays. In August, a Senate group including Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Vir.), Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Sen Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Ver.) sent O’Malley a letter asking a similar question: what was the Social Security Administration doing to address the barriers that applicants with Long Covid face? They have yet to receive a response—at least publicly.

[bardic-tales]

Day 4 | Diana Ravenscroft | Day 6

31 days of FF 7 Headcanons: Day 5: Relationship with Materia

In the world of Gaia, materia is often treated with reverence, caution, or strategic utility. For Diana Ravenscroft, however, materia is not a means to survive or a conduit to the Planet’s will. It is a subject, a specimen, and a locked vault of planetary memory and divine architecture she has every intention of dissecting and decoding.

Today’s exploration delves into Diana’s uniquely clinical relationship with materia: not as a user or believer, but as a scientist seeking to master the unmasterable. This entry examines how her fixation on materia’s genetic, divine, and metaphysical properties reflects the core of her worldview. Her fixation is one where understanding demands domination, and awe is always forced to kneel before knowledge.

Possible Trigger Warnings: body horror, experimentation, forced implantation, medical trauma, non-consensual modification, scientific exploitation, violence

Diana Ravenscroft’s relationship with materia is one of scientific detachment and intellectual scrutiny rather than mystical reverence or practical reliance. She views materia not as a tool for battle or survival, but as a rare biological and metaphysical phenomenon: a crystalline compression of planetary will that can be categorized and weaponized. In her eyes, materia represents the intersection of science and the divine, a place where her obsession with understanding supernatural forces can be made manifest. Unlike typical Shinra operatives who use materia for combat efficiency, Diana prefers to extract and analyze them in controlled laboratory settings, stripping away their mythos to reveal their inner workings.

While she is more than capable of using materia herself, Diana rarely does unless absolutely necessary. Her style of work doesn't lend itself to battlefield magic. She delegates that to enhanced test subjects, SOLDIER prototypes, and controlled experiments. When she does wield materia, she does so with surgical precision, preferring types like Contain, Gravity, or the elusive Enemy Skill materia. Her use is never emotional or instinctive. It’s calculated, data-driven, and often tied to live experimentation, especially when testing the resilience of genetically modified subjects.

During her obsession with the divine and Bianca Moore, her fascination with materia intensified following the discovery that certain individuals can naturally absorb or synthesize materia-like energy without external conduits became an obsession. Diana began experimenting with materia implantation, theorizing that materia could be used as a medium for permanent genetic alterations if properly stabilized. Her labs became host to grotesque trials in which subjects were forcefully fused with materia, often resulting in catastrophic failure, but in the rare case of success, she documented cellular regeneration.

This belief turned into an obsession, pushing her to experiment with corrupted and forbidden materia: dark, unstable shards extracted from ruins or rumored to have been tainted by proximity to the Planet's wounds. She wasn't content with the standard elemental and command sets. Diana sought materia tied to ancient knowledge and the boundary between life and death. Her fixation reached a crescendo when she attempted to create a hybrid materia using a demonic cells extracted from Bianca and an Odin summon materia. Though the project failed catastrophically, it marked another pivotal moment in Diana’s descent into scientific fanaticism.

In the end, Diana doesn’t see materia as a source of wonder or connection to the Planet. She sees it as a key. A key to unmaking death, to controlling gods, and to rewriting the boundaries of human evolution. Her relationship with materia mirrors her relationship with people: cold, instrumental, and exploitative. Yet, buried in her clinical approach is a flicker of awe she will never admit. This is an unspoken reverence for the cosmic architecture of a world that still dares to defy her scalpel.

@themaradwrites @shepardstales @megandaisy9 @watermeezer

@prehistoric-creatures @creativechaosqueen @chickensarentcheap

@inkandimpressions @arrthurpendragon @projecthypocrisy @serenofroses

[reasonsforhope]

Determined to use her skills to fight inequality, South African computer scientist Raesetje Sefala set to work to build algorithms flagging poverty hotspots - developing datasets she hopes will help target aid, new housing, or clinics.

From crop analysis to medical diagnostics, artificial intelligence (AI) is already used in essential tasks worldwide, but Sefala and a growing number of fellow African developers are pioneering it to tackle their continent's particular challenges.

Local knowledge is vital for designing AI-driven solutions that work, Sefala said.

"If you don't have people with diverse experiences doing the research, it's easy to interpret the data in ways that will marginalise others," the 26-year old said from her home in Johannesburg.

Africa is the world's youngest and fastest-growing continent, and tech experts say young, home-grown AI developers have a vital role to play in designing applications to address local problems.

"For Africa to get out of poverty, it will take innovation and this can be revolutionary, because it's Africans doing things for Africa on their own," said Cina Lawson, Togo's minister of digital economy and transformation.

"We need to use cutting-edge solutions to our problems, because you don't solve problems in 2022 using methods of 20 years ago," Lawson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a video interview from the West African country.

Digital rights groups warn about AI's use in surveillance and the risk of discrimination, but Sefala said it can also be used to "serve the people behind the data points". ...

'Delivering Health'

As COVID-19 spread around the world in early 2020, government officials in Togo realized urgent action was needed to support informal workers who account for about 80% of the country's workforce, Lawson said.

"If you decide that everybody stays home, it means that this particular person isn't going to eat that day, it's as simple as that," she said.

In 10 days, the government built a mobile payment platform - called Novissi - to distribute cash to the vulnerable.

The government paired up with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) think tank and the University of California, Berkeley, to build a poverty map of Togo using satellite imagery.

Using algorithms with the support of GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that uses AI to distribute cash transfers, the recipients earning less than $1.25 per day and living in the poorest districts were identified for a direct cash transfer.

"We texted them saying if you need financial help, please register," Lawson said, adding that beneficiaries' consent and data privacy had been prioritized.

The entire program reached 920,000 beneficiaries in need.

"Machine learning has the advantage of reaching so many people in a very short time and delivering help when people need it most," said Caroline Teti, a Kenya-based GiveDirectly director.

'Zero Representation'

Aiming to boost discussion about AI in Africa, computer scientists Benjamin Rosman and Ulrich Paquet co-founded the Deep Learning Indaba - a week-long gathering that started in South Africa - together with other colleagues in 2017.

"You used to get to the top AI conferences and there was zero representation from Africa, both in terms of papers and people, so we're all about finding cost effective ways to build a community," Paquet said in a video call.

In 2019, 27 smaller Indabas - called IndabaX - were rolled out across the continent, with some events hosting as many as 300 participants.

One of these offshoots was IndabaX Uganda, where founder Bruno Ssekiwere said participants shared information on using AI for social issues such as improving agriculture and treating malaria.

Another outcome from the South African Indaba was Masakhane - an organization that uses open-source, machine learning to translate African languages not typically found in online programs such as Google Translate.

On their site, the founders speak about the South African philosophy of "Ubuntu" - a term generally meaning "humanity" - as part of their organization's values.

"This philosophy calls for collaboration and participation and community," reads their site, a philosophy that Ssekiwere, Paquet, and Rosman said has now become the driving value for AI research in Africa.

Inclusion

Now that Sefala has built a dataset of South Africa's suburbs and townships, she plans to collaborate with domain experts and communities to refine it, deepen inequality research and improve the algorithms.

"Making datasets easily available opens the door for new mechanisms and techniques for policy-making around desegregation, housing, and access to economic opportunity," she said.

African AI leaders say building more complete datasets will also help tackle biases baked into algorithms.

"Imagine rolling out Novissi in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ivory Coast ... then the algorithm will be trained with understanding poverty in West Africa," Lawson said.

"If there are ever ways to fight bias in tech, it's by increasing diverse datasets ... we need to contribute more," she said.

But contributing more will require increased funding for African projects and wider access to computer science education and technology in general, Sefala said.

Despite such obstacles, Lawson said "technology will be Africa's savior".

"Let's use what is cutting edge and apply it straight away or as a continent we will never get out of poverty," she said. "It's really as simple as that."

-via Good Good Good, February 16, 2022

[justforbooks]

‘I felt nothing but disgust’: Tesla owners vent their anger at Elon Musk

The tycoon’s links with Donald Trump and Germany’s far-right AfD have slammed the brakes on sales and put the car’s owners in a spin

When Mike Schwede first sat in a Tesla Roadster 15 years ago, he felt like it was a glimpse into the future. By 2016, he was the proud owner of a Tesla, revelling in the thumbs up he would get from other drivers as he whizzed along Europe’s highways in the electric vehicle.

But of late the sheen of owning a Tesla has begun to wear off. For years the brand has been synonymous with Elon Musk and his stance against the climate crisis. Recently, Schwede watched aghast as the Tesla CEO poured hundreds of millions into backing Donald Trump as he made promises to ramp up domestic oil and gas production.

“He was getting more and more weird,” said Schwede, an entrepreneur and digital strategist based in Switzerland. The final straw came when Musk made back-to-back fascist-style salutes during Trump’s inauguration in January. “I felt nothing but utter disgust,” said Schwede. “And I no longer enjoyed sitting in my Tesla.”

On Tuesday, data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association showed sales of new Tesla cars almost halved in Europe last month. The figures left analysts scrambling to assess how big a factor customers turning their backs on the brand because of Musk’s foray into far-right politics may be.

The Texas-based carmaker sold 9,945 vehicles in Europe in January, down 45% from last year’s 18,161, the association said.

Now, there are signs existing Tesla owners who have become disgruntled with Musk’s views are making their anger heard.

Schwede contemplated selling his car, but after racking up more than 60,000 miles on it, there was little value left in it. So he came up with his own means of reclaiming his Tesla and the liberal ethos that had underpinned his purchase; he began donating 10 cents for every kilometre driven to a range of charities, countering Musk’s support of the far right with direct support to those who help LGBTQ+ youth or fight hate and extremism. “It was something Elon wouldn’t like,” he said. “That’s my personal revenge.”

It’s a hint of how some Tesla owners in Europe are fighting back, putting up their own – albeit small-scale – resistance as Musk wades into global politics, using his wealth to help secure Trump’s return to the White House and his sprawling influence to back far-right and anti-establishment parties across Europe.

For Germany’s Patrik Schneider, the turning point came as he was heckled by a stranger at a petrol station, who pointed to his Tesla and called him a Trump supporter. Saddled with a long-term lease on the vehicle, he scrambled to find a way to address his relationship with a brand that – in his mind – had soured.

“Of course, as a Tesla driver you were always the fool: the Green party voter, the world saviour, the CO2 guy,” Schneider told Germany’s Capital.de media. “But now you’re in a category that’s no longer funny.”

What he came up with was a line of “Anti-Elon stickers” for Tesla cars. In an echo of an American initiative, he began selling the stickers online six months ago, taking orders for messages that range from “I bought this before Elon went crazy” to “Elon sucks”.

As Musk waded more deeply into German politics, hosting the far-right AfD’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, in an interview on X and turning up at an AfD rally where he disparaged multiculturalism and lambasted the country’s focus on “past guilt”, demand for the stickers soared.

Demand has now climbed to as much as 2,000 stickers a day, with orders pouring in from across the German-speaking world but as far as Australia and South Korea. All of it was done without any advertising, said Schneider, adding wryly: “Elon Musk does that for us.”

Others have called for the actions to go further. In Poland – where the Nazi German occupation led to the deaths of 6 million Poles, including 3 million Jews – the country’s tourism minister called on citizens to boycott Tesla after Musk’s surprise appearance at the AfD rally. “All I can say is that probably no normal Pole should buy a Tesla any more,” Sławomir Nitras recently told Polish broadcaster Tok FM. “A serious and strong response is necessary, including a consumer boycott.”

In August, the German drugstore chain Rossmann said it would no longer buy Tesla cars for its corporate fleet, citing Musk’s support for Trump, while the German energy company LichtBlick said on social media that it would be “pulling the plug” on the Tesla vehicles in its fleet, citing Musk’s backing of “a rightwing populist and extremist party”.

The message was echoed recently by UK-based campaign group Led by Donkeys after they projected images of Musk’s salute on to the facade of the Tesla gigafactory near Berlin.

“The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is promoting the far right in Europe,” the campaign group wrote on social media after their collaboration with Germany’s Centre for Political Beauty. “Don’t buy a Tesla.”

In London, activists put up a parody “Tesla – The Swasticar” bus stop advert with the tagline “goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds”, referencing the start of the second world war, and stickers with similar wording have been slapped on Tesla cars. In Tottenham, north London, a member of the activist group People vs Elon took a cardboard cutout of Musk’s salute into a Tesla dealership.

In Sweden, the EV maker Polestar has sought to capitalise on the discontent. “We get a lot of people writing that they don’t like all this,” the company’s CEO, Michael Lohscheller, told Bloomberg, adding that he had directed sales staff to target disgruntled Tesla owners.

After a Dutch poll suggested 31% of respondents who owned Teslas were considering selling them or had already done so, it remains to be seen what the impact will be on the company. Matthias Schmidt, a Germany-based automotive analyst, said “2025 will be one of the biggest tests for Tesla.”

“With all respect, consumers tend to be like goldfish; they tend to forget things very quickly,” Schmidt added. “But Germany is potentially slightly different because of its history … The shift to him backing the AfD was potentially far more damaging in Germany than his move to back Trump.”

Last year, Tesla saw sales in Germany plunge 41% – outpacing the overall 27% decline in EVs across the country – as rivals rolled out their own electric vehicles and governments rolled back subsidies.

Figures for early 2025 show that Tesla sales fell sharply across several European markets. Registrations were down 63% on a year earlier in France, 59% in Germany, 44% in Sweden, 38% in Norway and 12% in the UK.

While buyers could be reacting to Musk’s comments, other factors may also be at play as consumers await Tesla’s release of the updated Y model, said Schmidt.

When contacted by the Guardian, Tesla did not reply to a request for comment. But late last month, Musk appeared to be upbeat during a call with investors, hinting that 2025 may be a tough year but that 2026 would be “epic” for the company.

“Musk is kind of like a character that – like a cat – has nine lives,” said Schmidt. “And he’s almost used up those nine lives. And it will be interesting to see what happens now.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[mariacallous]

Not long ago, I was reading the newsletter TheRighting, for which the journalist Howard Polskin combs through the right-wing mediasphere so you don’t have to, when a back-to-back pair of links jumped out at me. The first, from Townhall, announced that it was “Time for Trump’s DOJ and FBI to Deal the Pain.” Republicans “control federal law enforcement right now,” an excerpt pulled out by Polskin read. “That means we get to set the agenda, and we need to ruthlessly and brutally use the law to defeat our enemies’ outrageous and disgraceful attacks upon patriotic Americans.” The second, from The American Spectator, focussed on the role that Elon Musk’s company SpaceX played in bringing home astronauts who had been stranded on the International Space Station, arguing that the supposed rescue reinforced the earthly premise of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE: that the government is riddled with waste and other actors can perform its functions better. “If the private sector can recover astronauts,” the subheading read, “it can do anything.”

One of these links leaned into the idea that the government should be smaller; the other that it should be bigger. This juxtaposition—and apparent contradiction—seems to be everywhere at the moment. While catching up on the news on a Sunday in early April, I came across stories that attested, respectively, to significant forthcoming job cuts at the Internal Revenue Service and to the Trump Administration’s unprecedented plans to use the agency’s data to go after undocumented immigrants. The same day, Kristen Welker, the host of “Meet the Press,” asked Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, about tariffs that have been called “the biggest tax hike on Americans in decades”—and then about the Administration’s plans to extend President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. More recently, I read a story in the Times about a root-and-branch push to slash regulations across government, which Trump described as the “deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.” (A notice published as part of this effort, at the Federal Communications Commission, was literally titled “DELETE, DELETE, DELETE.”) I then clicked through to the paper’s live blog for that day, which led with Trump threatening to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status should it not bend to his will.

Perhaps the two overarching themes of Trump’s first hundred or so days back in office have been that he has brazenly pushed the boundaries of executive power—over Congress, the courts, universities, law firms, the media, former bureaucrats who have slighted him, migrants disappeared without due process to a mega-prison in El Salvador—while, at the same time, empowering Musk and DOGE, among others, to pare back the federal government and withdraw it from long-standing areas of activity. At least at a glance, these narratives seem to channel a classic political divide, between those who think the government should stay out of people’s business and those who think it should take a more hands-on role. That Trump finds himself on both sides of the divide surely reflects, at least in part, the chaos of his approach to governance; whether he pursues a particular policy often seems guided less by philosophical rigor than by naked self-interest. There’s also the issue of execution. Some of his early policies—not least his tariffs—have been implemented in messy ways, and have at times appeared to be driven by incompatible impulses.

At the same time, the Trump Administration seems to be trying to appeal to a broad coalition that runs from traditional small-government Republicans to Silicon Valley techno-libertarians and the nationalist hard right. The latter’s priorities, in particular, involve expanding executive power in ways that are frequently at odds with an instinct to cut costs. The Administration’s breathtakingly ambitious deportation goals are perhaps the clearest example; Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” has been prodding Congress for more funding. (“Our level of success depends on the resources I have,” he said in February.) This is before we even get into Trump’s desire to take over Canada and Greenland, which would expand the government in a very literal sense.

Moves that might appear to shrink or to grow the government, however, are not always as contradictory as they seem. Oren Cass, a prominent policy commentator who serves as the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank, told me that “the simple small-government-versus-big-government dichotomy that dictated most of our political fights in the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands isn’t the right axis on which to understand a lot of the conflicts and a lot of the opportunities” of this moment. In part, he is right; we are in the midst of a political realignment that muddies old dichotomies. But evaluating exactly how government is getting both smaller and bigger under Trump 2.0—and, in some ways, getting bigger by getting smaller—is a revealing lens through which to view where this Administration, the country, and, perhaps, our broader political world may be headed.

During the Obama years, Jonathan Havercroft, an academic who teaches political theory, and who is now at the University of Glasgow, was reading Nietzsche in preparation for a lecture when he came across a reference to “misarchism,” a world view that combines aversion to government, as the entity that regulates social life, with support for a robust state that enforces order and traditional morals. Havercroft wondered if the concept might help explain the rise of the Tea Party, the Republican movement that emerged in furious opposition to Barack Obama and advocated for a mix of both libertarian and authoritarian policies. (The Tea Party was broadly anti-tax, as its name suggested, and opposed big-government programs like the Affordable Care Act, but many adherents seemed to favor stronger immigration enforcement and an aggressive approach to counterterrorism.) Havercroft and a colleague tested his hypothesis against data from the American National Election Study, found support for it, and predicted that this world view would continue to shape Republican politics long after Obama.

As the misarchist framework suggests, the idea of “the state” can be theoretically distinguished from the idea of “government,” wherein government is conceived as an entity that provides services and welfare and the key characteristic of the state is what the sociologist Max Weber called its monopoly on legitimate violence—as Havercroft told me, “what we today would think of as police power, protecting borders, military power.” The two terms have often been used interchangeably, particularly in the postwar era of democratic welfare states. Many countries, though, have combined small-government principles borrowed from neoliberal economics, with its emphasis on free markets as the main driver of social organization, with vicious crackdowns on freedoms of speech and association. Pinochet’s Chile, for instance, both privatized the pension system and disappeared people by dropping their bodies out of helicopters into the ocean. It has been speculated that the scale of Chile’s neoliberal turn would have been impossible without its accompanying authoritarianism. In a 1982 letter to the libertarian economist Friedrich A. Hayek, Margaret Thatcher acknowledged the success of Pinochet’s reforms, but noted that “in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable.”

Many neoliberal economies have been premised on the notion that a strong state is needed to create a strong market—though that state, ultimately, might do fewer things. A Ferrari or a Porsche might be smaller than a Jaguar, Ernesto Gallo, an academic who has studied a growing body of literature on what is called “authoritarian neoliberalism,” told me. But the smaller car may be “stronger in terms of power.” Even in the age of Ronald Reagan and Thatcher, the idea of a spectrum running from small government on the right to big government on the left was an oversimplification. (In Reagan’s first Inaugural Address, he declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and then went on, for example, to significantly increase defense spending.) In 2001, a journalist launched the Political Compass, a tool designed to move beyond such simplifications by adding a social scale perpendicular to the economic one, creating ideological quadrants that have since become a staple of political-science classes. Singapore, for instance, is highly economically free but sharply socially authoritarian.

Trump, despite continuing to celebrate Reagan’s legacy, has in many respects moved away from the consensus that defines the former President’s economic policies. In 2019, Veronique de Rugy, a libertarian and senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, at George Mason University, wrote in Reason magazine that Trump’s first Presidency would “end up being, by a large margin, a very pro-government intervention administration,” citing, among other things, his first-term tariff policy. Now that Trump is back in office, de Rugy told me, he is redoubling his pursuit of that policy in a way that constitutes “an utter abuse of executive powers” and mirrors “the very same arrogance that the far left has always had, that government knows best and can consciously reorganize the economy.”

Indeed, an ascendant wing of the Republican Party has actively pushed for a more muscular government—in the areas of family and industrial policy, for example—after reaching the conclusion that Reagan-style market orthodoxy has hollowed out communities, among other bad outcomes. Cass, who is generally aligned with this wing, accused DOGE of “cutting the things you actually wanted to be building up”; its approach to head-count reduction, for example, slashed an office overseeing subsidies for the domestic manufacturing of semiconductors.

But Cass sees DOGE more as a wasted opportunity than a faulty premise, and he sees spending cuts as a necessary part of realigning the government’s priorities; in his view, for example, it might take less government to enforce universal tariffs than to regulate individual free-trade deals, or to coördinate industrial policy than to retrain and support workers left behind by the market. But “the actual substantive goal of both building some things up while cutting other things down has to be paired to a rhetoric that recognizes that updated reality,” Cass said. And on that front “there’s still a ways to go.” Many figures in the Administration still speak in very classically “small government” terms. The Deputy Treasury Secretary complained to Politico recently that “the government’s gotten larger” and “more involved in people’s lives.” DOGE called for “small-government revolutionaries” to join its team; Musk has said that the U.S. should privatize “everything we possibly can,” and danced around with a chainsaw gifted to him by Javier Milei, the avowedly libertarian President of Argentina. (He also reposted, then deleted, a missive stating that “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did.”) Havercroft told me that Musk is acting like the “misarchist-in-chief.”

And yet it’s also fair to question how much Musk et al. are actually shrinking the government. (Bessent himself reportedly did this recently, during a shouting match with the DOGE head in the White House.) Musk once spoke of wanting to quickly slash two trillion dollars in federal spending, but he has since revised down that figure; so far, the cuts have fallen far short of his ambitious goals—and that’s if you take DOGE’s self-reported claims at face value, which is, erm, ill-advised. And many government workers fired at DOGE’s behest have subsequently been reinstated, because their jobs turned out to be essential or because the courts intervened to clip DOGE’s wings. Over all, spending is actually higher than this time last year, spurred largely by debt interest and automatic increases in Social Security payments, which Trump has promised not to touch, even though they make up a substantial percentage of the federal budget. (Whether you believe Trump’s promise, of course, is a different question; White House officials have suggested that the early cuts targeted “low-hanging fruit” to build political cover for less popular decisions to come.)

If that budget is “the debt-ridden dad on the way to buy a $250,000 Ferrari on the credit card,” Jessica Riedl, of the center-right Manhattan Institute, told NPR in early March, then “DOGE is the $2-off gas card he used along the way.” Last week, Riedl told Reuters that she believes the initiative will end up costing more than it saves. Other analysts seem to agree, citing the costs of firing and rehiring people and lost productivity—not to mention the legal bills it has racked up defending its work. DOGE, Riedl said, “is not a serious exercise.”

The extent to which the Administration has cut government spending may be debatable, but surely it wants to be seen as slashing away. Musk has talked about the cuts in terms of efficiency, but he has also cast them in Manichaean terms. The U.S. Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., for instance, was (among many, many other things) “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” and needed to “die.” His army of engineers tinkers largely out of sight of the public, but Musk himself wants people—his supporters, yes, but, as with any good troll, probably more so his critics—to see him as a warrior and to pay attention to him, be that by posting hyperactively on X or by showing up in Wisconsin in a cheesehead hat and framing a state Supreme Court race as existential for civilization. After waving Milei’s chainsaw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in February, Musk sat down and proclaimed, “I am become meme”—hardly a classic expression of the desire for government to recede from people’s lives. (“DOGE started out as a meme,” he added, with a chuckle. “And now it’s real.”) If Musk, to a certain extent, has become a representation of the government, his ubiquity suggests that the government is growing, at least as an object that demands people’s attention.

The Administration has used Musk, DOGE, and other financial maneuvers to expand its power in more concrete ways, too. The gutting of U.S.A.I.D. threw down a gauntlet before Congress, which ultimately created the agency, and before the courts. Keen observers of authoritarianism see the mass firing of civil servants as a way station on the road to autocracy. The way the cuts and their associated efforts have been handled has certainly made federal workers feel targeted, demoralized, and even paranoid; there have been reports of some of them hiding their laptops and using white-noise machines for fear that their conversations are being recorded, and likening DOGE’s presence to a panopticon, a psyop, and a horror movie. This appears to be at least partly by design: Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key intellectual force behind Trump’s aggressive wielding of executive power, has said that he wants bureaucrats “to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” (There are wider fears that DOGE is trying to build a surveillance state by seizing control of people’s sensitive data.) The Administration is also pulling at the purse strings as a means of asserting power over organizations that receive federal money but are supposed to be independent—like the United States Institute for Peace and, reportedly, NPR and PBS—by sending in DOGE or attempting to claw back appropriations that Congress already authorized. Terminating grants, or threatening to do so, has been a primary instrument in Trump’s war on private universities. With cuts comes leverage comes power.

The DOGE part of all this might be at an inflection point. Musk, following weeks of reports that he is on the outs, confirmed recently—after Tesla, his car company, reported a huge drop in profits—that he intends to spend less time in Washington. (Ever the misarchist, he blamed recent protests targeting Tesla dealerships on special interests drunk on government largesse. “The real reason is that those who are receiving the waste and fraud wish it to continue,” he said.) Musk has suggested, however, that he will continue to spend around two days per week on government business. And it would be naïve to think that Musk taking a step back will spell the end of DOGE, though the volume might be turned down and Congress will at some point have to weigh in. (“DOGE is a way of life, like Buddhism,” he told reporters this week, when asked about succession planning. “Buddha isn't alive anymore. You wouldn't ask the question: ‘Who would lead Buddhism?’ ”) Musk has embedded allies across the government. Vought and others remain in place—and their plan to radically reshape the federal bureaucracy has much deeper ideological roots than some faddish crusade named after a meme. The ultimate boss, of course, is Trump himself—a man who surely cares less about the size of the government, in some philosophical sense, than about rooting out the parts of it that he views as hostile or disloyal and using what remains to enforce his whims.

One recurring motif of Musk’s tenure with DOGE has been that he thinks the government should be run like one of his businesses. Generously, his cuts might be cast in the Silicon Valley tradition of moving fast, breaking things, and then building them back up from zero. Similar has been said of Trump, albeit in a more old-fashioned sense. Businesses, Havercroft, the political theorist, told me, are often “actually quite authoritarian” in terms of how they are run.

Earlier in his career, Havercroft was keenly interested in the idea of the state, and how the concept grew out of the idea of the “estate,” or personal possession of the ruler, as depicted in Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Prince” or Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall.” “In one sense, I think Musk and Trump are trying to re-personalize the state,” Havercroft told me. “ ‘We’re now in charge, it’s my state, I get to run it.’ ” We spoke before Musk’s recent comments about withdrawing from government affairs. If the private sector can do anything, as The American Spectator would have it, it can certainly reabsorb Elon Musk. L’État, c’est encore Trump.

[likeadevils]

okay it seems like we’re picking up new cult members tonight and i need to tell yall about a man named sir richard owen

so i first stumbled upon him when i was trying to find out what platypus milk tastes like. you would think this would be easily googlable. surely, swiftie tumblr is not the first person to wonder about this, and surely some youtuber, or at least a zookeeper, has tried it and told the tale

to this motherfucking day the only first hand account i could fine was from one sir richard owen in 1832. EIGHTEEN THIRTY TWO. “okay,” i think. “it’s not like platypus milk has dramatically changed taste sense the 1800s. this strange, but still relevant data.”

but no. no. this motherfucker did not sample milk from a wild platypus. he did not sample milk from a captured platypus. dear reader, he did not even sample milk from a living platypus. this motherfucker sampled milk from a taxidermied platypus shipped from australia to england in the 1830s, which means it had at best been dead for months. (for the record, he described it as “drops of a yellowish oil, which afforded neither perceptible taste nor smell, except such as was derived from the preserving liquor”)

after months of platypus milk cult nights, i finally crack and look at this guys wikipedia page. what follows are my favorite qoutes, fun facts, and other miscellaneous bullshit

richard owen coined the term dinosauria, now dinosaur.

he helped create the natural history museum in london, the first of its kind

he once hosted a dinner party inside a giant concrete dinosaur

“Owen was granted right of first refusal on any freshly dead animal at the London Zoo. His wife once arrived home to find the carcass of a newly deceased rhinoceros in her front hallway.”

there is a very large section of his wikipedia page dedicated to his personal beef with charles darwin. not included in that section, his statue in the natural history museum of london, a museum that he opened, was replaced by a statue of charles darwin

“Owen has been described by some as a malicious, dishonest and hateful individual. He has been described in one biography as being a "social experimenter with a penchant for sadism. Addicted to controversy and driven by arrogance and jealousy".”

“An Oxford University professor once described Owen as "a damned liar. He lied for God and for malice".”

“Richard Broke Freeman described him as "the most distinguished vertebrate zoologist and palaeontologist ... but a most deceitful and odious man"”

Charles Darwin called him "Spiteful, extremely malignant, clever; the Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book is so talked about"

He claimed that he was the discoverer of the iguanodaun, when really it was this other guy, gideon mandell. richard published an anonymous paper talking shit about gideon and used his sway in the field to ensure that none of gideon mandalls papers were published in the royal society.

“Owen also resorted to the same subterfuge he used against Mantell [against Charles Darwin], writing another anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review in April 1860. In the article, Owen was critical of Darwin for not offering many new observations, and heaped praise (in the third person) upon himself […] Owen did praise, however, the Origin's description of Darwin's work on insect behavior and pigeon breeding as "real gems".

this is what he looked like

[unsolicited-opinions]

Most postmortems of the 2024 election have been purely punditry, and almost none have been data-driven.

It's a pleasure to see an exception: Ezra Klein hosts political consultant David Shore.

This is peak political wonkery, if that's the sort of thing which interests you.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Justin Horowitz at MMFA:

Viral TikTok videos are falsely linking birth control to infertility and describing the medication as “absolutely poison,” while others make generalizations about side effects and suggest the pill tricks women’s brains into making them less attracted to “masculinity." A recent report from The Washington Post examined how online birth control misinformation, combined with a lack of transparency about rare side effects from contraception, is causing women to believe misconceptions about the medication. The article says the trend is driven by an “underlying conservative push” by right-wing influencers. [...]

Misinformation about birth control is going viral on TikTok

On TikTok, figures spreading misinformation are leveraging cherry-picked data and anecdotes about negative side effects of the pill to make blanket generalizations about its effects and scare women into believing that birth control — which is safe and effective — is dangerous. In a May 2023 TikTok video with 144,000 views, for example, former Daily Wire host Candace Owens falsely insinuated that birth control causes infertility problems. (Owens has gone on to repeatedly attack birth control and suggest on social media that it is dangerous.)

[...] Making blanket statements about how birth control affects women is misleading — experts say that while there may be an “association” between hormones and some elements of physical attraction, “suggesting that birth control can alter mate preference,” it is difficult to be certain there is a “cause and effect” relationship. Additionally, as The Washington Post noted, many of the studies that influencers point to “have small sample sizes or are otherwise flawed … which can show correlation but not necessarily causation." No medication is perfect, and doctors need to be clear about potential side effects with their patients — the lived experiences of people on birth control are valid, and side effects from these medications vary from person to person. However, influencers on TikTok are leveraging cherry-picked data points and anecdotes about negative side effects from birth control to make blanket generalizations about its effects that are misleading and potentially dangerous. [...]

The Post’s reporting spurred TikTok to delete videos “linking birth control to mental health issues,” among other misleading claims. A TikTok spokesperson confirmed to the Post that some videos the outlet identified violated TikTok’s company policies against “inaccurate, misleading or false content that may cause significant harm to individuals or society." By design, TikTok’s “For You Page” algorithm feeds content to users based on “interests” or “connections” that can make it easier to be pulled into a world of radical content, even if they are not seeking it out. This could lead TikTok users — many of them children — to view and possibly believe medical misinformation from influencers that right-wing figures are exploiting to vilify and fearmonger about birth control.

Birth control misinformation and conspiracy theories are gaining lots of views on TikTok to push right-wing narratives to gin up anti-birth control sentiments.

[tomorrowusa]

We've been seeing a flood of news stories that young males have been flocking to rightwing parties around the world in recent elections. But the opposite seems to be true in the recent election in Australia. Men under 30 have apparently swung towards the left of center Australian Labor Party (ALP) which won a landslide victory this month.

(Researcher Intifar) Chowdhury says the 2025 election results stop “any kind of insinuation” that young men in Australia are becoming more rightwing. “If you look at electorates with a higher share of both first-time voters and voters under the age of 30, the higher the percentage, the more likely they are to swing towards Labor,” she says. “I will be very surprised if we see a swing among young men towards the Coalition, because no matter what demographic you’re talking about, there is some swing against the Coalition.” If her hypothesis is correct, it’s bucking global trends. At the 2024 US election, men aged between 18 and 29 turned out in force for Trump, while women of the same age voted for Kamala Harris by an even wider margin. Similarly, men at the 2024 UK election were twice as likely to vote for Nigel Farage’s rightwing Reform UK, while young women were more likely to vote Green. In Germany, there are signs young men under 30 are moving towards the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). China, Tunisia and South Korea have also experienced a surge in support for rightwing candidates among young men. But data suggests young Australians have been repelled by Trump’s leadership style. A March study of voters aged 18-44 found just 23% surveyed said Australia would benefit from a leader like Trump; 58% said “absolutely not”. A sense of dread about social cohesion and the rise of the far right were consistently cited as major issues among a cohort of almost 1,000 young voters who reached out to Guardian Australia over the election campaign. Chowdury describes what occurred this election as the “Trump slump”. “I think Australia just became more moderate, to be honest,” she says.

It's not so much a swing to the left as it is to the moderate left.

All but one of the nation’s five youngest electorates were won by Labor in 2025 after previously being held by the Greens. (Ryan was too close to call at the time of writing.) “Australians in general tend to vote heavily based on their issues of importance,” Chowdhury says. “If you think about the generational grievance of the younger generations, it’s being locked out of the [housing] market, the erosion of the safety net, job precarity.”

This Australian phenomenon seems driven to a large degree by the media scene in the country.

Hannah Ferguson, 26, is head of independent news commentary page Cheek Media Co and co-host of the Big Small Talk podcast, both aimed at younger audiences. She says Australia’s election felt like a “battle of influence”. “Murdoch media were projecting the Coalition to win and endorsing them, and it felt like I was in this bubble where I had to prove myself and push my audience to believe they were the change-makers,” she says. Ferguson says she has often been asked why “all the influencers in Australia are progressive”. She says that, excluding Fox News, America’s mainstream media is perceived as leftwing, allowing influencers to position themselves against the “establishment”. While Australian influencers are also responding to “the establishment”, she notes it’s in a media “heavily dominated by Murdoch”. “The commentators who have risen up in this election are the ones challenging the far-right establishment of media in this country,” she says.

What we in the US can learn from this is that we need to talk more consistently and frequently about the rightwing establishment being responsible for the mess in the US. We should also promote influencers and podcasters who are effective at presenting common sense progressive viewpoints.

[discussionswithgyetti]

Blog Post #3

Q1: Although social media is public, are there moral issues for the monopolization of spaces in which marginalized groups may go to cry and create change (especially while taking into account current government states)? 

In the revolution will be digitized, the authors discuss the role of the internet as a public sphere for activism for black activism, during a time in which there was a lack of safe, public spheres for social change. (Everett, 2011). This book was created in 2011, before the extreme monopolization of social media platforms. The use of unofficial forum websites have died down, and individuals often use these new platforms to elicit social movement and create eroding change. However, especially taking into account the current climate of politics, and the digital revenue based oligarchy that appears to be forming within the United States, I would like to question what the moral implications of these “public spheres”, when taking into account that the attention we provide, the adds we watch, and the data we give, all seems to line the pockets of capitalist oppressors. 

Q 2: The new jim code states “thus, even just deciding what problem needs solving requires a host of judgements; and yet we are expected to pay no attention to the man behind the screen”. In what ways do narratives and discussions around new technologies affirming the idea that new technologies are “unbiased”? 

Algorithms and data driven decision making is often seen as “out of the hands” of individual technicians and social media programers. As is stated in the race after technology, the new Jim Code article (Benjamin, 2020), a neoliberalism, colorblind view of technology has taken president. I reflected back on my own experiences prior to this class, as I also had lived under the assumption that algorithms were deemed as absolute. After taking into account my previous opinions on algorithms, and what this article states in regards to neoliberalism and productivity, I realized that production in “logic” has been moralized as being good, without further thought. Logic being different then empirical evidence, logic more so meaning a no nonsense, individualistic approach to the world. 

Q3: How does the exclusivity and gatekeeping of knowledge about algorithms contribute to its continued harm, as in regards for marginalized communities. 

In this week's Power of Algorithms chapter, the author states “It is impossible to know when and what influences proprietary algorithmic design, … except as we engage in critique and protest” (Noble, 2018). This statement made me question, how has the privatization of these public spaces prevented marginalized individuals from being a part of the conversation when it comes to their own algorithms, and what information they see? If updates and changes are made that change the info that people are exposed to, then why are consumers NOT more a part of the algorithm creation process? 

Q4: How might issues regarding online algorithms worsen as Artificial intelligence takes search engines by storm, now automatically generating simple consumable answers? 

This question stems from an ending remark made in the power of algorithms chapter (Noble, 2018), stating that there is a lack of human context in some types of algorithmically driven decisions.? Questions for me arise, such as, what results are used in the AI image generations? It can’t be all sources, are they the sources that pay money to be prioritized on google? The further distilling of responsibility (now AI being seen as absolute truth) may make it even harder for individuals to fight against algorithmic oppression, because it adds another “middle man”. 

References:

Benjamin, R. (2020). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity. 

Everett, A. (2011). “The Revolution Will Be Digitized: Reimaging Africanity in Cyberspace.” Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, State University of New York Press, pp. 147–82. 

Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York University Press.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Long COVID is hitting Kentucky hard. Vaccinations and proper ventilation are important. - Published Aug 1, 2024

We have a significant problem with the health of our nation.

Kentucky is barreling towards an unprecedented day of reckoning as it faces a tsunami of chronic diseases caused by sequalae from COVID-19. Currently, 7% of all Kentuckians report having symptoms of Long COVID, eighth highest in the United States. Mounting research is finding that delayed deaths and disability from damage to a multitude of different organs is greater than that from the acute infection. Kentucky is confronting this challenge by not improving indoor ventilation, not masking in high-risk settings and not keeping up-to-date on vaccinations. All of this in the face of raising rates of infections in Kentucky driven by new variants (KP.3).

In the spring of this year, vaccinations appeared to have reached a plateau (or maybe I should state a low flood plain) and the CDC stopped posting vaccination data on May 11, 2024. At that time the national average for receiving the updated booster was 22.5%. Kentucky was well below this at 18.5%.

Messaging from our leaders is important. The “blue” Western States and Northeastern States have almost twice the rate of up-to-date vaccinations (31.3%) as the “red” Southern States (16.1%), a trend which mirrors the perceived advice on the importance of vaccinations from their leaders.

One of our Northern Kentucky Representatives, Thomas Massie, last year introduced a U.S. Congressional Bill prohibiting a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for international visitors, and most recently for those seeking U.S. Citizenship. These political efforts are perplexing in the face of right-wing concerns of “undocumented migrants” bringing disease into our country.

Nationally, there is a growing recognition that we have a significant problem with the health of our nation. However, there is not agreement regarding its cause.

Project 2025 only cares about white populations The national conservative initiative “2025, Mandate for Leadership” from the Heritage Foundation, recognizes a precipitous drop in life expectancy “…with white populations alone losing 7% of their expected life span in just one year.” However, the preceding paragraph appeared to blame this drop on “ ‘promoting equity in everything we do’ for the sake of ‘populations sharing a particular characteristic’ including race, sexuality, gender identification, ethnicity, and a host of other categories.” Of interest the only statistic given was for “white populations.”

After all, if the right wing thinks this virus could potentially be used as a “bio weapon” and it is still rapidly spreading in our society, maybe we should focus more on COVID-19 with its potential to cause long COVID and delayed deaths, rather than blaming programs designed to protect our high-risk frontline workers, many of which are economically disadvantaged and minorities.

The importance in vaccinations cannot be overstated. They are one of our best tools to prevent long COVID with efficacy rates of approximately 70%. But with reinfections, even this is not enough. As exemplified by statements by Whoopi Goldberg during her return to the View after a COVID-19 reinfection. "I'm just getting over COVID – again – and I can barely remember anybody’s name," "I don’t know who they are ... There are times when I go for a word and it’s not there, …."

And vaccinations, even mandates, are not anti-patriotic. In 1775, George Washington mandated that his troops receive smallpox vaccinations. He knew that with a 30% fatality rate smallpox was a grave threat to his army and could prevent a victory against the British Army. The process of vaccination was called “variolation” where pus was taken from a smallpox patient and inserted into a wound on the individual to be inoculated. This vaccine was not without complications, it had a fatality rate of 5 to 10%, but was safer than getting the disease.

What are we to do? Obviously, if one cannot totally prevent COVID infections our goal should be to become infected the least number of times possible; lowering our risks of deaths, hospitalizations and long COVID. A new generation of vaccines are needed and hopefully once available, they will be more effective in decreasing spread and preventing infections.

Kentuckians need to increase their efforts, both for our health and that of our society as a whole. Currently, I carry a CO2 monitor to measure ventilation and judge the risks of indoor settings. And we all should start using N95 masks in high-risk indoor settings, become boosted with the latest version of the vaccine and businesses need to greatly improve indoor ventilation.