Congrats to you!

Birthday greetings forJulie Christie, born on this day, 1940. Pictured here in "Doctor Zhivago", 1965.

How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes A clever new paper puts concrete numbers to the taxes paid by members of the Forbes 400.

How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes
A clever new paper puts concrete numbers to the taxes paid by members of the Forbes 400. www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...

Impact Dashboard - Impact Counter | Impact Counter Visualize the human impact of funding changes for aid and support organizations.

A Boston University epidemiologist created a model tracking deaths from the shutdown of these programs which projected 780,000 deaths over the first year, 2/3 of them children

www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?vi...

No wonder they don’t want us to vote again.

9/
This is not mismanagement. It is a transfer of power. A government buried in interest payments cannot invest in its people. When the safety net is shredded, private wealth becomes the only law left. They are trading your security for their total control.

Congressional Republicans Might Set Off the Debt Bomb Their new budget framework is the most irresponsible in modern history—and will put the American economy on a very dangerous trajectory.

8/ They want a world where "we can't afford it" is the only answer to every public need. By ballooning the interest line on the budget, they make the country look broke on paper. Then they rewrite the social contract while you are too scared to fight back.
www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...

Bringing back both medieval disease and the “king’s touch” as a cure. Big win for MAHA.

Changing the conversation. No one is talking about Epstein or the Iran fiasco right now. Or last week’s threat of genocide. Gas prices will overtake it all tomorrow. And the markets.

lol. Um, no, but perhaps an interdict or papal bull will follow

The worst US failure since Vietnam, or ever

The US president starting and losing wars so he, his family, and his cronies can profit isn't even hard to believe any more.

Robin Hood: Man in Tights

To everyone celebrating Easter, Michelle and I wish you a joyful holiday filled with reminders of the enduring power of faith and hope.

The Seine at Lavacourt - 1879
https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/3109929

Cherry Blossoms 🌸 Sakura Season in Japan 🇯🇵

My entire life, Americans have been bringing up the constitution in commanding, warning tones - in both good and bad faith - and now it’s been proven to just be a completely meaningless concept. A guy came along and decided it didn’t apply to him, and all branches of government went ‘ok, fine’

Wikipedia now has higher standards than all universities

The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the AI Industry Tech companies believe in intellectual property, but not yours.

Even as they claim the right to train their models on work belonging to other people, the AI companies have rejected a similar premise when it comes to their own products, Alex Reisner reports:

What it’s like to live in one of Sir John Vanbrugh’s masterpieces ft.trib.al/UhIKJLz | opinion

AI writing is not scholarship.

Exhibit A:

War Isn’t Costing Billions—It’s Costing Hundreds Of Billions, Says Justin Wolfers YouTube video by Justin Wolfers

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCF_...

MIT Study Finds Artificial Intelligence Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline - Science, Public Health Policy and the Law By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

MIT study:

“83.3% of LLM users were unable to quote even one sentence from the essay they had just written.

“In contrast, 88.9% of Search and Brain-only users could quote accurately.

“0% of LLM users could produce a correct quote, while most Brain-only and Search users could.”

Grammarly declined my request to interview CEO Shishir Mehrotra today. But it told me that in response to criticisms, it will allow experts to opt out of the feature by emailing expertoptout@superhuman.com.

I've decided that instead of wasting my own time to see if Grammarly has stolen my name and writing for use their business, I'd just email them to opt out and make them waste some time cleaning up their own goddamn mess.

www.platformer.news/grammarly-ex...

Once you are losing the Wall Street Journal OpEd-page, which has for decades editorialized on behalf of war against Iran, you’re in serious trouble.
Important analysis by Walter Russell Mead.

He’s an alien trying to get back to Mars. Sometimes the mask slips.

That was my first thought when I saw the story. They don't care, have never cared.

Six years ago this week, an unplanned disaster engulfed the world. Trump catastrophically mismanaged it. The economy collapsed and 1m+ died.

Now reelected, he’s on the verge of topping that, only this time the disaster is entirely of his own making.

The results may be even worse.

‘My invention makes ocean plastic the world’s cheapest problem to solve’ Clean-up craft designed by a young man have already stopped 50m kilos reaching the sea. He says $1bn could end the scourge altogether

‘My invention makes ocean plastic the world’s cheapest problem to solve’

www.thetimes.com/article/ea44...

The Black Death’s counterintuitive effect: as human numbers fell, so did plant diversity New study finds that plant biodiversity collapsed in landscapes where arable production was abandoned during and after the Black Death era.

European pre-industrial agriculture was actually good for plant diversity. This according to a study that showed diversity slumped with the Black Death as human population crashed and land was abandoned and rewilded itself.
theconversation.com/the-black-de...

#biodiversity #agriculture #rewilding