De walging van wat er in #Berlicum gebeurt, wordt met de dag groter. Met #geld willen inwoners voorkomen dat het AZC er komt. En weer die argumenten 'we zijn niet tegen opvang van vluchtelingen' of 'mijn huis wordt minder waard'. Hebben die mensen nu echt niet door hoe ontzetten discriminerend/ racistisch ze zijn? Nog even afgezien van het NIMBY gedrag.
Mir ist es wichtig, über die Hitzesensitivität von Psychopharmaka aufzuklären. Das betrifft auch gängige Antidepressiva, vermutlich kennst du auch Menschen, die sie einnehmen.
I have an excellent excuse for this week's linkdump: I'm in Germany, but I'm supposed to be in LA, and I'm not, because London Heathrow shut down due to a power-station fire, which meant I spent all day yesterday running around like a headless chicken, trying to get home in time for my gig in San Diego on Monday (don't worry, I sorted it):
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
But there is *some* good news: Wil Wheaton has announced his new podcast, a successor of sorts to the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. It's called "It's Storytime" and it features Wil reading his favorite stories handpicked from science fiction magazines, including *On Spec*, the magazine that bought my very first published story (I was 16, it ran in their special youth issue, it wasn't very good, but boy did it mean a lot to me):
You may recognize Wil Wheaton’s name from his acting work in television shows like The Big Bang Theory, Leverage, and Star Trek: The Next Generation, or 1985’s timeless classic, Stand B…
Here's some more good news: a court has found (again!) that works created by AI are not eligible for copyright. This is the very *best* possible outcome for people worried about creators' rights in the age of AI, because if our bosses can't copyright the botshit that comes out of the "AI" systems trained on our work, then they will pay us:
Our bosses hate paying us, but they hate the idea of not being able to stop people from copying their entertainment products so! much! more! It's that simple:
This outcome is *so* much better than the idea that AI training isn't fair use - an idea that threatens the existence of search engines, archiving, computational linguistics, and other clearly beneficial activities.
Worse than that: if we create a new copyright that allows creators to prevent others from scraping and analyzing their works, our bosses will *immediately* alter their non-negotiable boilerplate contracts to demand that we assign them this right. That will allow them to warehouse huge troves of copyrighted material that they will sell to AI companies who will train models designed to put us on the breadline (see above, re: our bosses hate paying us):
The rights of archivists grow more urgent by the day, as the Trump regime lays waste to billions of dollars worth of government materials that were produced at public expense, deleting decades of scientific, scholarly, historical and technical materials. This is the kind of thing you might expect the National Archive or the Library of Congress to take care of, but they're being chucked into the meat-grinder as well.
To make things even worse, Trump and Musk have laid waste to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a tiny, vital agency that provides funding to libraries, archives and museums across the country. Evan Robb writes about all the ways the IMLS supports the public in his state of Washington:
* Technology support. Last-mile broadband connection, network support, hardware, etc. Assistance with the confusing e-rate program for reduced Internet pricing for libraries.
The entire IMLS budget over the next 10 years rounds to zero when compared to the US federal budget - and yet, by gutting it, DOGE is amputating significant parts of the country's systems that promote literacy; critical thinking; and universal access to networks, media and ideas. Put it that way, and it's not hard to see why they hate it so.
Trying to figure out what Trump is up to is (deliberately) confusing, because Trump and Musk are pursuing a chaotic agenda that is designed to keep their foes off-balance:
But as Hamilton Nolan writes, there's a way to cut through the chaos and make sense of it all. The problem is that there are a handful of billionaires who have so much money that when they choose chaos, we all have to live with it:
> The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars.
> If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.
We actually have a body of law designed to prevent this from happening. It's called "antitrust" and 40 years ago, Carter followed the advice of some of history's dumbest economists who said that fighting monopolies made the economy "inefficient."
Every president since, up to - but not including - Biden, did even more to encourage monopolization and the immense riches it creates for a tiny number of greedy bastards.
But Biden changed that. Thanks to the "Unity Taskforce" that divided up the presidential appointments between the Democrats' corporate wing and the Warren/Sanders wing, Biden appointed some of the most committed, effective trustbusters we'd seen for generations:
After Trump's election, there was some room for hope that Trump's FTC would continue to pursue at least *some* of the anti-monopoly work of the Biden years. After all, there's a sizable faction within the MAGA movement that hates (some) monopolies:
But last week, Trump claimed to have illegally fired the two Democratic commissioners on the FTC: Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter. I stan both of these commissioners, hard.
When they were at the height of their powers in the Biden years, I had the incredible, disorienting experience of getting out of bed, checking the headlines, and feeling *very good* about what the government had just done.
Trump isn't legally allowed to fire Bedoya and Slaughter. Perhaps he's just picking this fight as part of his chaos agenda (see above).
But there are some other pretty good theories about what this is setting up. In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller proposes that Trump is using this case as a wedge, trying to set a precedent that would let him fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell:
Donald Trump picked a fight over firing officials at the Federal Trade Commission. If he wins, Federal Reserve independence is next. And an Amazon lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, may be involved.
But perhaps there's more to it. Stoller just had Commissioner Bedoya on Organized Money, the podcast he co-hosts with David Dayen, and Bedoya pointed out that if Trump can fire Democratic commissioners, he can also fire *Republican* commissioners. That means that if he cuts a shady deal with, say, Jeff Bezos, he can order the FTC to drop its case against Amazon and fire the Republicans on the commission if they don't frog when he jumps:
David Dayen and Matt Stoller are joined by FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya to discuss the Trump Administration's attempt to oust him from his seat, and other currents in antitrust.
The future that our plutocrat overlords are grasping for is indeed a terrible one. You can see its shape in the fantasies of "liberatarian exit" - the seasteads, free states, and other assorted attempts to build anarcho-capitalist lawless lands where you can sell yourself into slavery, or just sell your kidneys.
The best nonfiction book on libertarian exit is Raymond Criab's 2022 "Adventure Capitalism," a brilliant, darkly hilarious and chilling history of every time a group of people have tried to found a nation based on elevating selfishness to a virtue:
If Craib's book is the best nonfiction volume on the subject of libertarian exit, then Naomi Kritzer's super 2023 novel *Liberty's Daughter* is the best *novel* about life in a libertopia - a young adult novel about a girl growing up in the hell that would be life with a Heinlein-type dad:
But now this canon has a third volume, a piece of *design* fiction from Atelier Van Lieshout called "Slave City," which specs out an arcology populated with 200,000 inhabitants whose "very rational, efficient and profitable" arrangements produce €7b/year in profit:
This economic miracle is created by the residents' "voluntary" opt-in to a day consisting of 7h in an office, 7h toiling in the fields, 7h of sleep, and 3h for "leisure" (e.g. hanging out at "The Mall," a 24/7, 26-storey " boundless consumer paradise").
Slaves who wish to better themselves can attend either Female Slave University or Male Slave University (no gender controversy in Slave City!), which run 24/7, with 7 hours of study, 7 hours of upkeep and maintenance on the facility, 7h of sleep, and, of course, 3h of "leisure."
The field of design fiction is a weird and fertile one. In his traditional closing keynote for this year's SXSW Interactive festival, Bruce Sterling opens with a little potted history of the field since it was coined by Julian Bleeker:
Then Bruce moves on to his own latest design fiction project, an automated poetry machine called the Versificatore first described by Primo Levi in an odd piece of science fiction written for a newspaper.
And now Sterling has built a Versificatore. The keynote is a sterlingian delight - as all of his SXSW closers are. It's a hymn to the value of "imaginary futures" and an instruction manual for recovering them. It could not be more timely.
Sterling's imaginary futures would be a good upbeat note to end this 'dump with, but I've got a *real* future that's just as inspiring to close us out with: the EU has found Apple guilty of monopolizing the interfaces to its devices and have ordered the company to open them up for interoperability, so that other manufacturers - European manufacturers! - can make fully interoperable gadgets that are first-class citizens of Apple's "ecosystem":
It's a good reminder that as America crumbles, there are still places left in the world with competent governments that want to help the people they represent thrive and prosper. As the Prophet Gibson tells us, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." Let's hope that the EU is living in America's future, and not the other way around.
Photo : YONHAP News Thirty-five out of 40 medical schools nationwide have rejected the collective leave of absence applications from students in protest of the admissions quota hike.
" Habitants de Gaza, ceci est votre dernier avertissement ". C'est par cette formule glaçante que le ministre israélien de la Défense, Yoav Katz, a menacé toute la population civile de la bande de Gaza. Selon lui, l'opération militaire en cours n'est que la première étape, et la suite sera encore plus brutale, plus violente, plus destructrice. Katz annonce la reprise imminente de l'évacuation des zones de combat, et met en...
" Habitants de Gaza, ceci est votre dernier avertissement ". C'est par cette formule glaçante que le ministre israélien de la Défense, Yoav Katz, a menacé
As European leaders shamelessly lecture President Trump about the sanctity of Ukraine’s borders, their own hypocrisy is on full display as they continue to ignore Turkey’s 50-year occupation of Cyprus.
Het is bizar dat het reisadvies voor de VS nog steeds groen is. De overheid zit helemaal niet op te letten. Je moet wel behoorlijk onder een steen gelegen hebben om te denken dat je nu hup naar de VS kunt reizen alsof er daar niets aan de hand is. De douaniers daar kunnen je smartphone bekijken en als ze social media posts van je vinden met kritiek op Trump kan dat al voldoende zijn voor hen om jou de toegang tot de VS te weigeren .... of erger, je voor onbepaalde tijd vast te zetten.
@LiefhebberV Natuurlijk, de leopards eating people's faces but certainly not mine. Maar als verantwoordelijke overheid hoor je wel voor iedereen te denken. Maar goed, een verantwoordelijke overheid is inderdaad ook alweer een tijdje geleden.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced upcoming meetings of the “coalition of the willing” to discuss military planning for a potential peacekeeping contingent in Ukraine, according to Politico.
Representatives of the coalition will convene at their headquarters near London, where preliminary military-level talks on a possible ceasefire in Ukraine were held earlier. The new round of talks is scheduled to take place next week and will last three days. #AureFreePress #News #press
Good morning ! To you ... and it's 330 am here and time to stop shopping and I get to sleep finally ... will be making more coffee and canning it and maybe some kind of casserole as well later
)
🖖
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2025/03/22/omn…
2/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Therefore, this is *30th* linkdump, in which I collect the assorted links that didn't make it into this week's newsletters. Here are the other 29:
pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
I always like to start and end these 'dumps with some good news, which isn't easy in these absolutely terrifying times.
3/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But there is *some* good news: Wil Wheaton has announced his new podcast, a successor of sorts to the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. It's called "It's Storytime" and it features Wil reading his favorite stories handpicked from science fiction magazines, including *On Spec*, the magazine that bought my very first published story (I was 16, it ran in their special youth issue, it wasn't very good, but boy did it mean a lot to me):
wilwheaton.net/podcast/
4/
It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton
WIL WHEATON dot NETCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Here's some more good news: a court has found (again!) that works created by AI are not eligible for copyright. This is the very *best* possible outcome for people worried about creators' rights in the age of AI, because if our bosses can't copyright the botshit that comes out of the "AI" systems trained on our work, then they will pay us:
yahoo.com/news/us-appeals-cour…
5/
Yahooist Teil der Yahoo Markenfamilie
www.yahoo.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Our bosses hate paying us, but they hate the idea of not being able to stop people from copying their entertainment products so! much! more! It's that simple:
pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/eve…
This outcome is *so* much better than the idea that AI training isn't fair use - an idea that threatens the existence of search engines, archiving, computational linguistics, and other clearly beneficial activities.
6/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Worse than that: if we create a new copyright that allows creators to prevent others from scraping and analyzing their works, our bosses will *immediately* alter their non-negotiable boilerplate contracts to demand that we assign them this right. That will allow them to warehouse huge troves of copyrighted material that they will sell to AI companies who will train models designed to put us on the breadline (see above, re: our bosses hate paying us):
pluralistic.net/2024/03/13/hey…
7/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The rights of archivists grow more urgent by the day, as the Trump regime lays waste to billions of dollars worth of government materials that were produced at public expense, deleting decades of scientific, scholarly, historical and technical materials. This is the kind of thing you might expect the National Archive or the Library of Congress to take care of, but they're being chucked into the meat-grinder as well.
8/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
To make things even worse, Trump and Musk have laid waste to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a tiny, vital agency that provides funding to libraries, archives and museums across the country. Evan Robb writes about all the ways the IMLS supports the public in his state of Washington:
* Technology support. Last-mile broadband connection, network support, hardware, etc. Assistance with the confusing e-rate program for reduced Internet pricing for libraries.
9/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
* Coordinated group purchase of e-books, e-audiobooks, scholarly research databases, etc.
* Library services for the blind and print-disabled.
* Libraries in state prisons, juvenile detention centers, and psychiatric institutions.
* Digitization of, and access to, historical resources (e.g., newspapers, government records, documents, photos, film, audio, etc.).
* Literacy programming and support for youth services at libraries.
10/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The entire IMLS budget over the next 10 years rounds to zero when compared to the US federal budget - and yet, by gutting it, DOGE is amputating significant parts of the country's systems that promote literacy; critical thinking; and universal access to networks, media and ideas. Put it that way, and it's not hard to see why they hate it so.
11/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Trying to figure out what Trump is up to is (deliberately) confusing, because Trump and Musk are pursuing a chaotic agenda that is designed to keep their foes off-balance:
wired.com/story/elon-musk-dona…
But as Hamilton Nolan writes, there's a way to cut through the chaos and make sense of it all. The problem is that there are a handful of billionaires who have so much money that when they choose chaos, we all have to live with it:
12/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
> If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.
hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-underl…
We actually have a body of law designed to prevent this from happening. It's called "antitrust" and 40 years ago, Carter followed the advice of some of history's dumbest economists who said that fighting monopolies made the economy "inefficient."
14/
The Underlying Problem
Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Every president since, up to - but not including - Biden, did even more to encourage monopolization and the immense riches it creates for a tiny number of greedy bastards.
But Biden changed that. Thanks to the "Unity Taskforce" that divided up the presidential appointments between the Democrats' corporate wing and the Warren/Sanders wing, Biden appointed some of the most committed, effective trustbusters we'd seen for generations:
pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/adm…
15/
Pluralistic: 18 Oct 2022 Being good at your job is praxis – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
After Trump's election, there was some room for hope that Trump's FTC would continue to pursue at least *some* of the anti-monopoly work of the Biden years. After all, there's a sizable faction within the MAGA movement that hates (some) monopolies:
pluralistic.net/2025/01/24/enf…
But last week, Trump claimed to have illegally fired the two Democratic commissioners on the FTC: Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter. I stan both of these commissioners, hard.
16/
Pluralistic: The first days of Boss Politics Antitrust (24 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
When they were at the height of their powers in the Biden years, I had the incredible, disorienting experience of getting out of bed, checking the headlines, and feeling *very good* about what the government had just done.
Trump isn't legally allowed to fire Bedoya and Slaughter. Perhaps he's just picking this fight as part of his chaos agenda (see above).
17/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But there are some other pretty good theories about what this is setting up. In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller proposes that Trump is using this case as a wedge, trying to set a precedent that would let him fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell:
thebignewsletter.com/p/why-tru…
18/
Why Trump Tried to Fire Federal Trade Commission Democrats
Matt Stoller (BIG by Matt Stoller)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But perhaps there's more to it. Stoller just had Commissioner Bedoya on Organized Money, the podcast he co-hosts with David Dayen, and Bedoya pointed out that if Trump can fire Democratic commissioners, he can also fire *Republican* commissioners. That means that if he cuts a shady deal with, say, Jeff Bezos, he can order the FTC to drop its case against Amazon and fire the Republicans on the commission if they don't frog when he jumps:
organizedmoney.fm/p/trumps-sho…
19/
Trump's Showdown at the FTC with Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya
David Dayen (Organized Money)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
(By the way, Organized Money is a *fantastic* podcast, notwithstanding the fact that they put me on the show last week:)
audio.buzzsprout.com/6f5ly01qc…
The future that our plutocrat overlords are grasping for is indeed a terrible one. You can see its shape in the fantasies of "liberatarian exit" - the seasteads, free states, and other assorted attempts to build anarcho-capitalist lawless lands where you can sell yourself into slavery, or just sell your kidneys.
20/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The best nonfiction book on libertarian exit is Raymond Criab's 2022 "Adventure Capitalism," a brilliant, darkly hilarious and chilling history of every time a group of people have tried to found a nation based on elevating selfishness to a virtue:
pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/thi…
21/
Pluralistic: 14 Jun 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If Craib's book is the best nonfiction volume on the subject of libertarian exit, then Naomi Kritzer's super 2023 novel *Liberty's Daughter* is the best *novel* about life in a libertopia - a young adult novel about a girl growing up in the hell that would be life with a Heinlein-type dad:
pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/pod…
22/
Pluralistic: Naomi Kritzer’s “Liberty’s Daughter” (21 November 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But now this canon has a third volume, a piece of *design* fiction from Atelier Van Lieshout called "Slave City," which specs out an arcology populated with 200,000 inhabitants whose "very rational, efficient and profitable" arrangements produce €7b/year in profit:
archdaily.com/30114/slave-city…
23/
Slave City / Atelier Van Lieshout
Ethel Baraona Pohl (ArchDaily)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This economic miracle is created by the residents' "voluntary" opt-in to a day consisting of 7h in an office, 7h toiling in the fields, 7h of sleep, and 3h for "leisure" (e.g. hanging out at "The Mall," a 24/7, 26-storey " boundless consumer paradise").
24/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Slaves who wish to better themselves can attend either Female Slave University or Male Slave University (no gender controversy in Slave City!), which run 24/7, with 7 hours of study, 7 hours of upkeep and maintenance on the facility, 7h of sleep, and, of course, 3h of "leisure."
25/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The field of design fiction is a weird and fertile one. In his traditional closing keynote for this year's SXSW Interactive festival, Bruce Sterling opens with a little potted history of the field since it was coined by Julian Bleeker:
bruces.medium.com/how-to-rebui…
Then Bruce moves on to his own latest design fiction project, an automated poetry machine called the Versificatore first described by Primo Levi in an odd piece of science fiction written for a newspaper.
26/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The Versificatore was then adapted to the screen in 1971, for an episode of an Italian sf TV show based on Levi's fiction:
youtube.com/watch?v=tva-D_8b8-…
And now Sterling has built a Versificatore. The keynote is a sterlingian delight - as all of his SXSW closers are. It's a hymn to the value of "imaginary futures" and an instruction manual for recovering them. It could not be more timely.
27/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Sterling's imaginary futures would be a good upbeat note to end this 'dump with, but I've got a *real* future that's just as inspiring to close us out with: the EU has found Apple guilty of monopolizing the interfaces to its devices and have ordered the company to open them up for interoperability, so that other manufacturers - European manufacturers! - can make fully interoperable gadgets that are first-class citizens of Apple's "ecosystem":
reuters.com/technology/apple-o…
28/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's a good reminder that as America crumbles, there are still places left in the world with competent governments that want to help the people they represent thrive and prosper. As the Prophet Gibson tells us, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." Let's hope that the EU is living in America's future, and not the other way around.
29/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.
Catch me in SAN DIEGO on MONDAY (Mar 24):
mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow
And in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2:
exileinbookville.com/events/44…
More tour dates here:
martinhench.com
30/
Authors on Tap: Cory Doctorow and Peter Sagal
exileinbookville.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Image:
TDelCoro
flickr.com/photos/tomasdelcoro…
CC BY-SA 2.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
eof/
Bloody Mary
Flickrmark zero
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow
in reply to mark zero • • •Sensitive content
Überdurchschnittlauch
Unknown parent • • •@slothrop
Living in Berlin, I would guess you don't find something like this anywhere.
Berlin is crazy, but this my friend is not crazy, it's an abomination.
Ingo Schildmann
Unknown parent • • •