Steve MacNeil

It's all stuff and nonsense.

[AnthonyAndrews @anthon7yandrews]

This is the Russian oligarch who owns the resort being developed on the controversial island in Albania that Jared & Ivanka are managing. He was engaged to Naomi Campbell while she was running around w/Ghislaine Maxwell. The entire picture isn’t that difficult to piece together.

[Jenni @hashjenni]

Can we clap for the Albanians please? Over 100,000 of them took to the streets, shut down the capital protesting Maga Jared Kushner & Maga Ivanka Trump. Protecting their sacred lands from these vampires

[🏴‍☠️Maddox🏴‍☠️ @realmaddox]

This is an insane story. The DOGE whistleblower who said that login attempts were made to the NLRB from Russian IP addresses minutes after DOGE got access had his brake lines cut and photos of him walking his dog from a drone taped to his door after Musk attacked him on Twitter

[Steve MacNeil @SCMacNeil]

@LawyerGatMAREJD @adamjohnsonCHI @AlanDersh And gets 'massages' from people one-sixth his age!

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

We’re in final stage of capitalism where global capital can’t expand or sustain past profits. It’s now consuming public institutions and key systems, sacrificing democracy, welfare, infrastructure, education, healthcare, and ecosystems for short-term gain.

[Alex & Books 📚 @AlexAndBooks_]

Just a friendly reminder that libraries are free.

Not “free trial” free.
Not “free with ads” free.
Not “free if you give us all of your data” free.

But free free.

[Ian Welsh @iwelsh]

The top marginal tax rate om Canada is 33%.

It was 91% in 1960.

It was 70% in 1980.

No, the rich are not taxed heavily.

[Avi Lewis @avilewis]

Palantir is deeply embedded in the scariest activities of the Trump regime – enabling everything from mass deportations and lawless assassinations in international waters to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and war crimes.

CEO Alex Karp’s recent online manifesto is a truly disturbing, supremacist screed. One UK MP said it “sounds like the ramblings of a supervillain.”

The city of London, England recently canceled a contract with Palantir.

Why is Canada handing nearly $50 million in public money to this creepy company?

Doing business through a secretive contract with this MAGA-aligned tech giant is totally incompatible with the Prime Minister’s promise to defend Canadian sovereignty.

[Ted Rutland @TedRutland]

If we are going to call the cost of public services a “loss,” then Canadian police forces lost $20 billion last year while delivering no birthday presents and also killing a lot of people.

[Steve MacNeil @SCMacNeil]

@IamamishTv @LyricaofTheLyre @zaelefty You're right! My apologies.

[` @ymmayerr]

We are literally paying premium prices for the worst version of society we have ever lived in. I need a refund.

[Steve MacNeil @SCMacNeil]

@IamamishTv @LyricaofTheLyre @zaelefty You're refusing to acknowledge material fact because you can't argue against it. Whether you think or wish that gender should supersede sex in human law and society, sex remains an incontrovertible element of mammalian biology.

[Steve MacNeil @SCMacNeil]

@LyricaofTheLyre @IamamishTv @zaelefty Have you ever owned a pet? Was it male or female?

[Pubity @pubity]

DuckDuckGo, a Google alternative with an AI-free search option, had its traffic increase by 300% since Google ramped up AI's influence on search results.

People are fed up enough with Google's focus on AI that they're starting to switch search engines.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

How come AI is treated as inevitable and something we must adapt to and accept, but renewable energy technology, sustainable infrastructure and electric cars aren’t treated with the same urgency or certainty?

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I’m over here recycling toilet paper roll cores, using my own bags, not running the water when I brush my teeth, while billionaires are blowing up rockets and building water-polluting data centers. It’s hard not to be discouraged.

[John Delmenico @thebigjohnnyd]

The Google ai push is proof that billionaires truly are cartoonishly greedy, they had a beloved product that worked properly and was printing billions of dollars for them and intentionally broke it in the hopes that breaking it could make them a few extra bucks right now

[Eshan @eshanbuilds]

The man who wrote "Don't be evil" said he chose it specifically so it would be hard to remove.

Paul Buchheit, the engineer who later built Gmail, suggested the phrase at a Google corporate values meeting on July 19, 2001. About a dozen early employees were in the room, working through what their core values should be. The conversation had stalled on the kind of polite corporate statements that nobody disagrees with and nobody remembers.

Buchheit later explained why he picked those three words instead. He wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out. He framed it as a jab at competitors who he felt were already exploiting their users.

Amit Patel, another engineer from the same meeting, scribbled the phrase on whiteboards across the company for months until it stuck. It went into the founding letter of the 2004 IPO prospectus. It sat at the top of the corporate code of conduct for seventeen years.

Then in 2018, Google quietly removed it from the preface.

The timing is the part everyone forgets. In March of that year, internal documents leaked showing that Google had signed a Pentagon contract called Project Maven, building AI to analyze drone footage. By April, over 3,000 Google employees had signed a letter to Sundar Pichai demanding the contract be cancelled.

The letter specifically cited "Don't be evil" as the standard the company was failing to meet. Dozens of engineers resigned in protest.

Sometime between late April and early May, the slogan disappeared from the code of conduct's preface. A Gizmodo reporter caught it by comparing Wayback Machine snapshots. Google never announced the removal.

What I find clarifying about the sequence is what it means structurally. The motto was designed in 2001 by an engineer who wanted a sentence his bosses could not erase if the company drifted. Seventeen years later, with the company being publicly accused of building drone targeting AI, his own employer responded by quietly erasing the sentence.

He had been right about exactly one thing. The phrase was hard to take out. It took a Pentagon scandal to do it.

Buchheit, who left Google in 2006, is now a partner at Y Combinator. He has not commented publicly on the removal.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Finnish scientists trucked in real forest dirt and grass and laid it over the gravel at four daycare yards. They let the kids dig around in it for a month. The blood tests came back with changes the researchers hadn’t expected to see so fast or so clear.

The study ran at ten daycares in two Finnish cities with 75 kids aged three to five. Four of the yards got the forest treatment: about a tennis court worth of soil and grass laid over the gravel, plus planters and peat blocks the kids could dig and climb on. Three others stuck with their normal gravel yards. The last three were daycares where the kids were already visiting real forests every day.

After one month, the variety of bacteria living on the kids’ skin shot up, and the kind that helps train the skin’s immune defenses jumped the most. Their gut bacteria started to look like the gut bacteria of the forest-visiting kids. Their blood showed more of the immune cells whose job is to keep the body from freaking out at harmless stuff like pollen and peanuts, and overall inflammation dropped. The kids on the plain gravel yards showed none of this.

Childhood asthma in the US doubled between 1980 and 1995. Food allergies in kids jumped 50 percent between 1997 and 2011, then jumped another 50 percent between 2007 and 2021. And peanut allergies in one-year-olds tripled between 2001 and 2017.

The Finnish researchers think one of the reasons is simple: kids today don’t get dirty enough. 37 percent of American preschoolers now spend an hour or less outside on a normal weekday. Their immune systems are getting trained in environments stripped of the bacteria humans have always lived around.

Aki Sinkkonen, who led the study, put it in plain words: “It would be best if children could play in puddles and everyone could dig organic soil.” The Finnish government is now helping pay for daycares across the country to make the same changes.