Cay

Lifelong learner, freelance librarian, steward of peace, hope and love.

[Cay @CayLibrary]

Multi-Part Thread. Thoughts relate to "Horseshoe Theory," inspired by Chris Hedges' Interview of Anthony Arnove on Fighting Fascism: https://t.co/l7CxIaG418. See also: https://t.co/LUcaKkjrWo

[Kevin Kijewski @KevinKijewski]

Screwing Michigan: Sell 13 Michigan dams to a Wall Street private equity firm for $1 each, then force 1.9 MILLION ratepayers to buy the power back at DOUBLE the market price for 30 years, and hand the utility a $270 million profit on top.

That is the deal Consumers Energy is fighting for right now.

The out-of-state buyer's plan? Split the dams into 13 separate LLCs so it can pocket the profits and dodge the liability when these century-old structures need repairs. And when a state judge called the deal 'highly problematic' and 'unreasonable,' Consumers' answer was a threat: approve it as-is, or we tear all 13 dams down.

Your rivers. Your money. Your safety. Sold to Maryland financiers and handed back to you with a bigger bill.

The Whitmer-appointed Public Service Commission decides by September. They work for you, not for Consumers. Make sure they hear it.

Let's make Michigan safe, normal, and responsible again! 🇺🇸

@realDonaldTrump @JDVance @MIGOP @MI_Republicans @Th_Midwesterner @stevegrubershow @MrJustinBarclay @gatewaypundit @Rescue_Michigan @HarmeetKDhillon @elonmusk @timlovesann @mifairelections @TruckerRandy @DonnieDetroit19 @downi75

[Iconoclast @ProfessorDNA]

WTF!
All Posts from @gaijingirl2004 have been withheld in all countries because the user violates the X Hateful Profile Policy. Learn more

[Abdul El-Sayed HQ @AbdulElSayedHQ]

UAW says Abdul’s position on Medicare for All helped him win their endorsement.

"We, as a union, waste so many resources when we're in negotiation on health care," DePaoli said. "Why not a health care specialist in the U.S. Senate?" https://t.co/aiBbNpSUWA

[Kathleen Tyson @Kathleen_Tyson_]

I believe piracy is bad, even when UK government are the pirates.

UK has no legal basis for seizing Russian tankers on behalf of BP, Shell, and Chevron.

There will be consequences.

[jezz @JezziiB]

Elizabeth Warren’s proposed 3% tax on people with over $100M in wealth would generate $30B in revenue each year on Elon Musk’s fortune alone. That’s about how much the US spends each year on affordable housing subsidies.

Tax. The. Rich.

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

SpaceX is set to debut at a staggering $1.77 trillion valuation. It is the largest IPO the market has ever seen and will make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

But to make it happen Elon used his influence to get the rules changed so Index funds that hold millions of Americans’ retirement savings are forced to buy in.

That’s right. This IPO was engineered to make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire by risking your retirement savings.

You don’t hate capitalism enough. It’s all fake. It’s all a scam. It’s one giant pyramid scheme to funnel wealth to the ruling class off the backs of our labor and retirement savings.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.

You thought it was you. It is not you.

Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.

The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.

Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.

What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.

Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.

They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.

The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."

The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.

This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.

The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.

Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

I find AI-generated writing deeply depressing for this reason. You’ve been graced with the gift of literacy. You could be shaping thoughts into words that are funny & personal & uniquely you. And you gave it up. Millions of people now speak in the voice of a machine. It’s grim.

[Andy Lee Parker @AndyLeeParker1]

Can you all say "medical tourism"? A trip to China costs less than ANY so-called "health care" you'll receive in the United States.
https://t.co/WuPYJ4OSm7

[Čhazeᛪ༙ @Gottalovechaze]

A $7 increase in over 80 years, fvcking shameful

[Vincent Bevins @Vinncent]

Giving away some books for my birthday — who wants one

[Duopoly Destroyer @realnikohouse]

A few years before I left, my mother had one complication with her diabetes, and it landed her in the hospital for 4 days. Despite her paying a ridiculous amount for health insurance through her job, she left with a $5,000 bill.

My father almost died from what started out as a basic ear infection. But he was in between union positions when it happened. So it was partially covered and when he was finally able to be somewhat mobile, he spent the better part of a year working gig jobs to pay off the bill.

My grandma, rest her soul, was paying almost $1,500 a month for her healthcare. Because Medicare doesn’t get the job done as most retirees can attest to. She paid more for her healthcare monthly than she did for her mortgage and property taxes.

My grandpa literally worked up until an hour before he died at 87 to pay the bills.

That’s just my family. There are horror stories on top of horror stories. 401k isn’t sufficient anymore. Social security? I’d be surprised if that could even pay rent for a one bed room in the majority of states. So yes, millennials are now having to plan 10-15 years in advance to support their parents. And HOPEFULLY we get enough time to spare to think about our own retirement at some point.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

@CeciliaVega and her team were indeed working on a report for @CBS examining the impact of the U.S. sanctions on my work and personal life, including developments in the U.S. courts. I am sorry they were punished.
#JournalismIsNotACrime
Solidarity.

[GenXGirl @GenXGirl1994]

Did you know in January 2025, the court ruled that the FBI’s warrantless search under Section 702 FISA (when searching US persons) VIOLATE the 4th Amendment.

This was the first federal court decision to require a warrant (or exception) for such searches.

The government appealed. Oral arguments were held in the Second Circuit on April 28, 2026. No decision has been issued yet, and the appeal remains pending.

This case is significant in the ongoing debate over FISA reforms and the 2026 Section 702 reauthorization. The government says they don’t target Americans under FISA but they are actively appealing the court’s decision and pushing for reauthorization.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

In case you missed it:

President Trump just effectively announced that the US will be putting boots on the ground to take Kharg Island in Iran in the near future.

Kharg Island, which is one-third the size of Manhattan and located in the Persian Gulf, controls ~90% of Iranian crude oil exports.

That's roughly 1.5 to 2.0 million barrels of crude oil exports per day.

Trump specifically says this would be a "Venezuela" style takeover, where the US would take complete control of Iran's oil and gas infrastructure.

If this happens, it would be the biggest escalation of the Iran War yet.

We expect to receive Iran's response shortly.

[Camille Moscow 🇷🇺 🌿 ☦️ @camille_moscow]

🇺🇸⚔️🇮🇷 GUERRE CLIMATIQUE USA CONTRE L’IRAN : LA PREUVE PAR L’EAU

Le journaliste franco iranien @SiavoshGHAZI l’expose sans filtre : depuis 25 ans, les États-Unis menaient une guerre climatique contre l’Iran via un réseau de radars au Kurdistan irakien, en Turquie, aux Émirats et au Qatar. Ces installations ont été pulvérisées par les missiles iraniens lors de l’attaque du 28 février.

Résultat immédiat et spectaculaire : le lac d’Urmia, asséché il y a encore quatre mois, a vu son volume d’eau multiplié par 18 en trois mois seulement. Les barrages sont remontés à 67 %, les rivières et étangs revivent, et 20 000 flamants roses migrateurs sont de retour pour la première fois depuis cinq ans.

[Esmaeil Baqaei @IRIMFA_SPOX]

"The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics, when it is especially an act of interior politics, and the most atrocious act of all", so observed the French philosopher Simone Weil.

From this perspective, targetting the drinking-water tanks in Sirik, southern Iran, strips the mask from the true nature of the power; a power that has spent decades cloaking itself in the language of 'human rights', 'international order', and 'moral responsibility' reveals its essence when it deliberately destroys the drinking water of Iranians. In that moment, it does not merely attack a target — it strikes at the very foundation of the noble narrative it has built about itself.

Empires do not fall when their enemies grow stronger; they fall when they can no longer sustain the bridge between what they proclaim and what they do.

The moment of decline is not the collapse of city walls; it is the collapse of the credibility of words that have long concealed reality. What remains is what T.S. Eliot so hauntingly described:
"Shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion."

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

While they tell you to switch off your lights and threaten hosepipe bans…just look at the natural resources being asset grabbed by AI data centres….

[Balto Star @baltostar]

SPR is stored in salt caverns with the pressure of the crude oil + replacement brine keeping the cavern walls & ceilings structurally intact.

But brine is denser than crude. So the higher the ratio brine/crude, the lower the pressure, the higher the risk of salt creep and ultimately salt falls which is collapse of walls/ceilings.

Every collapsed cavern traps the remaining crude. It's no longer possible to pump out crude and pump in brine.

So it doesn't matter to what degree Trump is mentally unbalanced or mentally ill, because past a certain point, depletion will trap the remaining crude.

Estimates are at 140-150 MMbbl the risk of wall collapse is extreme.

But we have another limit which is flow velocity.

At full capacity 715 MMbbl, max flow is 4.4 MMbbl/d

Currently at 350 MMbbl, max flow is substantially lower, perhaps 2.8-3.1 MMbbl/d.

For 200-300 MMbbl max flow drops down to range 1.9 - 2.5 MMbbl/d.

At 150 MMbbl max flow drops sharply below 1 MMbbl/d.

Note that 243-252 MMbbl statutory & strategic limits kick-in that a president can not easily override.

Keep in mind that primary purpose of SPR is response to natural disasters such as severe winter snowstorms/blizzards, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, wildfires. This is where the max flow is needed.

So depleting SPR below 300 MMbbl is playing with matches & gasoline, not because we're running at 1.1-1.3 MMbbl/day, but because our max flow is no longer an adequate response to natural disaster emergency need for fuel.

[Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE]

So true…