jacob

a sucker for perspective / ally & defender of all cats

[jacob @j_stripland]

forgive me for not tweeting my cat until now

meet Bushi! a certified sweetheart that our world does not deserve 🥹🧡

[Covie @covie_93]

The President of the United States paid $5.6 million to one of his rape victims today.

[Robert (Durden) @realrobdurden]

America has gotten to that last part of Monopoly where the game is effectively over and we’re all just watching the Elites suck up all the money, nobody else is allowed to really keep playing the game & we’re all getting more pissed by the minute

Flip the damn board over already

[Grinch @Uncatfishable]

Trump is so obviously racist, but he’s done so much wrong and evil that we just gloss over the fact that he doesn’t call Barack “President Obama”. He intentionally says Hussein as a dog whistle to all his racist followers.

This guy has done so much damage to this country and to the office of presidency. Truly a historic embarrassment.

[The Touchline | 𝐓 @TouchlineX]

🚨 𝗡𝗘𝗪: During Mexico vs South Africa, the referee had to keep the players waiting during the cooling break because FOX was still on a commercial break.

The match eventually resumed while FOX was still showing advertisements.

These cooling breaks are not related to player health, but are instead used to accommodate commercials.

— @Romain_Molina

[Esfandiar Baraheni @JustEsBaraheni]

Trump booed very loudly here at MSG

[Acyn @Acyn]

Trump isn’t just getting booed inside of MSG, he’s getting booed all across NYC

Video: AP

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

In the US, spending on data center construction now exceeds spending on public transportation infrastructure — including airports, marine terminals, and all mass transit.

[Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat]

Imagine you spent 40 years doing the boring, responsible thing.

You opened a 401k at 23. You contributed every paycheck. You ignored the noise. You bought the index because Bogle told you to, because Buffett told you to, because every honest piece of financial advice for 30 years told you the index was the safest, most diversified, most rules-based way to own America.

The whole point was the rules.

The rules said: a company must trade for 12 months before joining the S&P 500. The rules said: it must show four consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability. The rules existed because in 1999 the index quietly bought a lot of stocks at the top, and pensioners paid the bill.

After the dot-com crash, S&P tightened the rules. Nasdaq tightened the rules. FTSE Russell tightened the rules.

For 23 years, those rules held.

Then SpaceX filed for IPO.

And the rules changed.

The S&P 500 waived the profitability requirement. Nasdaq cut its trading-history window from 90 days to 15. FTSE Russell cut its to 5.

Bloomberg Intelligence estimates the major index funds will absorb between 19% and 24% of SpaceX's float within six months. That's over $30 trillion of passive 401k and retirement money, mechanically buying a single newly public company at IPO valuations, because the rules said they had to.

Except the rules used to say they didn't.

Here's the thought exercise:

If you spend 40 years building a system designed to protect ordinary savers from buying overpriced stocks, and then you waive the protections the moment a sufficiently large stock asks you to, what was the system actually protecting?

Most of investing is about understanding what's a rule and what's a guideline.

A rule binds the rule-maker.

A guideline binds the saver.

You're allowed to find out which is which only after the fact.

[davey @jerseyh0mo]

They’re taking away healthcare. AI is stealing jobs. Corporations are allowed to poison food and water again. They’re slashing education. They’re starting endless wars in multiple countries. He’s using our money to build a ballroom. He’s manipulating the market. They’re dividing the country even more with a gerrymandering war. He is taking bribes in broad daylight. And they still haven’t released the full Epstein files. This is objectively the worst and most corrupt administration in history.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

For $5, someone can upload your photo to an app called Sherlock and pull up your name, your social media, and every website where your face appears. The app has over a billion faces indexed. It launched in January. and it's far from the only tool that does this.

PimEyes came first, back in 2017, out of Poland. It has about 3 billion face photos copied from the internet without anyone's permission. Costs $30 a month. The company runs through a tangle of businesses registered in Belize, Seychelles, and Dubai. When five people in Illinois tried to sue them for collecting face data without asking, the lawyers spent two years trying to track down PimEyes' CEO. Sent people to the country of Georgia, to Dubai, to Belize. Never found him. The case got dropped.

Clearview AI is the one police use. Over 70 billion face photos in its system. There are about 8 billion people on Earth, so Clearview has roughly 9 photos for every one of them, pulled from social media, news articles, and random websites without asking. Ukraine's military used Clearview to identify over 230,000 Russian soldiers during the war. The database keeps doubling roughly every 18 months.

Texas sued Meta for scanning Facebook users' faces without consent and collected $1.4 billion. Then went after Google for the same thing and got $1.375 billion. Meta had already paid Illinois $650 million in 2020. TikTok paid $92 million. Clearview settled for $51 million. Total payouts from face-scanning lawsuits across the US: over $3.5 billion.

Last October, two Harvard juniors connected PimEyes to a pair of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses (regular-looking sunglasses with a tiny camera built into the frame) and built a system called I-XRAY. They walked around campus, looked at strangers, and within about a minute had each person's name, home address, phone number, and part of their Social Security number show up on their phone. They didn't release the code, but said anyone who can write basic code could build the same thing with tools already available online.

On March 17, three US senators wrote to Mark Zuckerberg asking what Meta plans to do about facial recognition in its smart glasses. Their letter pointed out that one person wearing these glasses could scan thousands of faces in a day without anyone knowing.

There is still no federal law in the US covering any of this. Illinois passed one back in 2008. A few states have followed. For everyone else, the only thing between your photo and your home address is whether someone feels like spending five bucks.

[fooler initiative @metroadlib]

In my LIFETIME, I have NEVER heard ANYONE admit anything even CLOSE to this out loud.
Oh.
my.
God.

[Tuki @TukiFromKL]

🚨 Do you understand what this man just pulled off..

> a guy from North Carolina used AI to generate hundreds of thousands of songs.. uploaded them to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon.. then botted billions of streams on his own tracks and walked away with $8 million

> 660,000 fake streams per day.. spread across thousands of AI songs so nobody noticed.. $1.2 million a year.. for music no human ever actually listened to

real artists are out here grinding for 0.003 cents per stream.. promoting on TikTok.. begging for playlist placements.. and this guy just had AI make the music AND the audience

first-ever criminal streaming fraud case.. he's paying back $8 million.. but the playbook is out there now.. and AI just got better since he started

the music industry spent 10 years fighting piracy.. now they have to fight songs that don't exist being listened to by people who don't exist.

[Maine @TheMaineWonk]

2 weeks of Iran War: ~$25 billion
1 year of ACA Subsidies: ~$28 billion

We just never learn, do we?

[HB•RAINEY™️ @RaineyOvalle]

WHY IT’S SO MANY JALENS IN THE NBA?! 🤔

Y’ALL EVER SEEN @JalenHurts and @SpeedyMorman in the SAME ROOM? 🤨

IT’S A JALEN INVASION AND I WANT ANSWERS 😤🤬

[YourFavoriteGuy @guychristensen_]

Red is your Israel-owned politicians currently in power.

[Car @CarOnPolymarket]

How can a random Polymarket account correctly predict:

- US striking Venezuela
- US kidnapping Maduro
- US forces in Venezuela
- US striking Iran
- Israel striking Iran
- US striking Iraq
- Israel striking Khamenei
- US anti cartel operations

And his next bet is public for everyone: US forces entering Iran in the near future.

Insane!

[Jack Whitcomb @jack_whitcomb_]

This is the correct way to view it and it's why you pull the lever.

[big boy boucher 🍕 @abendytendy]

bunch of grown ass millionaire men huddled up around a phone smiling ear to ear giggling their butts off at a pedophile making corny ass sexist jokes about their peers it does not get much lamer than this

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The US spent 70 years building a country optimized for cars instead of people. This is what that looks like at full resolution.

MetLife Stadium sits on 2.1 million square feet of parking. 28,000 spaces. The parking lots are larger than the stadium itself. The entire Meadowlands complex was purpose-built so that the only way a human being can reach it is inside a 4,000-pound metal box. The New Jersey State Police printed that sign because pedestrians were never part of the design.

And here’s where it gets interesting: the 2026 World Cup Final is being played at this stadium in five months. FIFA’s biggest event on Earth, hosted at a venue where walking is literally illegal. International fans from countries where you stroll to the stadium from a pub three blocks away are about to encounter a place where the nearest hotel requires a car to travel a distance you can see with your eyes.

The US has 700 million to 2 billion parking spaces. Eight parking spots for every car in the country. Parking lots cover more than 5% of all developed land, an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Minimum parking requirements forced every building, every stadium, every shopping center to dedicate more square footage to storing empty vehicles than to serving the humans inside. American cities didn’t accidentally become unwalkable. They were zoned that way.

During the recent Club World Cup at MetLife, only 12.5% of fans used public transit to reach the stadium. The other 87.5% drove. Now imagine that ratio flipping for the World Cup, when the majority of attendees will be international visitors without cars. NJ Transit is spending $100 million to try to move 20,000 people per hour through a single transfer point at Secaucus Junction, a system that already had door malfunctions and 13-minute delays during games with 29,000 fans. Scale that to 82,500.

The sign in this hotel lobby is American car culture in a single frame: we built the richest country on Earth, then made it illegal to walk across it.