JOHN WALL

IRASSHAIMASE ☔️RIP G-man☔️ I/XX/MMXVI. HTX

[Rob Draper @draper_rob]

If you knew FIFA you would know that selling even a 20% stake is equivalent to selling football

It means corporate investors (the Trump family) will control World Cup

Which means dynamic pricing/$10,000 tickets become the norm

Sweating the assert every way possible

👋 to ordinary fans

USA hosting every World Cup (no more European/African/Sth American World Cups)

Biennial World Cups, 64 teams, player welfare minimised

Even more money to FIFA members with unaudited accounts

The worst kind of capitalism

And obviously they ‘can’ do that

The question is whether they ‘should’?

And whether 21st century capitalism has any moral moorings whatsoever?

[SB Nation @SBNation]

FIFA president aims to sell the World Cup to Trump family associates https://t.co/83sPeA012v

[Martyn Ziegler @martynziegler]

NEW: Infantino tells countries to sign up to World Cup sell-off in 53 days for $40m each - or reject it and receive $10m. "Pure bribery" says one sources. https://t.co/TyG0j7kXH3

[Charles Watts @charles_watts]

Absolute disgrace of a man. Get him out.

[Arsenal @Arsenal]

A season to be proud of.

We pushed the boundaries over land and sea, and couldn't have done it without your support. Thank you, Gooners ❤️

[Sxnti @PeakSxnti]

This is crazy.

[Arsenal @Arsenal]

This belongs to all of us.

[Arsenal @Arsenal]

The Arsenal. Your Premier League champions.

[Katherine Argent @effthealgorithm]

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

[Séamus Malekafzali @Seamus_Malek]

You are going to have your bills go up, your wages stolen from you, your air polluted, your economic opportunities dashed, and the ground you live on poisoned, so that Israel can achieve an absolute hegemony over the Middle East and seize the land from the Nile to the Euphrates.

[Matt Strickland @MattForVA]

This isn’t a small deal. Restaurant Depot is where most mom & pop restaurants go to buy inventory because Sysco is so expensive.

Restaurant Depot was privately owned. Sysco is owned by… you guessed it, BlackRock & Vanguard.

Now private equity can control pricing for food costs with zero competition. Just like they did with housing.

This should be an anti-trust violation, but we have politicians that work for Big Corp, not us.

[Mark Gadala-Maria @markgadala]

This is wild.

143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history.

Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots.

Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget.

Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard.

The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🏀 Investigative reporter @PabloTorre says the NBA’s “progressive” brand is colliding with its “capitalist instinct,” as the league and its stars chase money from crypto, gambling, the Emirates, and Israel-linked tech used to “war crime Palestinians,” while betting mainstream sports media won’t press them on it.

He spoke to @CHAPOTRAPHOUSE about NBA star Kevin Durant’s (@KDTrey5) investment in Skydio, which has supplied short-range drones to the Israeli military for use in Gaza. Torre says these deals are likely happening with “extraordinarily little due diligence” as famous names pile into Silicon Valley rounds, then shrug when the politics catch up.

They also cite @TheGrayzoneNews’ reporting tying @StephenCurry30-backed firms to Israeli cyber and cloud security startups founded by veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200, describing it as part of a broader sportswashing ecosystem: “shady” industries and states normalizing themselves by moving through sports, in this case, the NBA.

The NBA’s response has been silence. They are relying on a “compliant media that doesn’t want to touch any of this stuff,” Torre said. “Let’s count on them to not ask about it,” adding that so far it has been an “effective strategy.”

Dallas Mavericks star @KyrieIrving echoed that frustration during All-Star weekend: “No real questions that happen, bro. No real questions… And y’all know the questions I’m talking about.”

Torre argues the NBA has cultivated an “unsustainable reputation,” portraying itself as “the good guys” while it “keeps on getting into business with characters that are very persuasively the bad guys.”

“So far they’re just hoping that no one really asks them about it in public. And so far they’ve gotten away with it.”

He points to the league’s wider money trail: crypto arena naming rights, sports betting and “prediction markets,” Gulf cash, and deals like Experience Abu Dhabi on the Knicks jersey. The UAE has been widely reported as a key backer of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, which the U.S. government has determined committed genocide. The NBA also green-lit Israeli-American ultra-Zionist Miriam Adelson’s family buying the Mavericks, while putting the team under her son-in-law’s name to soften backlash.

The full episode is available at the link in reply.

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

The Trump admin is directly working with US corporations to make plans to try to pillage Venezuela's oil, Politico reports.

It's obviously risky (because it's not their oil!), so these corporations want the US government to sign "contracts guaranteeing payment and security or forming public-private joint ventures".

So, as always, the US government will socialize the losses and privatize the profits, ensuring US corporate oligarchs make as much money as possible and the public pays for any costs.

Source: https://t.co/kJvmq1STYF

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

https://t.co/vyekz40NZh

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

El Salvador under Bukele is a negation of American values: its anthesis. No due process, no free speech, no rights at all.

Many on the right claim they want to preserve "American values," yet venerate and want to import this Central American authoritarianism to the US:

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base -  77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump  critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Idiots. Fucking morons.

[☀️👀 @zei_squirrel]

seeing some justifying the nuclear bombing of Japan. To be clear, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killing countless civilians was totally unnecessary militarily. It was done primarily to intimidate the Soviets and gain leverage. Renowned historian Gar Alperovitz:

[Young Thug ひ @youngthug]

Executive produced by @MetroBoomin