Monkeytime

queer, easily distracted.
the anti-trans folks are coming for you next.
@tmorman.bsky.social
@[email protected] (rarely)

[Jackson @Jacksonsrule]

Billionaires don’t have bank accounts like you and me. They have art collections, Yachts,Mansions,Stocks. None of it gets taxed until they sell it. So they just never sell it. They borrow against it instead. Live off the loans. Pay almost nothing. Then when they die, their kids inherit it all tax-free. The wealth never gets taxed, It just gets passed down. And we wonder why the gap keeps getting wider.

[Carolina Forward @ForwardCarolina]

Facing an all-but-certain "blue wave" election this fall, Republican leaders in North Carolina are scrambling to insulate their policy preferences in the state constitution.

Their proposals include eliminating local control over property taxes in favor of a state takeover, capping personal income taxes, and expanding partisan gerrymandering to the State Board of Education.

Our recommendation: North Carolina voters should reject all of the proposed state constitutional amendments.

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Basil🧡 @LinkofSunshine]

Mitt Romney text to McConnell, January 2nd

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Trump's stock trading is even worse than you thought.

One trade after another was followed by Trump making suspiciously timed comments boosting the companies he invested in.

Boeing, Robinhood, Palantir — in each case Trump bought the stock then publicly praised the companies.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Spanberger also promised to lower everyday costs for Virginians, but rejected a bill lowering the state’s prescription drug prices.

In 2020, Virginians paid 36% more than the national average for prescription drugs, and last year, almost 70% of surveyed Virginians delayed or skipped treatment altogether because of inaccessible costs.

https://t.co/h9zqL8QuAt

[Prof Zenkus @anthonyzenkus]

Oh look - Democrats ran an ex-CIA agent as governor of Verginia and are upset that she's vetoing all the legislation that the Democrats in her state are passing.

Expect Spanberger to be on the Dems short list for VP come 2028.

[carl beijer @_carlbeijer]

NEW: I looked at all of the vetoes from Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) over the last week, and they were even worse than you thought they were.

[Susan @ifudontlike2bad]

If you think you have read everything about Mike Johnson think again. 🧵
1/
Mike Johnson has filed federal disclosures for 8 yrs & reports no bank acct, no savings, no retirement fund, no investments.
His office later admitted he does have a bank acct, but earns 0 interest so

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

I wrote about the media habit of trying to understand the rightward shifts at CBS and Washington Post in terms of market demand, or chasing “clicks” or “viewers” when it’s clear organic demand is largely incidental to what is very obviously billionaire ideological projects.

[Austen Ivereigh @austeni]

This is perfectly said:

[Andrey X @the_andrey_x]

Craziest protest video I've ever filmed

[Martin Gould @MartinVGould]

https://t.co/dI8FqXBpht

[Martin Gould @MartinVGould]

The best overview of how US animal welfare laws might be overturned, and what we can do to stop it -- link in thread

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

AOC: “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that”

[Monkeytime @tmorman]

The Streetcar Museum on Falls Road is such a great spot but be warned it will make you sad for what was, and could still have been, in #Baltimore. https://t.co/VjHFtIiadj

[Peter Norton @PeterNorton12]

One hundred years ago, Baltimore’s suburbs were (street-) car dependent.

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

not so fun fact: Tapper's Sunday show State of the Union has not featured a single Palestinian or Palestinian-American guest in almost 7 yrs. The last time was in 2019 when Tapper interviewed Rep Tlaib and grilled her about BDS and asked if Israel had a "right to exist" 3 times

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A 17-year-old in Iowa boiled beets in her chemistry class and turned them into stitches that change color when your wound gets infected. Her name is Dasia Taylor. It started as a science fair project.

She wanted a low-tech version of the "smart stitches" Tufts researchers built in 2016. Those used thread wired up with sensors and a tiny chip that pinged your phone if something went wrong. Cool, but useless without a phone or a hospital that can afford it.

Her version doesn't need any of that. Healthy skin is slightly acidic, like lemon juice but much milder. When bacteria grow in a wound, the chemistry flips and turns more like soap or baking soda.

Beet juice has a quirk. The same red pigment that stains your fingers when you cook it shifts color based on what it touches. Bright red on healthy skin. Dark purple on infected skin. The switch lines up with infection almost exactly.

She tested ten threads before finding a cotton-polyester blend that soaked up the dye and changed color within five minutes. That was the prototype.

Around 1 in 40 American surgeries end in an infection at the cut, costing hospitals more than $3 billion a year. In poorer countries the rate is closer to 1 in 9. In parts of Africa it's 1 in 6. In some Ethiopian hospitals, up to a quarter of surgery patients leave with an infection.

The whole game is catching it early. Spot it in time and antibiotics handle it. Miss the window and the patient is back on the operating table.

Dasia filed a patent in 2021 and started a medical device company called VariegateHealth in 2022. The stitches haven't been tested on real patients yet. New medical device patents can take a decade. She's also looking into a side benefit: the beet pigment kills bugs like E. coli and Klebsiella in lab tests.

Smart stitches need a phone to read them. Hers just need eyes.

[Travis Fain @TravisFain]

One person cancelled North Carolina’s solar power buildout for the year. Is that really how it’s supposed to work?

[Carolina Forward @ForwardCarolina]

This is wild: last month, the Chairman of the NC Utilities Commission Bill Brawley, a Republican political appointee and former state house rep, unilaterally allowed @dukeenergy to cancel all new solar energy development in the state for a year.

That's what Duke Energy buys.