Waterloo Illinois

living in the path of totality

[Chicken Joe 🐔 @ChickenJoeSTL]

An interesting Victorian house on W Beecher in Jacksonville, Illinois, built in 1889.

Recently sold for 130k!

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

Florida International University is requiring students to record apology videos after their silent anti-ICE protest at a campus event.

The protest drew no complaints, and admin even admitted it wasn’t disruptive, yet students face charges under an unconstitutional speech policy.

[Noname Book Club @NonameBooks]

Getting out of class early to go to the scholastic book fair was the highlight of grade school years. Does something like this currently exist for kids?!? They made reading so fun! The fair was about books but they had games, puzzles etc all associated with reading. Truly iconic

[Waterloo Illinois @WaterlooIlinois]

Sandra Bernhard's First Appearance With Dave | Letterman https://t.co/iMv3m1qCsL via @YouTube

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

Amazing chart from today's episode:

It's not just that US household exposure to equities is at a record high, but that the stock market is a SIGNIFICANTLY greater component of total household net worth than real estate now, which blows my mind.

The stock market is the economy.

[Hannah Meisel @hannahmeisel]

The 2nd Amendment's right to bear "arms" has become synonymous with firearms, but supporters of IL's assault weapons ban compare it with historical bans on Bowie knives — which a court in 1859 called an "instrument of almost certain death" — to comport with SCOTUS' 2022 ruling.

[Aaron Belz @belzpoems]

How different rap history would be if Big Boi had opted to go by Big Bio instead.

[Andrey Mir @Andrey4Mir]

A great article in @TheAtlantic by @rosehorowitch:
"The End of Reading Is Here.
Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history."
With substantial references to Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Walter Ong, @JoshuaMeyrowitz, and even a small contribution from yours truly. A deep analysis of the current state of literacy.
(link in the comment)

[Waterloo Illinois @WaterlooIlinois]

@hollo @YouTube I used to watch this show on a regular basis and just remembered that I'd usually wind up in tears at some point in the episode.

[Waterloo Illinois @WaterlooIlinois]

@hollo Would be so much fun to see them. And to see who else turns out for a Dead Milkmen show. Somehow I missed any tours they've done, and I'm sure there have been some.

[Waterloo Illinois @WaterlooIlinois]

@RepBost embarrassing. you were told to go there and tweet about it.

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

Unicef said in June that a 12-year-old girl had been shot in the chest with a crane-mounted gun while in her tent.

https://t.co/sTTZRJv9Zh

[Isaac Saul @Ike_Saul]

This is a really excellent thread, showing how much work it takes to debunk the viral nonsense that spreads on this website (in this case, by @elonmusk). One lie that Elon posts in 3 seconds can take hours of work to unpack and ultimately expose as nonsense.

[Brenden Moore @brendenmoore13]

This logic would seem to severely undercut Rep. Mike Bost’s challenge to Illinois’ election laws, which allow mail-in ballots to be counted up to 14 days after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day.

[Isaac Saul @Ike_Saul]

Had the great pleasure of sitting down with @waitbutwhy on the Tangle podcast — someone whose writing I've always loved and whose understanding of this political moment strikes me as incredibly important. This one is worth your time: https://t.co/ucpvVLS2oZ

[Chicken Joe 🐔 @ChickenJoeSTL]

Groovy glass blocks on a storefront in Quincy, Illinois

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

Gig workers in the US are being offered individualised wages depending on what algorithms decide about how desperate they are for work.

Ride-hailing companies have long used algorithms to determine how much to pay drivers for a trip – and tech vendors in the US are now exporting that model to other sectors, according to a Washington Center for Equitable Growth report from last year.

According to the report, platforms like Uber and Lyft track users’ personal data – like how often they find work through the app and for what wage – to find workers who will accept the bare minimum without the protections that come with fixed-term contracts.

One Lyft driver in the US found that over a two-month period, it took her longer and longer to earn $200. It seemed like the longer she spent on the app, the less she would be paid per trip.

“Uber was the baseline model, and we are seeing that model being exported into different industries,” Travis Hall, state director for the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Bloomberg Law.

A report from the Roosevelt Institute found that the staffing platforms now used by gig nurses in the US use algorithms to determine pay for individual shifts – resulting in nurses being paid different amounts for the same work within the same facility.

Experts fear that the same trend is being repeated across diverse industries, including HR, customer services and retail.

In the UK, experts from the Institute of Employment Rights argue that more needs to be done to regulate algorithmic pay practices.

Non-profit Worker Info Exchange found that since Uber introduced ‘dynamic pay’ practices in the UK in 2024, drivers in the country have lost out on an estimated £1.2bn in pay in the 12 months to March 2025.

James Farrar, director of Worker Info Exchange, said: “Uber UK managers must now come clean and explain to their workers how their pay is set – and how much of each fare the company is taking.

“If Uber is allowed to continue getting away with the algorithmic trickery of its so-called ‘dynamic pay’ model, we should not be surprised when hyper-variability and AI-induced precarity in pay become the norm across the entire labour market.”