A house divided against itself cannot stand.

No one's quite sure of the rationale.  I wonder if they're going to require all attending to take some kind of oath, and arrest or fire anyone who won't.

I think this is true: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art

In particular, the idea of art as a series of choices is something I was thinking about recently, as opposed to life, which might be characterized as a series of responses.  Do we really choose dispassionately between options in life, or is that something that we infer when looking back on our lives?  Situations present themselves (good, bad) and w respond, sometimes well, sometimes catastrophically.

But art lies exactly in making choices, as the article describes.

There’s an article in the Guardian today about a book proposing reparations for slavery in the UK. It pointed out that such reparations need not be monetary. That got me thinking: perhaps the primary value for a reparations process is the accurate accounting of exactly what wrongs were done, and the cost of those wrongs. Often an accounting of the wrongs of the past amount to nothing more than generalized handwringing and a vague sense of guilt, but processes like the Waitangi Tribunal require detailed, specific analysis of wrongs and their ongoing consequences, which in itself constitutes a value.

www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/attention

With notes on how sustained attention may lead to synchronized biochemical processes that reinforce themselves.

Truth #11 of The Thirteen Truths of Superman
— Read on orphansandempires.substack.com/p/americas-kryptonite

inspired polemic

An interesting and well written article that pushes for an informed activism that encompasses tech.
— Read on wedontagree.net/technically-radical-on-the-unrecognized-potential-of-tech-workers-and-hackers

I keep saying this, but i keep having to.  Listening to yet another pundit debate about whether whatever trump is doing right now (in this case, reversing direction I Ukraine) is good policy or bad policy, and it's not the right question.  It might have good effect. It might be catastrophic. The issue is that one man is in a position to decide!  He is a KING!  We don't want a king!

UBI doesn't mean "no work".  It means divorcing work from remuneration.  There's still plenty of good work, but no one wants to pay you for it, so you get paid independently of your work. For example, you write songs.  You build a house for yourself.  You learn to sail, and take people sailing.  You raise a kid.  

You don't expect to get paid for any of it, but you do the work because work is meaningful and life affirming.  Remuneration, the money you need to live, doesn't depend on renting your labor out, which when you think about it is a pretty modern idea.  Back in the day we had patronage, and inheritance, and allowances (and slavery!) and all sorts of mechanisms that didn't directly tie labor to money.

The Guardian sees us in a time where we transitioned away from Pax Americana to an indeterminate state where we can’t rely on the US because the leadership keeps changing direction, so other countries have to form institutions that work around us (https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/may/10/are-we-heading-for-another-world-war-or-has-it-already-started).  But that’s just the intermediate position; the US will bring its weight to bear to actively oppose much of the rest of the world, and the rest of the world will have to find a way to stand up to it.