Martha Nussbaum, Poet's Defender
DOGE Pilled
Bloomberg gift article: “Luke Farritor could have been an artist, or a builder, or someone dedicated to seeing a great historical mystery through. Instead he wound up at the Department of Government Efficiency, slashing, dismantling, undoing. Before he was called a patriot and a traitor for following Elon Musk to Washington to join DOGE
Bloomberg gift article: “Luke Farritor could have been an artist, or a builder, or someone dedicated to seeing a great historical mystery through. Instead he wound up at the Department of Government Efficiency, slashing, dismantling, undoing. Before he was called a patriot and a traitor for following Elon Musk to Washington to join DOGE
Substack Is Where Writers Go to Be Weird
Vulture [no paywall] “It has become the premier destination for literary types’ unpublished musings. What is an author without an editor?
The Daily Beast retracts story linking Melania Trump to Epstein
Vulture [no paywall] “It has become the premier destination for literary types’ unpublished musings. What is an author without an editor?
The Daily Beast retracts story linking Melania Trump to Epstein
The publication quickly removed the story from its site after receiving a letter from Trump’s attorney
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: When Your Power Meter Becomes a Tool of Mass Surveillance.
Simply using extra electricity to power some Christmas lights or a big fish tank shouldn’t bring the police to your door. In fact, in California, the law explicitly protects the privacy of power customers, prohibiting public utilities from disclosing precise “smart” meter data in most cases.
Despite this, Sacramento’s power company and law enforcement agencies have been running an illegal mass surveillance scheme for years, using our power meters as home-mounted spies. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is seeking to end Sacramento’s dragnet surveillance of energy customers and have asked for a court order to stop this practice for good.
For a decade, the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD) has been searching through all of its customers’ energy data, and passed on more than 33,000 tips about supposedly “high” usage households to police. Ostensibly looking for homes that were growing illegal amounts of cannabis, SMUD analysts have admitted that such “high” power usage could come from houses using air conditioning or heat pumps or just being large. And the threshold of so-called “suspicion” has steadily dropped, from 7,000 kWh per month in 2014 to just 2,800 kWh a month in 2023. One SMUD analyst admitted that they themselves “used 3500 [kWh] last month.”
California’s power rates are the highest in the continental US. Shouldn’t utility companies be thrilled when customers are gorging on their product? Jay Leno used to advertise Doritos with the slogan, “Crunch all you want – we’ll make more!” Why isn’t that the motto of California’s power companies?