technocrit

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5542552

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plague-kills-arizona-resident-health-officials-say/

To me, it felt like waking up from the Matrix. The more I learned, the more I saw it everywhere. LA, I realized, is full of contradictions. We have density, but more often than not, it’s placed right along loud, dangerous, car-dominated corridors like Venice, La Brea, and Pico. We build apartments facing six-lane boulevards with no trees, no safe crossings, and nowhere to walk to. Meanwhile, the quiet, leafy streets just behind those corridors are protected, reserved almost exclusively for single-family homes and mansions. In LA, comfort and quiet are privatized. Everyone else gets noise and fumes.

I grew angry. Not just at the noise and fumes. But the systems that allowed this to be normalized. At a government that underfunds transit but widens highways. At a culture that treats cars as a birthright and housing as a commodity. At the way we’ve built a society that quietly inflicts violence on the most vulnerable people. Kids growing up with asthma, unhoused neighbors driven mad by all the traffic noise, families forced to trade safety and health for an affordable place to live.

I started to see the street not just as a place, but as a symptom. Of deeper choices. Of political cowardice. Of whose comfort we protect, and whose we sacrifice. And I can never unsee it. I didn’t just want to complain, I wanted to understand how we got here, and how we could get out of this.

Not only was Trump intimately close to Jeffrey Epstein, but there is a wealth of reporting tying the billionaire pedophile to intelligence circles. Trump is once again protecting the elites he claimed he would fight on the campaign trail.

It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs — interspersed with photos of a family picnic — with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip.

Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior.

Also Inc., the micromobility startup spun out of Rivian earlier this year, has raised $200 million from Greenoaks Capital, according to a new report from Bloomberg News...

Now established as its own company, Also plans to make micro-EVs of all shapes and sizes, and is supposed to reveal the first designs at some point later this year.

Despite felony convictions in fatal crashes, several local drivers have regained licenses under a system that operates with no public tracking, few safeguards and rising calls for reform.

Two sanitation workers, including one who is pregnant, who were on the picket line in the AFSCME District Council 33 union strike, were hit by a vehicle in Philadelphia's Port Richmond section late Thursday night, officials said. A driver is already in custody and charged with hit-and-run and driving under the influence.

Supply-side progressivism is forging unexpected alliances between populist Democrats, business-friendly centrists, and MAGA Republicans around militarized growth. The result is a post-neoliberal politics that accommodates authoritarian populism.

We begin our July Fourth special broadcast with the words of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Douglass gave one of his most famous speeches, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” He was addressing the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. The late actor James Earl Jones read the historic address during a performance of Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which was co-edited by Howard Zinn.