technocrit

“The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in one year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm,” the journal’s editorial board wrote in its latest issue.

Betting company Polymarket and online writing platform Substack announced a partnership this week to further entrench gambling in the world of journalism and, in Polymarket’s words, make journalism “better” with “live markets.”

Substack will now allow writers to embed prediction market data in their articles, with “native tools that make it easier to share, discuss, and debate prediction market data directly on Substack,” as the company’s co-founder and CEO Chris Best said in a post on the platform. Best said a pilot program the company has run since 2024 has led to one in five of Substack’s 250 highest-revenue publications embedding the data.

“Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets,” Polymarket disturbingly wrote in a post on X announcing the partnership.

...

Donald Trump’s attack on Iran may set off a showdown over the president’s authority to declare war. The case could end up in court, giving conservative justices a long-awaited chance to end Congress’s ability to limit presidents’ warmaking powers.

CNN employees reacted with alarm after Netflix abruptly pulled out of the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, effectively clearing the way for a takeover of the 24/7 cable channel by Paramount Skydance, the media giant run by technology heir David Ellison.

Seven current CNN employees who spoke to NBC News on Thursday night, hours after Netflix announced it would not try to match Paramount’s bid for WBD, expressed a combination of fear and concern. They described the mood inside the company as “shaken” and” depressing.”

American companies are spending enormous sums to develop high-performing AI models. Distillation attacks are attempting to maliciously extract them — and nobody is doing much to stop it.

The United States is attacking Iran because Donald Trump was determined to drag us into war no matter what — and despite repeatedly insisting he would do the exact opposite.

If the basic logic of the DSM is flawed, it should be abandoned. Instead, psychiatrists should move towards a system that looks at an individual’s mental experiences in context, alongside their unique developmental vulnerabilities and strengths, as the main source for analysing and responding to their distress. Diagnosis would no longer name a disorder but map what kinds of support, relationships and learning processes are most likely to help a person regain agency, coherence and a sense of future.

According to recent reports, the Trump administration is trying to cut transit funding to every state, fundamentally changing the way federal transportation policy has operated for more than four decades. The administration has been trying to reduce funding for months by tying grants to birth rates and banning certain types of transportation projects altogether like those related to pedestrian safety and bike lanes. This latest action is both an economic and political disaster: it will worsen the escalating affordability crisis and take away states’ ability to direct transportation dollars to benefit working people.

The Trump administration has ordered U.S. diplomats to lobby against countries’ attempts to regulate how American tech companies handle foreigners’ data, arguing that data sovereignty laws threaten the advancement of AI services and technology, Reuters reported, citing an internal diplomatic cable.

The cable, signed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, says such laws would “disrupt global data flows, increase costs and cybersecurity risks, limit AI and cloud services, and expand government control in ways that can undermine civil liberties and enable censorship,” according to the report.

The cable pushes diplomats to “counter unnecessarily burdensome regulations, such as data localization mandates.” It also orders them to track proposals that would promote data sovereignty laws, and urged diplomats to promote the Global Cross-Border Privacy Rules Forum, an international group that claims to enable “trusted data flows globally through international data protection and privacy certifications.”

...

Progressives acknowledging the fact of genocide is a good first step, and it’s useful that Ocasio-Cortez and others have done so — “I think [unconditional aid to Israel] enabled a genocide in Gaza,” she said in Munich — but it is not in and of itself sufficient. Before anyone in the party can move on to selling a post-Biden vision of human-rights-first foreign policy, they must address what accountability for the war criminals in the Biden administration — those who aided, armed, and funded genocide — should look like.

In one North Carolina district they already dropped $1.3 million on one primary ad. They're trying to take down Bernie-backed Nida Allam, and boost a candidate who will give them free reign.