I write a blog that focuses on public information, public health, and policy: https://pimento-mori.ghost.io/
Moving from lemm.ee to sh.itjust.works
Yeah, I wrote about that and in particular hope more people will pay attention to what Michael Kratsios is doing.
Kratsios stays pretty quiet, so most people aren't aware of him, or the fact he and Thiel were behind most of the ideas everyone currently associates with DOGE during Trump's first administration.
Well TBF, I think they also existed to cover up the money that was being stolen to pour into these AI data centers, but disguise that missing money as "savings." Pretty sure they thought they would be able to make so much money so quickly, that they would just be able to replace it before anyone realized all of those "savings" numbers were just bullshit.
Not that they ever planned to actually bring any of the jobs back, but likely thought they could replace the money that was stolen and then just automate those jobs anyway bc AI is apparently magic
The image is from March, but who knows
I am more inclined to believe Thiel set him up to be the face of all the DOGE work and then had him step down when Kratsios was nominated.
I also saw something about nuralink stock being up though, so could be a distraction
Pretty sure most policy is AI generated and relies on recycling history's failed playbooks.
"Totally not a narc, inc."
Interesting thing is that rich people also have a lot to lose from AI data takeover. Pretty sure the only reason Marsha Blackburn is opposed to the state AI ban is because her wealthy supporters in Nashville are going to be fucked by losing copyright control of so much material
Yep, been trying to warn people about that https://lemm.ee/post/64787536
The same reason this administration does all the things they point their finger and accuse everyone else of doing. They're traitorous scumbags and hypocrites.
Law enforcement officer
In my city, a private company, Project Nola, owns the cameras. The owner is a former LEO and basically started a private security company in the city around 2015. He charges people an installation fee and cloud storage fee for the cameras, but has allegedly always offered surveillance footage to the cops for free because he wants to help tackle crime. There has never been an official contract with the city or police
I could possibly see a small company legitimately starting out that way, but this company actually popped up in the city during the middle of a secret partnership between the city and Palantir. The partnership, which enabled Palantir to collect data on individuals in order to create and patent predictive policing software was exposed in 2018.
There is allegedly no link between the two private companies, but the business model of the local surveillance company seems very hard to match the level of growth despite what would seem to be a fairly low profit margin it charges people using its service.
At some point the owner of the local surveillance company began combining his surveillance with facial recognition software, which then provides real time tracking of individuals on a watchlist to police (or anyone working with the company) when a match is made via information the surveillance cameras are constantly scanning for. The cameras can scan for details like a specific face (which is still prone to error/false positive matches) or it can scan for more vague details like walking gait, clothes a suspect may be wearing, or the type of car they may be driving.
The owner of the surveillance company, insists he does share the data he collects with anyone other than the law enforcement agencies he is working with. Originally this was apparently only NOPD, but now it's also the state police, FBI, and ICE/ICE state affiliates such as the National Guard, ATF, Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, and some other Louisiana state departments.
If that were true, it would still be quite concerning, but given that he apparently began using facial recognition software at some point over the last few years, and the most common facial recognition software used by LEOs and private companies is also a company backed by Peter Thiel, I find that claim nearly impossible to believe.
Here is some info about that other Thiel backed company, Clearview AI
Before the police in New Orleans began using the facial recognition software, they had to lift a city wide ban in 2022, that had originally been put in place in 2020
Two years after the city's partnership with Palantir allegedly ended, it was revealed the city was using facial recognition software, despite years of denying use. After this use was revealed, the 2020 ban of the technology was put in place. In 2022, the mayor requested the ban be lifted, so that police could continue using facial recognition software, but an ordinance regulating use was created in order to offer some regulation and protection of this use. However, last week, a Washington Post article revealed that police had just ignored that ordinance anyway.
Most people in New Orleans, including myself, were oblivious about most of this information until the Washington Post article was released. NOPD has allegedly stopped using the tracking software since the Post began its investigation, but is hoping to get the city to remove the ordinance they were in violation of.
As concerning as all of this is, what's perhaps even more concerning are the provisions included in the 2022 ordinance, that was created with the intention of providing some small level of regulation and protection to the public once the ban was lifted.
The proposed ordinance, if passed, would largely reverse the council’s blanket bans on the use facial recognition and characteristic tracking software, which is similar to facial recognition but for identifying race, gender, outfits, vehicles, walking gait and other attributes. One provision also appears to walk back the city’s ban on predictive policing and cell-site simulators — which intercept and spy on cell phone calls — to locate people suspected of certain serious crimes.
That provision could, for the first time, give the city explicit permission to use a whole host of surveillance technology in certain circumstances, including voice recognition, x-ray vans, “through the wall radar,” social media monitoring software, “tools used to gain unauthorized access to a computer,” and more.
Yeah, I thought it was pretty clear, but I guess not. I definitely would have on Reddit but figured it wouldn't be necessary here
I agree, and just to be clear I was being sarcastic. I would also guess it's way more than half the money.
Between health insurance companies, hospital administrator salaries, liability insurance for doctors, and drug patents making most medications unaffordable, I would say it's pretty easily about 3/4 or more.
I volunteer in a free clinic in a red state that has had the Medicaid expansion for less than 10 years. It provided the absolute bare minimum healthcare to essentially everyone in need, but it still made such a huge difference in terms of patient health outcomes to just offer that bare minimum.
Now the U.S. is targeting that entire program through budget cuts, and in addition, at least in my state, private hospital oligopolies have been ramping down acceptance for months now because they seemed to know what was coming before anyone else.
The argument is that the cost of providing that bare minimum is unsustainable. Even if that were true, and the cuts weren't actually only necessary to provide another tax break for the wealthy, there are clearly so many other places we could be making cuts to reduce the cost of healthcare, rather than to the tiny amount that goes towards actually providing the barely minimum healthcare coverage to some of the most vulnerable patient populations.
So I actually just found a really good hack after like 10 years of struggling with getting halloumi just right
Put a piece of parchment paper on a cast iron skillet and cook the halloumi on top of that. It will help you get perfect just slightly brown but not burnt halloumi
Clearly this is just a way to get all of the cases currently holding him in contempt dropped.
It seems it's up to the judge's discretion at what it's set, at least according to the traitorous scumbags that wrote the bill.
“The judge can set the security at whatever level he wants,” Mr. Jordan said at a hearing on Wednesday. “What’s typically happened in these cases is he’s just waiving it. Nobody’s putting it up. And they’re getting this injunction that applies nationwide, which is the concern.”
Most likely, unless the judges want to allow the court system to completely crumble, like you're worried they will, they will have to play ball by setting it to an affordable amount like $1.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us/politics/trump-policy-bill-judges-contempt.html
The point isn't really that you have to pay a $1. The point is that the president is making it loud and clear that there is now a dollar amount on upholding the constitution. By making a citizen pay any amount of money anytime the government violates the rights it's a show of lawlessness by the president and his loyalists.
These people are already being paid to uphold the rights they're violating, with the tax dollars that they're squandering on the AI data centers they're rolling out across the country in different states, so that they can steal more data, invade more privacy, violate more rights, and have no consequences unless they are cut off at the state level by state government.
Ugh George Soros poisoned Progressivism!
By "affordable" I'm assuming you mean free. Always wanting a handout, of course.
I just want untaxed inheritance, corporate welfare on top of more tax breaks for me and all my friends, unregulated surveillance and data collection of the plebs so I can continue to make even more money (untaxed obvs), exclusive and elite private universities, and a justice system where I can live free of consequence and purchase a judge at a reasonable price because I believe in being fiscally conservative.
Food, shelter, and healthcare are things I've just never had to think about really. Although, I would also prefer that if too many people are worrying about those things in my immediate vicinity, they be shuffled around or forcibly moved to a different vicinity.
That way I don't have to start thinking too much. It's really unfair when that happens, because it starts to make me feel all kinds of uncomfortable. Uncomfortable is not something I'm used to feeling, and since I don't like to think about things, I never stop and think about why somebody else being uncomfortable would also make me feel so uncomfortable.
Logically, the solution is to just put those people somewhere not visible to me, and then complain about what society is "turning into these days" when they slip through the privilege perimeter.
I would definitely just be that lady driving the truck
Or those that attend a protest, or mouth off to the wrong person, or catch the interest of the wrong person, the potential for abuse is kinda endless.
You know how in healthcare, you can be fired for looking up someones medical records just to snoop on them, even if you're not sharing it with anyone else? This is like that but so much worse, and you could potentially be sharing that information with anyone with zero consequences
If this goes through the Senate, it will be shitty and so very Trump. However if that happens, it seems most likely judges will just begin setting a bond, which could be as low as $1.
It's unprecedented but it doesn't really mean that Trump has unlimited executive power, unless for some reason judges just refused to start setting the bond. There normally isn't one bc judges normally don't say if you want justice for a violation of your rights by the government you need to provide a security bond first.
On the one hand it will be a new low for America, but will probably be reversed as soon as Trump is out of office. It will almost certainly do him no favors in court going forward or the Republicans any favors during the midterms.
The shittiest part is that it would retroactively effect cases where he's in contempt and also effect long standing injunctions like desegregation orders in schools. Funny thing about that specifically, red states are already seeing the DOJ dropping investigations and law suits into civil rights violations. Last week the DOJ said they're no longer investigating civil rights accusations against Louisiana State Police, and last month the DOJ removed a consent decree that enforced segregation on a Louisiana school in the 60s, meanwhile the governor has been trying to remove a consent decree on the NOPD for years.
The argument of both red states and the federal government, is that these federal rules are no longer necessary bc states like Louisiana got their act together a long time ago. Definitely not true, but what can I do about that if my governor says it's so and no other elected officials are willing to challenge him on it.
Yet Republicans are somehow arguing state regulations on AI are unnecessary because their "light touch" federal regulations will be all you need. That's because they plan to provide no enforceable regulations that will actually serve anyone but corporations.
Literally, the only thing a federal government should be doing is protecting the rights of people. When a federal government becomes worthless and stops providing federal laws protecting your rights (because they argue they're not necessary to protect you from people exactly like them), you hopefully have state leaders who are willing to step in and provide the insurance that the federal government is failing to provide you.
Well you need someone to control the narrative, so if there's no one being tasked by an administration to actively spread a conspiracy, it's harder to get people to embrace it.
Reuters reported last summer that the Pentagon had a campaign to spread online disinformation about China's vaccine Doesn't really seem too far fetched to think something similar was used against Americans by the same people that would now benefit from Americans being blissfully unaware of how dangerous it is to put one of these chips in their brain. After all, it has an official breakthrough tag now, and if it was really so dangerous "why would the FDA approve it?"
Not sure if you remember, but we were also one of the only countries that tried to downplay the effectiveness of people wearing masks during the earliest days of the pandemic. That was one I never could figure out back then, but now I'm suspicious that was also part of a targeted disinformation campaign.
March 2020 White House seeks assistance from tech companies in fight against coronavirus
So with all those people and their resources controlling the narrative, why would we then be spreading misinformation about masking? Why would anybody care if large numbers of Americans were covering their face to stop the spread of disease?
I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I do feel like the public should be more aware that Trump's former CTO and current science advisor, the guy who was also tasked with preventing online disinformation being spread during COVID, was also tirelessly promoting deregulated facial recognition technology long before anyone was considering that masking in public would be common in the U.S.
Nov 2019: Trump CTO Addresses AI, Facial Recognition, Immigration, Tech Infrastructure, and More