aditi rao

Powerful earthquake rattles Northern California, tsunami warning issued An earthquake has shaken Northern California. Reports of damage were not immediately available.

location deets thanks to sf chronicle’s article www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

this is the one, apparently — off the coast of petrolia, CA in humboldt county. earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...

This is not just embarrassing, it's actively destructive. It's lending legitimacy to a project whose purpose is to gut the state, immiserate public workers, and replace them with political loyalists. It's textbook authoritarianism, and the biggest impediments it faces is anyone taking it seriously

Cost of Voting Index Chart showing that Washington State is the easiest state to vote in and mississippi is the hardest

Washington State is the easiest state in the country to vote in. Moved from NY To Seattle in 2017 and I'm still infatuated with being able to vote by mail while still wearing pajamas

costofvotingindex.com

aaand just got a loud tsunami warning on my phone

earthquake! in the east bay, at least. just followed @earthquakebotsf.bsky.social but no updates from it yet.

for my next newsletter and episode i bought the bestselling laptop on Amazon to try and explain how shitty most people's exposure to tech is. Currently at 30 minutes of menus and updates. I have agreed to three privacy policies and created two new accounts. We live in hell

He's a liar. He's lied in the past. He'll continue to lie.

The real question is will the press do their job and call out the lies . . . or will they fold and cower like The L.A. Times, Washington Post, and Joe Scarborough?

This is your daily reminder that this really did happen.

Gonna be cool when they use this to claim they know what marginalized communities want.

Well, he allegedly disrupted a woman’s ability to leave his hotel room and not be raped by him

Roundup: The return of self-driving hype Read to the end for a graph of Elon Musk’s real-time mental decline

Why are we talking about self-driving cars again — or robotaxis, as we now call them? Not because they’re about to solve all our transport problems, or even significantly replace existing road trips. It’s simply because AI hype is back — and AV makers are taking advantage.

Remember this guy? Trump just made him director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Shout-out to everyone who tried to convince us he knew nothing about Project 2025.

Correction

Crime reporting be like

this is my shocked face

There are, of course, laws about this stuff we could actually enforce, depending on whether we decide the problem is 1) he is not yet a federal employee & therefore this is illegal as hell; 2) he is now a federal employee & therefore this is illegal as hell. But since we're not a serious country 🤷‍♂️

On Authoritarianism Or: What Year 600 of the Reich Taught Me About Project 2025

Reminder that a key strategy of project 2025 is to fire scores of federal employees, then install tons of theocrats to number two positions in all of these departments, so that while the department head role is tied up in Congressional approval, the Deputy Director is de facto running things.

The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone Other Western democracies have been roiled by the use of spyware to target political opponents, activists, journalists, and other vulnerable groups. Could it happen here?

I lived in Greece when the government was hacking phones of journalists, politicians, and activists. @citizenlab.ca checked our phones many times 🙏 it was so stressful!

Surveillance has massive psychosocial impacts - and such targeting will likely grow under Trump

www.newyorker.com/news/news-de...

great thread and this has been one of my obsessions in my column, to point people away from the european example and toward the american one.

Having read a bunch of really sharp critiques of AI, I’ve found myself assuming that AI entrepreneurs must have equally smart arguments. I’m always astounded to find that they don’t: it’s just easily disproven boosterism. But then, of course it is. It doesn’t matter, because capital is behind them.

To review:

ATTORNEY GENERAL: Allegedly paid for sex with multiple women and a 17-year-old girl

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Allegedly raped a woman at a conference in 2017

SECRETARY OF HHS: Allegedly sexually assaulted his kids’ baby sitter

basically every pro-consumer regulation we have is on the chopping block and it is very frustrating to see normal people parrot this sort of “regulatory overreach” language when almost every individual regulation that gets rolled back is immensely popular on its own

well great

RFK Jr. comes ‘home’ to his anti-vaccine group, commits to ‘a break’ for U.S. infectious disease research He has suggested without evidence that researchers and pharmaceutical companies are driven by profit to neglect chronic conditions.

RFK Jr.: “Thank you [to the NIH] for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”

Kennedy wants to take a “break” from studying infectious diseases like COVID-19 and measles.

www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...

Surge in worldwide measles cases driven by lack of vaccine coverage, WHO says The WHO and CDC say there were about 10.3 million cases of measles last year, up 20 percent from 2022. Children are especially susceptible to complications.

Meanwhile:

“An estimated 10.3 million cases of measles occurred worldwide last year, up 20 percent from 2022, primarily because of inadequate immunization coverage, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/...

US Driving and Congestion Rates Are Higher Than Ever After a reprieve from car traffic in 2020, vehicle miles traveled have now surpassed pre-pandemic levels in almost every metro area.

If traffic seems to be getting worse, it is. People are driving 12% more than pre-pandemic.

We need to invest in public transit and biking to get cars off the road. Even if you love driving, you should want better public transit and biking so that you aren't sitting behind other cars in traffic.

How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world | Carole Cadwalladr In the wake of Trump’s unnerving appointees, the investigative journalist and veteran of the libel court offers pointers on coping in an age of surveillance

NEW: The great Trump-Musk crackdown is coming. And it will hit hard & fast. Journalists will be first. But everyone else is next.

I urge you to read my 20 lessons in How to Survive the Broligarchy, inspired by & featuring the great @timothysnyder.bsky.social
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