Linkage

Planet Money has obtained a secret government report outlining what once looked like a potential crisis: The possibility that the U.S. government might pay off its entire debt.

It sounds ridiculous today. But not so long ago, the prospect of a debt-free U.S. was seen as a real possibility with the potential to upset the global financial system.

[…]

The report is called "Life After Debt". It was written in the year 2000, when the U.S. was running a budget surplus, taking in more than it was spending every year. Economists were projecting that the entire national debt could be paid off by 2012.

This was seen in many ways as good thing. But it also posed risks. If the U.S. paid off its debt there would be no more U.S. Treasury bonds in the world.

"It was a huge issue ... for not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy," says Diane Lim Rogers, an economist in the Clinton administration.

The general election did not allow for the full expression of people power. Rather, we saw a rejection of the political establishment, leading to a loveless landslide; this election saw the second-lowest turnout since 1918 and the smallest combined vote share for the two main parties since 1945. Public discontent with a broken political system will only grow as the government fails to make the real change that people expect.

That energy needs somewhere to go. It needs to be channelled. It needs to be mobilised. That’s why our campaign will organise with those who have been inspired by our victory to build community power in every corner of the country. Once our grassroots model has been replicated elsewhere, this can be the genesis of a new movement capable of challenging the stale two-party system. A movement that offers a real alternative to child poverty, inequality and endless war. A movement that provides a real opposition to the far right – one that doesn’t concede ground to divisive rhetoric, but stands by its principles of anti-racism, equality and inclusion.

I have no doubt that this movement will eventually run in elections. However, to create a new, centralised party, based around the personality of one person, is to put the cart before the horse. Remember that only once strength is built from below can we challenge those at the top.

When the history of the 21st century comes to be written, surely the cuddly and playful ranks of the gay furry hackers will be remembered as our Greatest Generation.

A group of self-proclaimed “gay furry hackers” says it breached the Heritage Foundation earlier this month, releasing two gigabytes of the right-wing think tank’s internal data on Tuesday. On its Telegram channel, the hacktivist collective SiegedSec — which has previously claimed responsibility for hacking NATO’s computer systems — said the Heritage hack was part of its #OpTransRights campaign, which also targeted the far-right media outlet Real America’s Voice and the Hillsong megachurch. The group also cited their objections to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy proposal for a second term for former President Donald Trump, as a motivating factor.

In an email to The Verge, Heritage Foundation spokesperson Noah Weinrich denied that Heritage had been hacked, calling it a “false narrative and an exaggeration by a group of criminal trolls trying to get attention.” 

[…] 

A SiegedSec representative who goes by vio told The Verge they “completely expected” Heritage to deny that it had been hacked. “Many companies try denial to save face,” vio said. “The server we hacked was linked to The Daily Signal, and the server was named ‘first-heritage-foundation’. Clearly, Heritage was genuinely hacked.”

“Mike’s threats and insults showed anger that confirmed what Heritage denied,” vio said.

In a statement on Telegram, SiegedSec said the goal of the hack was to draw attention to — and combat — the Heritage Foundation’s anti-LGBT and anti-abortion policy proposals.

[Archived from here.]

Private tenants are paying up to £192 a month more in rent than they were last year, with the average rise in England equalling £103 a month, according to an analysis of Office for National Statistics data. 

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A survey of 2,000 private tenants by Shelter and YouGov shows that 58 per cent of tenants have had their rent increased since March 2023, and 34 per cent are now spending at least half their monthly income on rent.

Some landlords are using Section 21 no-fault evictions to force tenants who cannot afford to keep up with rent increases to leave with two months’ notice.

Shelter estimates there were 60,000 renters forced to move because of rent hikes last year.

Palestinians living abroad have accused Microsoft of closing their email accounts without warning - cutting them off from crucial online services.

They say it has left them unable to access bank accounts and job offers - and stopped them using Skype, which Microsoft owns, to contact relatives in war-torn Gaza.

Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - a claim they dispute.

"They killed my life online," said Eiad Hametto, who lives in Saudi Arabia.

"They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years - It was connected to all my work," he told the BBC.

He also said being cut off from Skype was a huge blow for his family.

I am pornography. Granted, it's not necessarily the first thing you'd notice about me. That is to say, I am not the subject of pornography, but the thing itself, 24/7. It's jolly tiring, I can tell you.

The prominence of pornography in Project 2025 is no mistake, of course; it’s absolutely core to the authors’ agenda for Trump. The attack on porn is inseparable from the attacks on abortion and contraception, on marriage equality and trans rights, and of course on drag queens and library books—all of which, they believe, threaten the straight, married family as the natural bedrock of society. All of these threats, to them, constitute pornography. By calling on the president to outlaw porn, they’re calling for the eradication of all these imagined enemies of the family.

Though Project 2025 does not define “pornography,” their concern clearly extends beyond porn itself. Pornography, according to the Mandate, is responsible for the “normalization” of non-normative gender expression and identity among young people—what the right often calls “gender ideology.” Pornography could be anything that contributes to that purported normalization. “Pornography,” Roberts continues, is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.” And how should it be outlawed? “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” Project 2025 is not targeting “pornography” as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography. 

The US Bill of Rights? That's pornography. Have you seen what's in it? Can you imagine how exposure to that sort of thing might harm children?

Food is no ordinary commodity. It’s both indispensable and a precious, scarce resource. Ultimately, we need to bring food production and distribution under public ownership and control to end this irrationality.

Achieving that end-goal won’t be simple. We can’t simply take over a system as complex as our food system in one fell swoop. Socializing supermarkets, by contrast, would be relatively simple. It’s the obvious place to start.

Most of the popular discourse around food places the burden of change on individual consumers. However lovely local farmers’ markets may be, convincing people to frequent them isn’t going to cut it, especially as wages decline and working hours crawl up. For their part, government regulations can end the worst excesses of the market, but the problems with our food system require more than just regulatory nudges.

Solving these problems will require rational economic planning. In fact, supermarkets already plan our food system. But they do it for the sake of profit maximization rather than the public good and long-term sustainability.

In early June, Al Jazeera aired a series of disturbing videos revealing what it described as “summary executions”: Israeli soldiers shooting dead several Palestinians walking near the coastal road in the Gaza Strip, on three separate occasions. In each case, the Palestinians appeared unarmed and did not pose any imminent threat to the soldiers.

Such footage is rare, due to the severe constraints faced by journalists in the besieged enclave and the constant danger to their lives. But these executions, which did not appear to have any security rationale, are consistent with the testimonies of six Israeli soldiers who spoke to +972 Magazine and Local Call following their release from active duty in Gaza in recent months. Corroborating the testimonies of Palestinian eyewitnesses and doctors throughout the war, the soldiers described being authorized to open fire on Palestinians virtually at will, including civilians.

The six sources — all except one of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity — recounted how Israeli soldiers routinely executed Palestinian civilians simply because they entered an area that the military defined as a “no-go zone.” The testimonies paint a picture of a landscape littered with civilian corpses, which are left to rot or be eaten by stray animals; the army only hides them from view ahead of the arrival of international aid convoys, so that “images of people in advanced stages of decay don’t come out.” Two of the soldiers also testified to a systematic policy of setting Palestinian homes on fire after occupying them.

Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.

Earlier versions of these new imported vapes, exemplified by Elf Bar, are beefier and more colorful than Juuls, and are usually single use, despite containing rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Wired describes a new generation of mostly disposable vapes that, in addition to being extremely cheap and wildly potent, let vapers play games on tiny touchscreens and track their vape’s location on devices that cost as little as $5 apiece. The devices are a grotesque example of electronic waste, viral marketing, and the easily exploitable idiosyncrasies of cross-border commerce in 2024.

But they’re also an example of a bigger trend that’s been gaining momentum for years. If you’ve spent much time on the internet’s burgeoning discount-retail platforms — Temu, TikTok Shop, and Wish, to name a few — disposable vapes with screens and logic boards sound almost reasonable. On Temu, for example, some of the top-selling items in the electronics category are Bluetooth earbuds with touchscreens built in to the case with interfaces of extremely dubious value that can be used to control playback, show screensavers, or just fidget, some of which cost less than $10. There are $4 USB cables with built-in screens to tell you how fast you’re charging; $7 cigarette lighters covered in LED lights and displays; USB hubs that double as external displays; $65 dressers with touchscreens; $48 toasters with software interfaces; $16 rechargeable neck coolers with LED readouts; hundred-dollar motorcycle backpacks with two LCD screens; $18 school backpacks with voice-activated flashing displays.