Linkage

Shameless.

Jeff Bezos, the self-proclaimed “hands-off” owner of the Washington Post, emailed staffers on Wednesday morning about a change he is applying to the paper’s opinion section that appears to align the newspaper more closely with the political right.

“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos said.

“We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”

The CDC’s move to comply with Trump’s executive order is not just an attack on transgender inclusion—it is a fundamental assault on evidence-based policymaking. Public health data drives funding allocations, legislative protections, and medical advancements. Without accurate data on transgender individuals, lawmakers and health officials will be unable to craft policies that address the unique challenges faced by the trans community.

For transgender individuals, this erasure from federal data is more than an administrative slight—it is a direct threat to their health, safety, and survival. Without demographic representation, there will be fewer initiatives tailored to trans healthcare needs, fewer resources allocated for trans youth mental health programs, and fewer protections against discrimination in medical settings.

“This is an attempt to legislate us out of existence,” said a transgender activist who wished to remain anonymous. “They are trying to make it so that we don’t ‘exist’ in public data, and if we don’t exist in the data, we don’t exist in policy. If we don’t exist in policy, we don’t get protections. And if we don’t get protections, they are making us more vulnerable.”

Sage advice:

I once pulled out a ten-year old unsubmitted and unfinished piece of writing, revised it, and submitted it—it was published, and won an award. It took ten years for me to understand what that argument was really about, so leaving it unfinished for that long wasn’t a bad choice at all. There are others that will remain forever unfinished—also not a bad choice.

But there are times when one should just hit submit. The dreams may not come true, but there will be other pieces of writing about which we can dream.

I’m saying all this because I hope people who might be stuck in their writing will find it hopeful. Just hit submit.

In the broadest sense, according to the dictionary, the term vegetable is used to define anything living that isn’t animal or mineral ― think the vegetable kingdom (which is another term for plant kingdom).

If you ask a cook, a vegetable is also a term used to define the parts of the plant that we eat― the plant matter on our plates such as salad, braised greens, carrots or potatoes.

But if you ask a botanist, they’ll tell you there’s no such thing as a vegetable. “The term vegetable has no meaning in botany,” Amy Litt, director of plant genomics and Cullman curator at The New York Botanical Garden explained to LiveScience.

Why? Because from a biological standpoint, what we call vegetables are really just parts of plants. So botanists just call them by their parts. Asparagus is the stalk of a plant. Broccoli is the flower of a plant. Kale is the leaves of a plant. Onions are the bulb of a plant. Carrots are the root of a plant. Tomatoes are the fruit of a plant. 

This site is designed to make World Bank data easy to find, download, and use. All of the data found here can be used free of charge with minimal restrictions.

The Data Catalog is designed to make World Bank's development data easy to find, download, use, and share. It includes data from the World Bank's microdata, finances and energy data platforms, as well as datasets from the open data catalog. There are different ways to access and download datasets. 

Every fascist movement needs a group of people to blame all the bad things in the world on. Obviously, this is a highly dangerous situation to said people, and they might need to flee the country. This is a small project trying to help them within the bounds of what we can do.

At the UK's State of Open conference, Dawn Foster, director of data science for the CHAOSS Project, unveiled compelling evidence that forks -- community-driven alternatives to proprietary codebases -- are thriving. At the same time, companies that abandoned open-source principles face stagnant growth and disillusioned users.

[…]

At the event in London, James Governor, RedMonk's co-founder, said: "There is neither a share price rise for public companies nor revenue gains. There's no clear, 'Oh, we relicensed and got a hockey stick.' So, I think that if businesses are making these decisions, the expectation is that relicensing will be the special source that takes it to the next level. The numbers do not indicate that."

Simultaneously, Foster noted at the event that when companies closed their code, communities fought back with successful forks.

[…]

Foster's CHAOSS research also revealed that forks under neutral foundations have three times more organizational diversity than their proprietary counterparts. OpenSearch, for example, saw contributions from 45 organizations in its first year -- a stark contrast to Elasticsearch's single-vendor dominance.

In other words, open-source forks are far more popular than their proprietary counterparts. Foster said users flock to forks to avoid vendor lock-in.

Project 2025 Tracker began as a humble spreadsheet created by /u/rusticgorilla, combined with /u/mollynaquafina's vision for making this information accessible to everyone through a dedicated website.

What started as a passion project by two Redditors has grown into a community-driven resource, powered by people like you who believe in the importance of transparent, detailed analysis.

Seventy years ago, at the height of the McCarthy era—when federal employees with left-wing views were routinely interrogated and fired for being suspected communists—a related purge of queer workers was underway. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order listing “sexual perversion” as a basis for terminating federal civil service employees, on the theory that gay men and lesbians were susceptible to blackmail by the country’s enemies. In what became known as the Lavender Scare, at least 5,000 federal workers were fired for suspected homosexuality over the next two decades.

“More people were targeted during that period for being gay or for engaging in same-sex intimacy than were targeted for being communist,” says San Francisco State University professor Marc Stein. The firings rippled out to state and local governments and the private sector, he adds, “accompanied by notions that the gay people were weak, were divisive in workplaces, were not strong representatives of a moral United States.” It’s taken decades since then for LGBTQ people to gain acceptance in public life, including in the federal workforce. Not until the Obama administration was Eisenhower’s executive order formally rescinded.

[…]

Now, the very programs and support groups that have helped queer folks integrate could create risks for their participants. Employee resource groups like Michael’s have been shutting down operations and wiping their websites, afraid of putting their members at risk in the openly hostile Trump administration.

“We’ve gone dark,” a former LGBTQ resource group leader in the Department of Agriculture tells Mother Jones. “We have pulled our contact lists off of government systems. Personally, as someone who has been very involved in queer spaces, I went through and deleted a bunch of emails and contacts, because I have lists of queer employees, and I am afraid if someone in the Trump administration gets their hands on it.”

“I’m scared for the people I’ve been trying to help,” says a trans worker for the Interior Department who is involved in employee resource groups. “People came to us because they needed community, needed connection. We were trying to keep each other safe. Now, we’re all just this big target.”