Everyone looking to stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today has a lot to learn from the explosive mass movement that culminated in the “Day Without an Immigrant” on May 1, 2006. The spark was H.R. 4437, the Sensenbrenner bill, which passed the House of Representatives on December 16, 2005. Former representative Jim Sensenbrenner’s bill would have made it a felony for immigrants not to have papers, while also criminalizing acts of support and solidarity.

The threat was clear and the response spread fast. As one Los Angeles protest sign put it, “You’ve kicked a sleeping giant.” In the spring of 2006, between four and five million people marched in over 160 cities. And on May 1, over a million people walked out and poured into the streets across the country. Ports slowed; classrooms emptied; restaurants, shops, and job sites went short-staffed or dark. Chris Zamora, a marcher in Los Angeles, described what that collective power felt like on the ground: “It gives me chills to be a part of it. Thirty years from now, I’ll look back and say, ‘I was there.’”

The mass marches and economic disruption worked: Sensenbrenner’s bill was killed by the Senate in late May. It was a historic victory for the immigrant rights movement and the American working class.

Staley is openly asserting here what many on the Left have long feared: that workers in rich societies are too bought off to overthrow capitalism. But among many other revelations in Epstein’s emails is the glaring fact that the ruling elite are not as uniquely bright as they’d like us to think. For all their wealth and power, these are no Übermenschen — they’re just average men with lurid sexual impulses and atrocious spelling. Their money and influence do not testify to their exquisitely developed personalities or intellects, only to the arbitrary injustice of the system that elevates them.

In other words, just because the former CEO of Barclays thinks American workers are too lulled by consumerism to come for his crown someday doesn’t mean it’s true.

“We have a master plan … There is no Plan B,” remarked Jared Kushner last month, during a Board of Peace (BoP) presentation about Gaza reconstruction at the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos. What has become apparent is that no coherent Plan A exists either.

Although Kushner’s father-in-law, US President Donald Trump, was granted the legitimacy to build what he calls the BoP on the back of pledges to implement his “20-point peace plan” and Gaza ceasefire, the BoP’s charter is notably absent of any reference to Gaza...

Stuff like this makes me think maybe my country (the UK) would be better off back in the EU. Europe together can create great technology like rockets. The UK alone can't.

US spy agency’s outreach, depicting a disillusioned mid-level officer, risks unsettling fragile calm before April’s Trump-XI summit

I really hope they die soon, this is unbearable…

The incident was not the first undersea sabotage in the Baltic, and it won’t be the last. That shallow body of water has become a hotspot for targeting critical undersea infrastructure. Over the course of the past decades, major Western economies have become increasingly dependent on the flow of data and energy along the seafloor. Russia has begun to weaponize that dependency, and China looks set to follow suit. The West is belatedly rebuilding its capacity to patrol and protect its undersea infrastructure but still hasn’t adequately grappled with how to deter the growing risks below the waves.

Archive.

During the Super Bowl, Anthropic ran a dystopian AI ad about dystopian AI ads featuring an AI android physical trainer hawking insoles to a user who only asked for an ab workout. Not to be outdone, Amazon ran a commercial for its AI assistant Alexa+ in which Chris Hemsworth fretted over all the different ways AI might kill him, including severing his head and drowning him in his pool. Equally bleak, the telehealth company Hims & Hers ran an ad titled “RICH PEOPLE LIVE LONGER” in which oligarchs access such healthcare luxuries as facelifts, bespoke IVs, and “preventative care” to live longer than the rest of us. It was an anti-billionaire ad by a multibillion-dollar healthcare company.

Turn on the TV today, and you will drown in a sea of ads in which capitalists denounce capitalism. Think of the PNC Bank ads where parents sell their children’s naming rights a la sports stadiums for the money to raise them or the Robinhood ads where a white-haired older man, perhaps meant to evoke Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, curses the “men of means with their silver spoons eating up the financial favors of the one percent” from the deck of a yacht.

After years of ingesting the mainstream discourse around surveillance capitalism, Occupy Wall Street, and democratic socialism, corporations are regurgitating and even surpassing the rhetoric of the modern left. Naturally, it’s all a winking sleight of hand meant to corral us back into engaging with the same capitalism they portray as a hellscape — but with new and improved privatized solutions. In another widely reviled Super Bowl ad, the video doorbell company Ring tells us that every year, 10 million family pets go missing, and by opting into a web of mass surveillance, the company has reunited “more than a dog a day” with their families.

Modern advertisers descend from those ad men of the 1960s who first perfected the art of channeling our angst with society writ large into buying more junk. As historian Thomas Frank wrote in his book “The Conquest of Cool,” midcentury advertisers constructed “a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the … everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”

The machine has hummed on ever since, retrofitting capitalism’s reprimands into its rationales. It churns out commercials reframing the precariat’s pain not as the product of plutocracy but as the product of buying the wrong products. Advertisements pitch that the good life is to be secured by procuring high quality goods, by curating the right combination of AI assistants, locally crafted beer, paraben-free dryer sheets, Jimmy Dean breakfast biscuits, Capital One Venture X points, BetMGM spreads, Coinbase crypto wallets, on and on.

It’s lunacy. Buying Levi’s won’t give you deep pockets. Brand promises, like all promises, are made to be broken. As AI anxiety fueled fears of mass layoffs, Coca-Cola soothed American workers’ worries about “AI coming for everything” with a glossy 2025 Super Bowl ad, featuring Lauren London, where the gleaming actress flexed her dimples and told us everything would be all right. Ten months later, Coke automated its advertising with generative videos, replacing the actors they’d paid to soothe our worries about being replaced by AI with AI itself.

Air Transat is cancelling its last two flights into Florida as of this spring, suspending all of its business into the United States.

The Russian government is trying to block WhatsApp in the country as its crackdown on communication platforms outside its control intensifies.

Despite being sued by Spotify, Anna's Archive has begun releasing the actual music files from its massive Spotify scrape.

Thailand is consistently ranked among the bottom 10 countries in the world for low birth rates. Its Total Fertility Rate has dropped to between 1.0 and 1.2 children per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement level required to maintain a stable population.

Attorney General Pam Bondi took to Capitol Hill this week with her burn book in hand and a message to Congress, the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and the American people: Shut up, the Dow hit 50,000. She was right about the Dow Jones Industrial performance until the next day when stocks dumped out on news that AI might be real and that the economy added 400,000 fewer jobs last year than we originally thought. That’s the thing about building an entire narrative around the stock market. The stock market is not the economy. And the victims of Epstein’s crimes deserve better.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/7204957

Archived link

• Focus Graphite's Lac Knife project in Quebec features 15% graphitic carbon content, approximately 3x higher than the industry average of 3-5%, providing significant cost advantages in a North American operating environment
• The company has secured $14 million in non-dilutive funding from Natural Resources Canada's Global Partner Initiative, with total cash position of $18 million and minimal near-term dilution requirements
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• Focus is developing specialty large-flake graphite for military, defense, and aerospace applications, leveraging unique purification technology that preserves flake integrity without chemicals
• The company is in final stages of environmental permitting (ESIA completion expected within 3-4 months) and has already demonstrated material in missile applications, positioning for production in 2-3 years

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Unless I am blind or my search-fu is hugely failing me, I cannot for the life of me find any information on the recommended/minimum specs to self-host the matrix backend services. I'm trying to spin up a VM just to play around with it and see if I like it. Specifically, I'm looking at Synapse or Continuwuity. Any advice?

Looking for vCPUs, memory, storage.