Countries with Birthright Citizenship 2024: 33 countries have unrestricted birthright citizenship, 32 others have a restricted form.

Trump’s birthright citizenship order shows how he is challenging the Constitution itself: He holds no more respect or love for ‘America’ than for anything else that isn’t himself.

Why Blog If Nobody Reads It?: ‘When you write, you think better’.

Revealed: Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests: Amongst those from other regimes, autocratic and otherwise.

I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. Here is How I Mastered My Own: Humans just hate boredom; our modern world being full of distractions doesn’t help.

Never Forgive Them: A long and eviscerating read from Ed Zitron on how and why the tech industry is making our lives substantially worse than they need to be - basically their incentives are no longer aligned with us, their users.

Revealed: ‘extremely concerning’ industry influence over UN aviation body | Airline emissions: The relatively secretive UN’s committee on aviation environmental protection (CAEP) seems to be dominated by representatives from the aviation and fossil fuel companies.

Extreme weather expected to cause food price volatility in 2025 after cost of cocoa and coffee doubles: Food is harder to grow in a world ravaged by climate change.

Silicon Valley is Embracing Christianity (With the Help of Peter Thiel): The tech bros appear to have rewritten Christianity.

Is it okay?: Robin Sloan considers the ethics of generative AI models needing to slurp up the entirety of the internet to exist.

Trump demands $500B in rare earths from Ukraine for continued support

Elon Musk’s Big Government Grift: An article from 2020 on Musk’s mission ‘to get unimaginably rich by maximally gaming the government’s largesse…taking advantage of programs meant to help people who earn in a lifetime what he earns every minute.’

Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies: Old news, but let’s remember Musk’s success is at least partly down to government largesse.

More Than 800K Have Lost $2B on Trump’s Meme Coin: He, of course, profited vociferously.

He’s anti-democracy and pro-Trump: the obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration: Curtis Yarvin.

Baltic nations disconnect from Russian power grid to avoid power being used ‘as a weapon’: ‘Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania disconnected from the network in a move to block Russia’s ability to geopolitically “blackmail” them via the electricity system.’

Is OpenAI’s Operator, a new AI ‘agent,’ ready to help in the real world?: A reporter’s very expensive AI inadvertently buys them very expensive eggs.

Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog: ‘…since there are already countless places where you can’t be yourself, there is no need to build another one of those.’

How Mark Zuckerberg, Once a Trump Foe, Changed His Tune on President-Elect: There was a time when he didn’t publicly admire ‘President Trump’s divisive and incendiary rhetoric’ quite so much.

Reform UK tops landmark poll for first time: Ugh.

A Coup is In Progress in America: ‘The transformation happening before our eyes—from a government bound by law to one bound by personal loyalty—is precisely what generations of Americans gave their lives to prevent.’

A real-world test of artificial intelligence infiltration of a university examinations system: A “Turing Test” case study: The 100% AI-written psychology essays weren’t detected as such by the graders, and they typically scored higher than the human ones.

DeepSeek Fails Researchers' Safety Tests: The hot new AI bot appears to be up for discussing pretty much anything, irrespective of harm.

‘I lost 10 years of my life’: how UK betting giant’s unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked: A particularly dark example of the perils of letting companies surveil, extract and exploit the trail of data modern life requires we generate.

The UK is a World Leader in Stomping Peaceful Protest: There is, unfortunately, something we’re still good at.