Art rock legend Brian Eno has called on Microsoft to sever its ties with the government of Israel, saying the company’s provision of cloud and AI services to Israel’s Ministry of Defense “support a regime that is engaged in actions described by leading legal scholars and human rights organizations, the United Nations experts, and increasing numbers of governments from around the world, as genocidal.”

Eno’s connection with Microsoft goes back 30 years—he composed the famous boot-up jingle for Windows 95 that was recently inducted into the National Recording Registry at the US Library of Congress.

“I gladly took on the project as a creative challenge and enjoyed the interaction with my contacts at the company,” Eno wrote in an open letter posted to Instagram (via Stereogum). “I never would have believed that the same company could one day be implicated in the machinery of oppression and war.”

Regardless, Eno clearly isn’t interested in Microsoft’s protestations of innocence: “Selling and facilitating advanced AI and cloud services to a government engaged in systematic ethnic cleansing is not ‘business as usual’. It is complicity. If you knowingly build systems that can enable war crimes, you inevitably become complicit in those crimes.”

this is likely to benefit him tremendously in the gubernatorial race, where he’s running in the Democratic primary but has generally been the third or fourth wheel to this point. if you’re curious about more details of how he’s been protesting, DocumentedNY has you covered:

To representatives of Delaney Hall, the mayor was staging a publicity stunt. But to the mayor, Delaney Hall was pitting his city in a direct confrontation with the Trump administration’s deportation agenda. Delaney Hall, Baraka claimed, was violating city and state laws by contracting with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and by prohibiting him from entering the facility, they were evading the enforcement of city codes.

In April, the city of Newark filed a lawsuit to block Delaney Hall from reopening and to allow city officials to inspect the facility for code violations. The Trump administration has since attempted to intervene to stop the lawsuit.

For nearly three hours, the mayor and his staff, along with over a dozen protesters who chanted “Say it loud, say it proud, immigrants are welcome here,” waited to be allowed in.

Nearby, two bulldozers from the Newark Department of Public Works, each carrying a large concrete slab, were parked nearby as a veiled threat to the detention center’s management, insinuating that if they do not comply with the city’s mandates, the mayor might order the facility to be barricaded.

When asked if he planned to place barricades outside the facility, Baraka, who is currently running for governor of New Jersey, smirked and stated he was entertaining the idea.

additional flavor text to this tense situation: Pakistan blamed a terrorist attack on India literally earlier today

the website for it is pretty comprehensive as far as i can tell

this strikes me as a fascinating idea–with a couple of eyebrow-raising backers–that is probably going to flop spectacularly because it’s too minimalistic to the point of just being cheapskate

here’s your fun fact of the day: the hierarchy of how unchecked your law enforcement is basically goes something like federal police > city police departments > rural police departments > sheriffs of any kind. apparently, while regular police are at least nominally accountable to someone higher up than them, we basically let sheriffs do whatever the fuck they want

whatever recourse you think you have against a PD usually and very explicitly will not exist against a sheriff, even if your governor is sympathetic–most states devolve an incredible amount of power to sheriffs while demanding basically no qualifications or oversight of them. also, most outspoken police you will ever hear are probably sheriffs in specific–they are hugely over-represented in politics because there’s nothing stopping them from opining on politics even where ordinary police chiefs and the like are inhibited. (also their positions are usually elected and partisan, so they are politicians)

naturally, the mixture of election and targeting by the far-right over the past 50ish years means like 85% of these guys are just total cranks now too, because almost all of them represent Republican-leaning counties

FYI: we’ve banned this user because after communicating our disinterest in being used as an anti-China dumping ground to shadowbox with people who can’t even see our instance, the user responded with a bunch of hostility about people pushing back on them.

if you’re going to be this confident, have the decency to be correct instead of saying something incredibly stupid like calling congestion pricing an infringement on “freedom of movement”. if you can drive into lower fucking Manhattan–one of the most car-free areas in the country, because a huge portion of NYC residents don’t drive a car and don’t need to drive a car because they have reliable public transportation–you can pay a toll.

yeah, no shit, that’s not the same as “your entire company being predicated on the unpaid labor of children who you also let do whatever they want without supervision or actually working filtering features”–not least because you could actually get banned for both of the things i mentioned from 2010, while what’s happening now is explicitly enabled by Roblox as their business model and an externality of doing business. as has been demonstrated by recent investigations into how they work down, they basically don’t have a company without systematically exploiting children

it’s been very strange to watch this game i grew up on–pretty innocuously, i should note–gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off

there will likely be in excess of a million people out on the streets today; there are at least 1,200 recorded Hands Off! protests today in addition to about 70 other scheduled protests against people like Elon Musk or rallying for Palestine. easily the largest mobilization so far either way–there are substantial protests in almost every city larger than about 100,000 people, and many significant ones in cities smaller than that

maybe you can be skeptical of the data source–but i think it is fairly reasonable to conclude, at this point, that trying to ditch DEI to placate conservatives has at the very least not helped Target

currently reading:

Then we slap a random-ass speed limit sign down and say “job’s done.”

we don’t actually–the basis we derive most speed limits from is actually much worse, if you can believe that. from Killed by a Traffic Engineer:

Traffic engineers use what we call the 85th percentile speed. The 85th percentile speed is whatever speed 85 percent of drivers are traveling slower than. If we have 100 drivers on the road and rank them in order from fastest to slowest, the 15th fastest driver would give us our 85th percentile speed.

Traffic engineers will then look 5 mph faster and 5 mph slower to see what percentage of drivers fall into different 10 mph ranges. According to David Solomon and his curves, the magnitude of the speed range doesn’t matter as long as we get as many drivers as possible into that 10 mph range.

and, as applied to the example of the Legacy Parkway, to show how this invariably spirals out of control:

North of Salt Lake City, the Legacy Parkway parallels Interstate 15 up to the Wasatch Weave interchange where these highways come together. It’s a four-lane, controlled-access highway with a wide, grassy median and more than its fair share of safety problems.

So how did the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) respond?

It increased the speed limit from 55 mph to 65 mph. It said the speed limit jump will “eliminate the safety risk” on the Legacy Parkway.

UDOT conducted speed studies up and down the Legacy Parkway. It found that most drivers were going much faster than the 55 mph speed limit. Channeling the ghost of traffic engineers past, the safety director for UDOT said, “We decided to raise the speed limit to a speed that is closer to what drivers are actually driving. In doing so, we hope to eliminate the safety risk of speed discrepancy, which can happen when you have a significant difference between the speed most drivers are actually traveling and those who are driving the posted speed limit.”

In the case of the Legacy Parkway, the 85th percentile speeds ranged from 65 mph to 75 mph. Based on that and what it deems engineering judgment, UDOT originally proposed raising the speed limit to 70 mph. After community pushback, it settled for 65 mph.

According to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), this slight adjustment is acceptable. The MUTCD specifies that speed limits “should be within 5 mph of the 85th percentile speed of free-flowing traffic.”

Columbia effectively committed to a punitive line that threw its student protesters under the bus last year; this is, unfortunately, not a very surprising development with that in mind

a curious development; of course, i would personally bet this does not actually end the conflict

Except it’s likely on purpose so they won’t have enough people to look into this and other large cases against corporations that might impact the people buying out the government.

this is exactly what has happened; previously, the FTC was aggressively pursuing anti-trust against Amazon, Google, etc.

i doubt there is a strong religious justification for this—most likely, Bhutan is doing it because they are cripplingly poor and limited in how much they can diversify their revenue, and Bitcoin is a fairly good speculative asset