Tag Archives: economics

href weekly | June 2 – June 8 2025

Bits

mythcloud.eu explores the enduring power of shared stories and their relevance to our everyday lives. It is an open education resource developed as part of Erasmus+ project Digital Mythologies.

“It’s a symptom of a totalizing cultural paradigm in which passive consumption and regurgitation of content becomes the status quo.” https://www.404media.co/teachers-are-not-ok-ai-chatgpt/

“People are already trusting today’s friendly, patient, often insightful AIs for facts and guidance on nearly any issue, and they will be vulnerable to being misled and manipulated, whether by design or by emergent behavior.” What AI Thinks It Knows About You

“Developing a robust ethics, in other words, is participatory and cultural; rules have to be worked out in the complex context of the human experience, with a lot of trial and error. Maybe we should have known that commonsense rules, whether coded into a positronic brain or approximated by a large language model, wouldn’t instill machines with our every value.” What Isaac Asimov Reveals About Living with A.I.

“Deep learning can act as co-pilot. Without the eye of the humanist, though, you don’t stand a chance at decipherment.” https://longnow.org/ideas/the-codes-ai-cant-crack/

Gardening

“No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward .. Our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches.” https://orionmagazine.org/article/natural-intelligence/

Travel

Love getting updates from my kids – they are working on Bornholm this month

Politics & Economics

Fascinating reporting on the role of shortwave #radio in the rise of far-right militias https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/the-divided-dial-episode-2-you-must-form-your-militia-units

Why You Should Shop at Your Farmers Market This Summer https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/06/02/Why-Shop-Farmers-Market/

href weekly | May 12 – May 18 2025

Bits

“Since last year, the app hasn’t been able to upload non-media files like documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, etc., due to Google’s restriction on file access permissions. Following widespread complaints from users, Nextcloud raised many appeals with Google, seeking a resolution to the issues. However, despite these efforts, they received no meaningful responses or solutions from them.” https://news.itsfoss.com/google-gatekeeping-nextcloud/

Photography

Light fantastic: the road trip that inspired Paris, Texas – in pictures https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2025/jan/30/wim-wenders-paris-texas-road-trip-in-pictures

Music & Audio

A Goldmine for Beat Diggers in the ’90s, Folk Funk Makes A Comeback https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/paul-hillery-folk-funk-feature

It’s wicked fine, fine, fine
They say while they’re whalin’ on short line
And vanish right out of my sight ..
https://kimdeal.bandcamp.com/track/coast-1

Politics & Economics

“At the end of the day, any progressive government should see steady improvement of the quality of life of working people as its lodestar of legitimacy and political strength. Redistribution is part of that, but so is organizing for growth. Leaving coddled corporate class to steer our economy in partnership with a government unable to resist giving it virtually everything it wants is no longer tenable.” https://thewalrus.ca/corporate-welfare-is-canadas-most-expensive-addiction/

“..this effort to separate the price of one family’s home from the broader price of a home on the market is nonsensical. If you want to drive down the cost of purchasing a home, you have to also reduce the price of existing homes. If you don’t want to reduce the value of these homes, then you are in fact committing to having demand exceed supply — the very issue that led us to the crisis in the first place.” https://archive.ph/NeOnF