This sucks. I feel bad for not being subscribed to the Herald-Leader, but it was McClatchy who chased me away.

Excellent satire.

Wait, is there a distinctively Mormon way of pronouncing “nursery”? I feel like this dialect quiz is overemphasizing patterns (my “most like” is ~55% and my “least like” ~45%, which doesn’t seem enough to assign a location), but I would accept this particular tell.

Review is good, removal is better.

I am repeatedly on record as being a fan of the Book of Mormon despite believing it’s ahistorical and despite recognizing how deeply problematic some of its ideas are. If there’s one problematic idea that I’m not totally sure can be redeemed even with a critical, willing-to-push-back reading of the text, it’s the appropriation of Indigenous history into the core narrative of the Book of Mormon.

Recently rereading Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything drew my attention some specific aspects of this relationship that I think are particularly interesting (and troubling). They are also professionally interesting to me since Graeber and Wengrow are fundamentally pushing back on narratives of technical progress. In fact, I nearly wrote this post for my “Work” sub-blog but am too lazy this morning to do the scaffolding needed to make the Book of Mormon narrative accessible to those not familiar with it; I recognize that someone can also read my “Communities” posts without being super familiar with the Book of Mormon, but I’m going to roll the dice on that one and answer questions as they come up.

Only skimmed this—and it deserves a more thorough reading—but it’s a good reminder that “Meta is awful” does not justify all constraints on Meta.

Living in interesting times.

Masnick always makes me think (even when I don’t fully agree with him), and this is no exception. (Though Heather Burns is the one who came up with the most important thing bouncing around my brain now).

I own a physical copy of this book but sold out to hoopla to listen to it over the weekend so I could say I’d finally read it. I appreciate just how practical this book is: outlining steps one can take rather than simply appealing to an abstract anarchist ideal.

I also felt a real tension while reading this. The ideals it sets out really speak to me, but the amount of work and commitment that it would take to actually follow these principles feels intimidating to me.

Haven’t finished the interview yet, but so far, Hochul isn’t impressing me. Ghost guns terrify me, and I would celebrate Meta collapsing as a company, but I think there are reasonable critiques of these policies, and when confronted with them, she kind of shrugs?

Combined with her seeming celebration of AI and tech companies in general, this just feels a lot like “I am solving a problem” performativity rather than thinking deeper about what the issues are here.

If Andy Barr of all people is removing Trump mentions from his website…

So much going on here. I think Boxer’s comments are some of the most important.

What a wild, frustrating experience.

Glad I went back to read this after originally missing the article. Here’s a heck of a paragraph:

While the sheer amount of data McDonald’s stored over the years caught me off guard at first, the way it was used by the company’s predictive algorithms was what I found most concerning. The company predicted how often I would visit in the next six weeks (2.16 times), what I would spend on average ($13.49), and what I would spend in total ($29.15). One reporter at WIRED joked that McDonald’s had created a Minority Report-style dossier to predict my next snack wrap purchase.

Hell yes. Disappointed in myself for not being one of these people.

Every time kiddo’s school does a fundraiser, I think about how much of a shame it is that there isn’t some system for automatically collecting funds from the local community to make sure schools have enough money to operate. It seems like there ought to be something there.

This story makes me (even) more highly of 404 and (even) more poorly of Flock.

Hard article to read, but an important one. Here’s the thing: I know two people who own Meta “pervert glasses,” and I think if there is an innocuous use case for these glasses, they’re demonstrating it.

And yet, here’s Ellul on technical ambivalence:

And this technological nexus is characteristically ambivalent. Because the solution of one problem by technological means immediately raises a multitude of others, which result directly from those very means, it is impossible to say whether technique produces good or evil effects. It does both, simultaneously. We are confronted with a system in the strict sense of the word, what I will call the “technological system,” hence ethical issues may only be considered relative to the system as a whole, and not to specific instances.

Cannot overstate how gross this is.

Amazing reporting.

I recently passed the second anniversary of my ordination in Community of Christ, and there are a couple of memories from that moment that feel significant enough to write down—and significant enough for them to affect the way that I think about my ministry. I don’t know that I’m doing great with ministry, but I am trying, and as I continue to try, these memories associated with the actual event of ordination are ones that I want to keep in mind.

This response is such a CEO way to apologize for something:

“It took me maybe longer than it should have to realize the sheer impact of the company,” he says. “I’m still surprised. I got our July update a week ago, and we helped find almost a thousand missing people, over 22,000 stolen cars — in July. That’s crazy. That’s such a big impact on the world. And what I came to realize over time was that the responsibility that bears with it is an obligation to make sure that it’s creating a society that we both, you and I, and everyone around us, want to raise their kids in.”

Because trademark bullying is in the news lately: Did you know that Intellectual Reserve owns the top-level domains .lds and .mormon, presumably for the sole purpose of preventing anyone else from using them?

Oof, this is terrifying.

Lots to like in this post.