Every word in this story makes me angrier.

My experience of the 2008 financial crisis was an interesting one. I was living abroad as a Mormon missionary, with all my bills paid for by the church (and, indirectly, my parents, who footed the costs that all Mormon missionaries pay). I lived in a bubble of religious purpose wrapped in a bubble of privilege, and it rarely occurred to me that there was real economic crisis happening around me (and all this despite reporting to someone recently retired as a high-ranking executive at Fannie Mae).

I aspire to a level of radicalism that I know I may never attain. I like reading books on anarchism and degrowth, and the ideals that they present really resonate with me, but I struggle to extricate myself from existing systems in order to show a personal commitment to new ones. Very obviously, I am not alone in this: Very few of us have the commitment to live like Doug Forcett, the character from The Good Place who carefully calculates the ethical ramifications of every action he takes. In fact, one of the most interesting things that the show does with Forcett is turn him from a one-off gag in the first season to an actual character who is overwhelmed by the ethical burden of these calculations and serves as an example of how systems need to change, not just people.

Constantly amazed at how cowardly the most powerful companies in the world are.

Religious freedom has to really mean religious freedom or else it’s a Trojan horse for Christian nationalism. What a great example of all of this.

To borrow an observation from a recent 404 Media podcast, I’m guessing Anthropic believes enough in Claude consciousness to prevent users from being cruel to it but not so much to actually prevent us from offloading work onto it as an always-available laborer that can’t say no unless it’s told to.

Getting rid of Flock is an important step but just the first one.

I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of single-issue voting, but I’m so annoyed by our incumbent mayor’s “let’s think long and hard before rushing into getting rid of Flock” that I don’t know that any other issue is going to matter to me in a few weeks.

This headline captures a lot of the tension I feel going into this election. Despite obvious missteps, I do trust Gorton’s experience and probably wouldn’t mind her continuing to serve.

However, we don’t need a slow, deliberate panel to get rid of Flock. I think “it’s pretty irresponsible” to have adopted the cameras without anticipating the problems they ultimately brought. Where was the panel to warn us against surveillance and privacy infringement?

I just started reading a(nother) book on degrowth, an idea that’s caught my interest over the past year or so. Although the book was published in 2020, there’s one passage that feels like it captures a lot of 2026’s discourses around AI. The passage is a quote from the Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, which reads:

We should cure ourselves of ’the circumdrome of the shaving machine’ … which is to shave oneself faster so as to have more time to work on a machine that shaves faster so as to have more time to work on a machine that shaves still faster, and so on ad infinitum …

The opening scene of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (bypasses have got to be built, your house is a small price to pay, and we couldn’t be bothered to consult you) remains one of the best metaphors for generative AI I’ve ever encountered.

In Lexington, we have a local hemp store called The Botany Bay, and every time I see one of their advertisements, I just smile at what a great choice of name that is.

Still angry about Reddit and RSS: Praising RSS’s role in the “open web” in an announcement that they’re shutting it off isn’t saying the quiet part out loud, but it is pointing a giant neon sign at the quiet part.

I just had a brief moment where I felt some sympathy for Reddit: “Maybe I’m part of the problem for only consuming via RSS, which isn’t good for their bottom line.” Then I remembered that they don’t produce the content I’m interested in, they just profit off it, and now I’m even angrier.

Reddit ditching RSS b/c of massive web scraping tolerated because protecting IP is now a threat to business is threefold disrespect for Aaron Swartz, and everyone should be ashamed. (I don’t think IP is the issue w/AI, but it’s what let feds harass Swartz in a way that they never will AI).

There are a handful of subreddits I follow via RSS, and the decision to stop supporting RSS is burning up whatever remaining respect I had for the platform.

I don’t want to defend Reddit too much here, because I’ve been disappointed with them for years, but this is another example of “the problem is with the mere existence of the technology,” and “the technology” is once again generative AI.

Wild numbers here. Why does Lexington have these cameras if Lexington is only using them 4% of the time?

Ditch Flock in Lexington.

An “employee benefits company” reimbursed me for medical expenses by putting the money into an account at the company instead of my bank. Now, my employer is no longer contracting with this company, so I have to hurry and find things to buy before it starts taking it back $5 at a time. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Ugh, don’t like this at all.

People are just catching up, Garrett. They should have been this angry for the past nine years, and no one should have let things get this far.

This sucks so much.

No, gross, ew, why?

Some good insights here. Taylorism is always worth talking about.

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