TGIF! [DOT 13/2/26]

13/2/26 MegMegMcGee 29

Hiya Gang! Hope everyone had a great week.

I have a PSA for everyone, authors and posters in particular: Please be careful not to upload copyrighted images. TY!

Trump’s EPA repeals landmark climate finding in gift to ‘billionaire polluters’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/trump-epa-rollback-pollution-regulation-endangerment-finding

‘Deeply illogical’: this man’s life work could end homelessness – and Trump is doing all he can to stop it
https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2026/feb/12/sam-tsemberis-homelessness

Was this part of yesterday’s rant, RIP?

Israel accuses two of using military secrets to place Polymarket bets
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5712801/polymarket-bets-traders-israel-military

800 episodes is insane. Got a favorite?

The 800th ‘The Simpsons’ episode is set in Philadelphia. But Portland is in its DNA
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5703618/simpsons-portland-800th-episode-bill-oakley

Have a great weekend!

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29 Comments

  1. …what day is it?

    …I think the answer is technically no…not yesterday’s…&…again technically…the one the day before I tried to slide under the DOT where it wouldn’t get in anyone’s way once I got it out of my system *was* about polymarket…but not in this specific sense…& the one I-forget-when that I think was a DOT that was pretty close to this specific sense was also technically about a different incident…basically…this one?

    https://www.reddit.com/r/IRstudies/comments/1pbnxo3/unauthorized_edit_to_ukraines_frontline_maps/

    …where it seemed like the equivalent to “did leavitt leave that podium abruptly right at the timestamp that determined that polymarket…again?” was “did someone with edit privileges on a real-time satellite observation online map resource temporarily make a fraudulent edit to flip which side of a polymarket paid out at the relevant time-stamp?” with the answer seeming to be pretty definitively “yup, that happened…”

    …so…I might kind of feel like just saying the answer was no might have been…misleading…which would seem inappropriate in context?

    • …so…remember when napster happened…& youtube…& everyone learned what DCMA meant without learning what it stood for?

      …well…in the tradition that brought you ambulance-chasers & “patent trolls”…despite the abundance of clearly stolen & repurposed for the purposes of posting it to provoke, promote & provide a revenue stream “appropriated” content that overpopulates popular & prodigiously profitable platforms…there are copyright trolls

      …to the best of my knowledge nothing we do here ought reasonably to be open to any charge that couldn’t be resolved on a fair use basis since there’s no aspect of the site that generates any form of revenue from which there could be a profit to be said to have been improperly accessed even tangentially as a result of using something from somewhere else online to be something you could see as you scrolled the stuff that happens here

      …if you approach generating such suits by crawling the web in a bot sort of a way & having an LLM image-match until it checks a box & then robo-mails a notice of legal action without any attempt to ascertain if we’d be happy to simply remove the offending content once made aware…that’s a bad faith operation that seems to be begging to be counter-sued counting on nobody wanting to be the one to take that on to be the only thing preventing the court itself from crushing it for spamming the docket

      …but…these are the times we live in?

      …if it’s a .gif or something that offers to let you share it…I guess default to preferring embeds over anything you have to upload to a deadsplinter URL to do that with…& make a reasonable effort to not upload something that looks like it might be copyright to sit on a server with deadsplinter’s name on it since it seems the cottage industry pulling that shit is scraping that barrel hard enough to find places as un-frequented or -monetized as ours

      …might be worth letting whoever ended up being the name on the paperwork over at oppo know…imagine they might already have decided they need some rules about that stuff but they might still think the chances are sufficiently unlikely that kind of shady predatory lawyering would fly in whatever jurisdiction they made a home for that post-kinja?

      • hmmm…ill drop a query with one of the oppo mods…but i havent heard anything about it… course..almost all pictures what turn up on oppo are home made…so you know… could well be they’ve missed the problem entirely

    • …he haunts major conjunctions of significant persons like a photobombing ghoul…& we know how the golf thing went & how much they banked off presidency 1.0…the 2.0 version is so fucked it seems like two third party state level actors were musing about how best to play jared & US intelligence was up on one or both ends of the call

      …not exactly “the mind boggles…”

      …more “well, d’uh – what else would you expect?”

  7. …by the by…speaking of rants…the one about the housing first being demonstrably twice or more as effective as the treatment first denial of housing approach their ideology demands…definitely a few rants worth to be had out of that

    …probably stray into the “works even better with a universal income pilot thrown in” I expect…but…I’ll try not to make it three days in a row with the double-up effect?

    …fucking hard, though…given…you know…it’s complicated & technical but the UK court ruled that classifying the Palestine Action lot as a terrorist organisation to avail the government of some charges they wouldn’t otherwise be able to stretch to a pensioner with a placard or an online donation…was “unlawful”…even if some of the “actions” might indeed cross that line…which…is a bit different to…say

    Never Should Have Happened And Could Not Possibly Be Legal…

    — Brant Reeves (@bireeves95.bsky.social) 2026-02-12T23:40:07.477Z

    …but…thin ends of wedges driven somewhere intended to trip & fall down a slippery slope or two is sort of SOP for these SOBs

    How bad do the facts have to be, how outrageous did the lies have to turn out to be, for a Trump-appointed US Attorney to say and do this?www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/u…

    — Jacob T. Levy (@jacobtlevy.bsky.social) 2026-02-13T03:30:32.674Z

    …& you can’t go full-rant on every little thing because there aren’t enough hours in even an insomniac-extension-enabled “day”…still…for the record…the struggle is…fucking real?

    For those who don't know, this is a finding from 2009 by the EPA which stated greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are heating the Earth and that warming threatens public health and welfare

    — Dom Ervolina (@dominicervolina.com) 2026-02-12T18:46:42.236Z

    …just…you don’t get to get up in the morning & declare that you voided science before lunch & a nap…he can say it…they can let business fuck the actual world…but…the science is the science is the fucking science & it will specifically be your delusional self-interest in picking solipsism over reality that fucks those futures…& if all that mattered were morals or ethics…the obvious moral calculus would make it a public good to take everything someone who wants that claims to have away from them & throw it at something that could do good with bad money

    In terms of what cures are being lost:- Epstein-Barr virus is perhaps the major trigger for multiple sclerosis- herpes simplex virus causes cold sores, genital herpes, infections in babies, deadly meningitis- shingles virus causes an intensely painful disease

    — Mark Histed (@markhisted.org) 2026-02-13T05:44:34.211Z

    …one thing informs another…& there is no value for “this is working” where “working” looks like it does & the “this” isn’t already fucking illegal

    NEW @ms.now: The lawyer representing the woman who was shot 5x by a Border Patrol agent in Chicago in Oct says the agent is the subject of a criminal investigation by the US Attorneys Office. This would be a remarkable shift in a case that started w/ the gov’t trying to prosecute the woman he shot ⬇️

    — Julianne McShane (@juliannemcshane.bsky.social) 2026-02-12T23:25:12.147Z

    …I mean…consciousness of guilt, much?

    NEW: Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told Congress today that local law enforcement in Colorado leaked word of a raid, allowing gang members to clear out of apartments.Those apartments were being cleared out weeks earlier.Tonight, ICE deleted social media posts with the claim.

    — Kyle Clark (@kylec.bsky.social) 2026-02-13T05:56:00.023Z

    Lyons made the claim about local law enforcement at a hearing this morning. His claims did not mesh with our real-time reporting in 2024 on when the apartments were cleared of many occupants. We asked ICE which agency leaked their raid. No answer yet. Then the posts disappeared.

    — Kyle Clark (@kylec.bsky.social) 2026-02-13T06:06:05.744Z

    …I mean…for the immediate future…tragedy though it undeniably be…the US ain’t beating the charges anywhere else

    Again, in actual democracies, ministers resign all the time, under threat of a no confidence vote in the parliament. We have a system where legislative confirmation totally fails ex ante to screen out wildly unqualified people, & ex post accountability depends on a toothless extraordinary measure.

    There must be a dozen fireable offenses listed in this piece:*Noem firing civil servants without cause*Her boyfriend using govt resources to boost her profile, punishing officials who would not give him a gun*Massive waste on ads, planes, delayed contracts, pushing favored firms

    — Don Moynihan (@donmoyn.bsky.social) 2026-02-13T05:20:10.356Z

    …but plenty other people trying to fuck up?

    The UK Treasury has chosen HSBC’s blockchain platform for the pilot issuance of the country’s digital gilt instruments, as part of plans to update the nation’s capital markets infrastructure

    — Bloomberg News (@bloomberg.com) 2026-02-12T08:08:47Z

    …&…bondi tried to brag on those markets

    Half of the main XAI team left this week, seems some were fed up of a lot of their Compute being used for post training “Grok” models (I wonder why), and I don’t think also that Elon is making BS and spending money trying to put compute on the Moon instead of getting more compute on Earth.

    — Ciarán (@ciaransaunders.bsky.social) 2026-02-12T21:21:07.654Z

    t w o t h i r d sof a b i l l i o nd o l l a r swww.bloomberg.com/news/article…

    — Sky Marchini (@sky.skymarchini.net) 2026-02-12T22:52:30.876Z

    …sigh…no wonder nobody believes me that this is what results from me *not* ranting…& why you like all the ellipses more than you think…I mean…for fuck’s actual sake

    You can't… repeal… a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

    — Katie Mack (@astrokatie.com) 2026-02-12T20:38:50.646Z

    …& then elon tries to mic drop with “the name of the wind” when dunking on his home field about anthropic being a misanthropic corporate entity like nobody thought of that before?

    …there’s a bill hicks bit where he asks if there are any heavy smokers in the audience & someone says yeah & he asks them how much they smoke & they say “a pack & a half”…& bill’s all “yeah? I go through two *lighters* a day, man…”

    …I swear I feel like I could say that about keyboards if I just won the lottery & went “fuck it – guess this is what I do now…”

    …I dunno…but it beats spending all the winnings on keeping the burns unit in business running down the streets all day & night with my hair on fire, I guess…& they say everything is relative?

  9. Asking me to pick a favorite Simpsons episode is like asking me to pick a favorite child and they’re all amazing but a few I think are not rated highly enough:
    Summer of 4’2
    Bart Sells His Soul
    Lemon of Troy
    Lisa on Ice
    Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk

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