Tootfinder

Court filing: Google says it is ready to add third-party app stores in Google Play in the US on July 22, as Google and Epic withdraw their joint motion (Sean Hollister/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/policy/965792/google-ep…

Google and Epic give up fighting — third-party Android app stores are coming next week
Epic Games and Google have just jointly withdrawn their attempt to retroactively settle the lawsuit changing how Android app stores work in the United States.

Electricity grid fees in the Netherlands up by 19% next year!
This was to be expected given the very high investments in increasing the grid capacity, and it will be followed by further increases in coming years. Cost reduction in the system should be a priority now.
https://www.

Energierekening gaat 140 euro per jaar omhoog door sprong in nettarieven
De energierekening van een gemiddeld Nederlands huishouden gaat volgend jaar weer flink omhoog. De nettarieven die iedereen betaalt voor toegang tot het stroom- en gasnet stijgen snel, vooral door de investeringen in uitbreiding van het stroomnet.

Sources say Anthropic struggles to communicate effectively with the Trump administration; an official says it "screwed us" after failing to "honor" a cyber EO (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/15/anthropic-white-house-fable-mythos

"They screwed us": Personality clashes sent Anthropic's models offline
Governing the world's most consequential technology is coming down to speaking President Trump's language.

3 Fearless Dallas Cowboys Predictions for the 2026 NFL Season You Didn’t See Coming https://insidethestar.com/3-fearless-dallas-cowboys-predictions-for-the-2026-nfl-season-you-didnt-see-coming

H-Net reviews posted to the H-Net Commons 03 Aug 2026 - 10 Aug 2026
https://ift.tt/uoGTVLH
Call for Paper (CAA 2027 Annual Conference): From the Street to the Bedroom: Designing the Modern…
via Input 4 RELCFP

"In January 2025, according to the court filing, a representative of the Betar "vigilante" group admitted to communications directly with Miller and Rubio to hand over a pre-selected list of Palestinian activists it wanted the Trump administration to arrest and deport."
'Sadistic savagery': Stephen Miller linked to 'vigilante force' in new court filing - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/stephen-miller-vigilante-conspiracy/

"The wheels are coming off."
"The IRS and Social Security are now run by the same person, which I think is a red flag, right?" Don Moynihan says.
"These are like two huge, complicated federal agencies, and one guy is running both of them."
Moynihan notes that a recent Inspector General report found that the agency is collecting much less revenue than it should from its audits.
Elon Musk's DOGE fired scores of tax audit specialists, …

The federal government is falling apart
Don Moynihan on what's been broken within the federal government.

Interesting to compare the author Neal Stephenson's profiles on X/twitter vs. Bluesky.
He has 89,4 K followers on X, where he still posts, but just under 10 K on Bluesky, where he doesn't post at all.
He has many fans on the fediverse who discuss his books, but he is not here.

I've been at The Firs, Elgar's birth place. As well as hearing Nimrod played on a 1927 wind-up gramophone (see @…'s post if you want to hear it) I learnt a lot about Elgar as a man and a polymath, and as the first composer to take the gramophone seriously. The odds were stacked against him but now he's a national treasure. My friend's gre…

The EU is not on track to achieve the necessary filling level of its natural gas storages, making it vulnerable to timely delivery of LNG from Trump's US and the Persian Gulf this coming winter.
Germany and the Netherlands are to blame. Together, they have over 1/3 of the storage capacity.
1/