Tootfinder

#Minnesota Pubic Radio (MPR) parent company cuts 30 jobs following federal funding cuts | MPR News (h/t akuzee@bsky.social)
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/08/15/m

MPR parent company cuts 30 jobs following federal funding cuts
Minnesota Public Radio's parent company laid off 30 staff members Friday after Congress clawed back funding that it had previously approved for public broadcasting. Cuts in state funding from the Minnesota Legislature exacerbated the budget gap.

War is an unconscionable horror. The illusions of "international law" and "rules of war" have lead us to believe that war can be clean, managed, and "civilized."
But wars are fought by humans and humans are messy. Humans are not well suited to following orderly rules. Humans respond to their environment. Humans in extraordinary situations can be extraordinarily vindictive and brutal. Sufficiently traumatized humans can act without a conscience, spreading trauma like an infection. If humans respond to their situation, then there can be no "civilized" war because war is itself an situation outside of the society. It is a place that promotes antisocial behavior and punishes pro-social behavior. War cannot be expected to follow "international law" because it is what fills the void created by the failure of "international law" (so long as we rely on nations).
To call for war is to inflict atrocities on civilians. It is to kill the parents and children who serve, and to destroy the combatants who survive. It is to infect both sides with a trauma that will spread if untreated, when soldiers come home or when they become mercenaries in other wars.
And yet... there are times when the brutality, the incompetence, the evil becomes so unbearable that no other option exists, when taking up arms is simply bringing symmetry to an existing asymmetric conflict. There are times when the worst possible thing is inescapable, though it can never be justified.
In this new era of war, in the scramble of conflict under the collapsing of the (poorly named) "Pax Americana," I hope that we, the people, can understand that war is not a tool to fulfill an objective. It is not part of a larger strategy. It is not an extension of deplomacy.
War is a failure.
While it may be the only way to deal with the irrational - the genocidal, the slaver, the dictator - it is still a failure. It is a failure to build a world in which these people can't control armies and economies, can't turn populations in to cults and bend nations to their will.
And we will continue to have such wars until we unite against those who would use as as pawns, who would control our lives and lead us to our deaths. We will have these wars until we unite, as one world, against those rulers. This is what I mean, and what a lot of other people mean, when we say, "No War, but Class War."

I need to spend some time with a USB PD analyzer and some of my hardware.
Earlier today I observed the following cursed USB-C behavior at a friend's place:
1) Laptop -> phone: charges phone
2) Power bank -> phone: charges phone
3) Wall brick -> phone: red LED on phone turns on, but OS doesn't show any indication of charging and battery level doesn't go up
4) Wall brick -> power bank: charges bank
5) Laptop -> power bank: LED flashes …

Unify, which offers AI-powered tools to boost revenue pipelines, raised a $40M Series B led by Battery Ventures, valuing it at $260M, following a $12M Series A (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)
https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/unify-ai-gtm-pipeline-40-million-raise

Unify, AI Startup Boosting Sales At Cursor And Perplexity, Raises $40 Million
Unify's Series B funding round values it at $260 million as revenue grows 17% month over month past $5 million. But a clash with GTM darling Clay may be coming up.

Rich Lyons,
the University of California, Berkeley, chancellor,
challenged US House Republicanson Tuesday
as they questioned Lyons and leaders of Georgetown University and the City University of New York
in the latest hearing on antisemitism in higher education.
The committee accused the schools of failing to respond adequately to allegations of bias or discrimination,
however the university leaders said that disciplinary action had been taken where approp…

I just sent the following to my House and Senate Congress Critters:
Please do not vote to approve *any* budget agreement.
Please let our Federal government shut down.
Please do not fall for any “negotiations” or “agreements”: We know that the present administration will simply usurp those funds for whatever purpose they chose.
Our present Federal government is engaged in a near-war against our people. Both the Constitution and the laws are being ignored or twisted.

Me (to myself): Get in to work early this morning, with no messing about on the way in. Just 'a to b', fast and efficient!
Also me: [Leaves very late, grabs a unicycle and proceeds to cycling in via the following route]
🤷
https://www.strava.com/activities/14824892

📉 Fears that falling birth rates in the US could lead to population collapse are based on faulty assumptions
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-falling-birth-population-collapse-based.html

Fears that falling birth rates in the US could lead to population collapse are based on faulty assumptions
Pronatalism—the belief that low birth rates are a problem that must be reversed—is having a moment in the U.S.

New site from the GSA "GO.gov will serve as a single travel management solution for all civilian Federal agencies [...]"
https://mastodon.social/@botgov/114863580250597448

Have you ever seen the magnificent movie "The Magnificent Ambersons"? (It is one of the great films of all times even after the studio hacked Wells and Hermann's full work.)
In the film, the kid George, is a self-centered, wealthy, narcissistic sociopath - not at all unlike El Presidente trump.
Everyone wishes that George will "get his comeuppance".
That comeuppance does indeed come - but so late that nobody notices or remembers.
It is pretty…