Tootfinder

Ukrainian Migrants: Spending, Employment, and Impact on Host Country Economies: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/02/ukrainian-migrants-spending-employment-and.html

The scale of investment and the involvement of governments means ROI must be found (or rather created) now, by any means necessary! Demand already is being forcefully created to justify these expenditures. Business models, regulations and policies/politics are pivoted in lockstep. Aside from all the conceptual, ethical and environmental issues of LLMs and their required infrastructure, these shifts are already also impacting chip/hardware production pipelines and start spelling the end of pe…

samim (@samim@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6m, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/ The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone* As a % of GDP, spending on AI infra has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot-com boom—and it’s still growing. This spending is so big it’s acting as a sort of privat…

An old school ransomware attack has a new twist: threatening to feed data to AI companies so it’ll be added to LLM datasets.
https://www.404media.co/hackers-threaten-to-submit-artists-data-to-ai-models-if-art-site-doesnt-pay-up/…

Hackers Threaten to Submit Artists' Data to AI Models If Art Site Doesn't Pay Up
Artists&Clients, a website for connecting artists with gigs, is down after a group called LunaLock threatened to feed their data to AI datasets.

Moral Deskilling – or, why you spend more time on admin than doing your job. — Crooked Timber https://crookedtimber.org/2025/07/31/moral-deskilling-or-why-you-spend-more-time-on-admin-than-doing-your-job/

this *sounds* like SFMTA agreed to painting full 20-foot red curbs at every intersection, rather than the mere 10 feet at stop-controlled intersections that has been traffic engineer Ricardo Olea's policy. if so, good! parent organizing worked!
https://www.k…

SFMTA Coming Up Short on Daylighting SF’s Red Curbs, Parents Say
San Francisco’s transit agency says it will change its daylighting policy to ensure compliance with a California traffic safety law intended to protect pedestrians and cyclists.

Dentsu: the video game industry attracts less than 5% of global ad spend despite 3.4B gamers worldwide; 60 game-based productions were in development in 2024 (Jennifer Maas/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/gaming/news/video-g…

Video Game Industry Draws Less Than 5% of Ad, Marketing Spend
According to a new report from Dentsu Gaming, less than 5% of global media investment goes toward the the video game industry.

'Elon Musk is right'
to criticize spending bill
says House Republican
who voted for spending bill
Representative Scott Perry,
a Pennsylvania Republican and member of the far-right House Freedom caucus,
just seconded Elon Musk’s criticism of the massive spending bill
that passed the House by a single vote
as “a disgusting abomination”
and added that the billionaire Republican donor
“is right to call out House Leadership”.

Dallas Cowboys seventh-round pick catching fire at the right time https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-seventh-round-pick-catching-fire-at-the-right-time

The last time a Republican-controlled Congress and President Donald Trump moved to slash Medicaid spending, in 2017, a key political force stood in their way:
GOP governors.
Now, as Congress steamrolls toward passing historic Medicaid cuts of about $1 trillion over 10 years through Trump’s tax and spending legislation,
red-state governors are saying little publicly about what it does to health care
— even as they face reductions that will punch multibillion-dollar hole…

GOP Governors Mum as Congress Prepares To Slash Medicaid Spending for Their States - KFF Health News
In 2017, when President Donald Trump tried to repeal Obamacare and roll back Medicaid coverage, Republican governors helped turn Congress against it. Now, as Trump tries again to scale back Medicaid, Republican governors — whose constituents stand to lose federal funding and health coverage — have gone quiet on the health consequences.

U.S. allies are rearming.
At NATO’s annual summit in June, the bloc’s members committed to spending at least 5 percent of their GDP on defense and related infrastructure.
East Asian countries are belatedly building warships and missiles to counter a stronger, more assertive China.
But even as funding rises, factories retool, and arms production ramps up,
one question remains unanswered:
Who will wield all these new weapons?
NATO states have not solved the f…

Who Will Wield All Those Shiny New Weapons?
As defense spending rises and production ramps up, allied armies struggle to fill the ranks.