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27 Jun 14:35

IC SERIES| Iran’s Underground Economy: The Nuclear-Crypto Synthesis Behind Sanctions PART III

by Tore Says
Gpscruise

emt to destroy cold-wallets next !

This trilogy is not speculative—it’s a bold briefing. If you’ve followed Part I and Part II , you already understand that Bitcoin was never just a currency. It was infrastructure masked as ideology, a sovereign-grade tool disguised as freedom. Now, in Part III, the mask is off. The 2025 Hashrate Shock wasn’t a market fluctuation—it was a detonation. A digital front line collapsed, and with it, the illusion of decentralization. From Iran’s nuclear-fueled mining vaults to China’s hydroelectric dominion at the Three Gorges Dam, energy has become the currency of control. North Korea doesn’t bother mining—it exfiltrates through Lazarus, embedding malware where diplomacy can’t reach. What you’re witnessing is the emergence of hashrate hegemony. Nations now mine policy, weaponize scarcity, and fund resistance in absolute silence. The old economic order wasn’t disrupted—it was outmaneuvered. And if Parts I and II laid the groundwork, then Part III delivers the reality: the battlefield is already active, encrypted, and sovereign. The game didn’t evolve, and the goal posts didn’t change. It was replaced.

2025 -The Hashrate Shock

In 2025, the world experiences a rupture that’s both physical and digital. A strike—surgical, silent, and strategically timed—hits deep beneath Iranian soil, targeting what at first appears to be a conventional underground nuclear facility. The blast registers on seismic monitors. Satellites catch the plume. But what follows is stranger, more telling than the explosion itself. Within minutes, the global Bitcoin hash rate plunges by 25%. Mining pools stagger. Blocks take longer to confirm. Traders panic. Markets convulse.

There is no official statement. No nation claims responsibility. The usual suspects in global diplomacy fall conspicuously silent. But inside intelligence circles, the chatter grows feverish. What was hit, according to multiple sources within Five Eyes and regional SIGINT nodes, wasn’t just a uranium enrichment site—it was something far more financially strategic: one of the most significant covert Bitcoin mining operations on the planet.

For years, Iran had deflected scrutiny by claiming its cryptomining was a domestic economic necessity—an energy sink for natural gas flare-off, a workaround for sanctions. But behind this public-facing narrative, it had developed a far more robust infrastructure. By diverting power from its nuclear grid and concealing ASIC farms beneath hardened facilities, Tehran had built what amounted to a sovereign mint—one not pegged to oil or dollars, but to hashpower.

The strike wasn’t about nuclear deterrence. It was about shutting down a financial engine disguised as a security threat. What the world witnessed wasn’t just a kinetic attack—it was monetary sabotage by missile. And in the sudden absence of Iran’s hashpower, the decentralization myth of Bitcoin began to fray, revealing how geopolitically centralized the system had quietly become. The message was unmistakable: the battlefield now includes kilowatt-hours, cryptographic throughput, and buried machines whose economic impact is no less strategic than warheads.

What does all this tell you?

This isn’t linear history—it’s strategic evolution. What began as a war over uranium has morphed into a battle over terawatts, tokens, and territory in cyberspace.

Bitcoin mining isn’t an economic afterthought—it’s a primary theater of power projection. And those who command energy in secrecy now possess the ability to distort markets, mask funding streams, and engineer artificial scarcity in what was meant to be the most transparent financial system ever conceived.

And perhaps that’s the most brilliant part of it all.

This core thesis is no longer theoretical—it is increasingly evident that Iran’s nuclear infrastructure serves a multifaceted, tightly integrated purpose that extends far beyond conventional enrichment. This is not merely a program aimed at military deterrence through the potential development of nuclear weapons. That narrative, while true on one level, conceals a far more sophisticated and dangerous strategic framework—one that merges physical sovereignty, digital finance, and economic asymmetry into a single, subterranean weapon system.

First, there is the undeniable function of deterrence. Uranium enrichment, acknowledged by the IAEA and fiercely contested through decades of sanctions and inspections, has provided Iran with a potent insurance policy against regime change. The lesson of Libya—where Gaddafi gave up his nuclear ambitions and was later overthrown—was not lost on Tehran. The implicit capability to produce atomic weapons ensures that any kinetic strike carries with it the risk of retaliation at a scale the West is reluctant to provoke. But beneath that umbrella of atomic ambiguity lies something more contemporary: a digital economy of resistance.

Iran’s nuclear energy facilities, particularly those located underground and shielded from aerial surveillance, are uniquely positioned to serve a second and more discreet function: cryptomining at scale. The country has repeatedly stated that it uses “flare-off” natural gas—wasted energy that would otherwise be burned off—to justify its mining operations. However, this narrative has been challenged by numerous reports, including leaked Iranian documents and public admissions that large segments of the national grid have been diverted to crypto infrastructure. In 2021 alone, Iran admitted to shutting down thousands of unauthorized mining farms to alleviate power outages, a statement that indirectly confirmed the deep integration of cryptocurrency mining within its energy network.

By embedding industrial-scale Bitcoin mining inside protected nuclear facilities, Iran gains two crucial advantages. First, it generates sanction-proof capital—uncensored, borderless, and resistant to seizure. This allows Tehran to fund its intelligence networks, its regional proxies, and its cyber operations through a financial system that is effectively beyond the reach of U.S. Treasury mechanisms. And second, it ensures operational security. Mining servers buried beneath hundreds of feet of reinforced concrete are not only impervious to drone strikes but also hidden from prying satellites and international inspectors.

Yet the third layer of this infrastructure is perhaps the most dangerous and least understood: economic leverage through engineered scarcity. By concentrating a significant amount of hashpower within nationalized, sovereign control, Iran gains the ability to manipulate global Bitcoin markets subtly. If such a state actor were to throttle its mining activity—either through power cuts suddenly, false-flag cyber incidents, or deliberate outages—it could induce sharp drops in hash rate, leading to slower block confirmations, transaction backlogs, and price volatility. The mere perception of instability in Bitcoin’s infrastructure is enough to spook markets, inflate prices, and create ripple effects across an increasingly crypto-exposed global economy.

Iran may not just be mining Bitcoin—it may be weaponizing it. The coins mined could be hoarded, strategically released to acquire foreign assets, or used in opaque peer-to-peer transfers to buy influence. And unlike traditional financial warfare, which relies on traceable SWIFT logs and interbank compliance, this method operates beneath the surface of the visible system. It is financial insurgency enforced by mathematics.

This is not conjecture. In 2021, the blockchain analytics firm Elliptic confirmed that Iran was generating hundreds of millions in Bitcoin annually, much of which was believed to be routed through overseas exchanges using obfuscation techniques. The U.S. Department of Justice has already linked crypto transfers to sanctioned Iranian entities, and Hezbollah has publicly acknowledged receiving cryptocurrency donations.

What emerges is a clear picture: Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is no longer merely a deterrent or a bargaining chip. It is a platform—a hardened, integrated system for military threat, covert funding, and global economic disruption. And in a world increasingly dependent on decentralized finance, that platform is not just strategic—it is sovereign power redefined.

THREE GORGES DAM

The strategic implications of China’s Three Gorges Dam extend far beyond its reputation as the world’s largest hydroelectric power plant. While publicly lauded as an engineering marvel and a cornerstone of national energy policy, its latent potential in the realm of digital finance—specifically cryptocurrency—has been vastly underappreciated. In reality, this megastructure represents a silent yet powerful tool in China’s broader economic arsenal, one that could fundamentally reshape global monetary power dynamics in ways few have dared to acknowledge.

Over the past decade, China has maintained a complicated relationship with cryptocurrency. While the government has enacted high-profile crackdowns on crypto exchanges and outlawed Bitcoin transactions within its borders, it simultaneously dominated global Bitcoin mining until 2021, at one point controlling over 65% of the world’s hash rate. Much of this mining was powered by hydroelectric stations in provinces like Sichuan and Hubei, precisely the regions fed by the Three Gorges Dam. The seasonal oversupply of electricity, particularly during the rainy season, was quietly converted into digital gold as mining farms absorbed surplus power that would otherwise go to waste. This practice not only optimized grid efficiency but allowed China to generate massive stores of cryptocurrency, despite, or perhaps because of, its public stance against it.

Cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin, is not merely a speculative asset. It is programmable capital—beyond borders, immune to sanctions, and untraceable when routed through decentralized exchanges or mixers. And in a world where economic hegemony is increasingly contested, the ability to accumulate and control such assets offers an unprecedented form of leverage. The Three Gorges Dam, with its massive generation capacity, provides the infrastructure to mine vast quantities of crypto without tapping fossil fuels or exposing China to environmental scrutiny. This isn’t just about profit—it’s about building a parallel store of wealth that can function outside the dollar-dominated financial system.

What makes this even more consequential is the volatility it introduces into global markets. Should China decide to weaponize its hidden mining capabilities—by cutting off power to a massive mining network overnight, for instance—it could induce a sudden drop in the global hash rate. Such an event would slow block confirmations, increase transaction fees, and potentially trigger panic selling or speculative spikes in Bitcoin’s price. In a financial system increasingly intertwined with crypto assets, such a disruption would ripple outward, affecting institutional portfolios, algorithmic trades, and even nation-state reserves. It is, effectively, a digital form of economic blackmail, with the dam acting as both the power source and the trigger.

The explosion of national crypto reserves in the past four years is no coincidence. Nations have witnessed the fallout from Western financial sanctions, the weaponization of the dollar, and the erosion of banking secrecy in offshore havens. They understand that in a world of escalating fiscal surveillance and political unpredictability, cryptocurrency offers a sovereign hedge—liquid, mobile, and resistant to interdiction. Venezuela has turned to its state-backed Petro. Russia has proposed using crypto to bypass SWIFT. North Korea has funded entire segments of its military budget through stolen Bitcoin. And Iran, sanctioned into economic isolation, has embedded mining into its energy infrastructure. Each state, in its own way, is preparing for a future where traditional monetary systems are no longer reliable weapons—or shields.

The Three Gorges Dam is thus more than a national symbol or an energy behemoth. It is a covert mint, a pressure valve for surplus power, and a potential switch for global market destabilization. In this context, cryptocurrency is no longer a fringe innovation or a libertarian fantasy. It is the emerging currency of geopolitical maneuvering, and the nations accumulating it are not doing so by accident. They are building war chests. Quietly. Relentlessly. In the shadows of dams, bunkers, and data centers. And by the time the world recognizes its significance, the infrastructure will already be complete.

If the Three Gorges Dam were ever taken out—whether by sabotage, warfare, or natural disaster—the consequences for China would be catastrophic, not just in terms of human and environmental toll, but economically devastating on a national and global scale. This isn’t merely a piece of civil infrastructure; it’s a linchpin in China’s energy grid, industrial output, and increasingly, its covert digital finance operations.

The dam supports tens of thousands of megawatts of power generation, feeding some of the country’s most industrialized regions. Its failure would trigger immediate blackouts across critical manufacturing hubs, paralyzing factories that sustain China’s export-driven economy and choking supply chains far beyond its borders. The economic ripple effect would be global, disrupting electronics, automotive, and rare earth industries already tightly wound around Chinese output.

The Three Gorges Dam also underwrites hidden strategic infrastructure—namely, state-affiliated and grey-zone Bitcoin mining farms that quietly absorb surplus hydroelectricity during peak seasons. These operations, although obscured behind regulatory crackdowns and public denials, form a significant part of China’s digital currency holdings and market influence. If the dam were lost, so too would be the mining capacity it feeds, stripping China of a discreet but potent mechanism of wealth generation, monetary hedging, and potential economic leverage.

Such a blow would not just be environmental or regional. It would be a decapitation strike against one of China’s most valuable multi-use assets—a blow to energy, industry, and the hidden machinery of digital statecraft all at once.

Bitcoin was always the strategy

The strategic implications of Bitcoin’s evolution from digital novelty to geopolitical instrument are only just beginning to surface, and the most capable state actors—those already isolated or constrained by sanctions—are exploiting its architecture with precision. What began as a decentralized experiment is now being treated by rogue and rising powers as a sovereign asset class, one backed not by gold or fiat, but by raw, convertible energy. Bitcoin is becoming a currency of power in the most literal sense: mined by megawatts, stored in ledgers, and wielded as a tool of influence, disruption, and deterrence.

Iran’s integration of cryptocurrency mining into its energy infrastructure is no longer a fringe development—it is now a state doctrine. By channeling energy from nuclear reactors and flare-off gas into Bitcoin mining, Tehran generates borderless capital immune to SWIFT blacklists or U.S. Treasury sanctions. These coins can then be funneled through unregulated peer-to-peer exchanges or privacy-enhancing protocols, bypassing traditional financial scrutiny entirely. The result is a war chest of untraceable funds capable of supporting proxy militias, intelligence operations, and cyber units, without ever touching a bank.

China, while publicly banning Bitcoin transactions and mining, remains deeply embedded in the ecosystem. It holds sway over key supply chains—from ASIC chip production to rare earth metals required for mining hardware—and continues to operate clandestine mining hubs in hydro-rich provinces like Sichuan. Even after the 2021 mining crackdown, hash rate recoveries and persistent network traffic suggest continued Chinese influence. The state’s dual posture—denial on the surface, dominance underneath—reflects its broader geopolitical strategy: to maintain plausible deniability while shaping the future economic infrastructure.

North Korea has taken a more surgical approach, leveraging Bitcoin not through mining but through theft, malware, and obfuscation. The Lazarus Group, under Pyongyang’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, has been linked to some of the largest cryptocurrency heists in history. From the $81 million Bangladesh Bank hack in 2016 to the more recent Axie Infinity breach, where over $600 million in Ethereum and USDC was stolen, North Korea has perfected the art of digital exfiltration. These operations fund weapons programs and bypass sanctions with ruthless efficiency—every satoshi stolen is another missile paid for without ever touching a dollar.

The strategic logic is simple: Bitcoin is not just a store of value—it is an energy-backed sovereign asset. In a world where financial flows are weaponized, crypto offers an alternative to the dollar-dominated system. It can serve as a substitute reserve currency for sanctioned states. It functions as a dark money generator when mined in state-controlled facilities and routed through anonymized mixers. And it can be used as an inflationary disruptor, with adversaries hoarding and dumping to destabilize crypto markets or induce speculative shocks.

What makes this battlefield even more volatile is its opacity. Bitcoin’s design allows for decentralization, but also for obfuscation. Mining operations powered by flare gas appear environmentally benign, blending into domestic grids under the guise of sustainability. When mining is relocated to fortified underground facilities—like Iran’s Natanz or Fordow complexes, which already house nuclear infrastructure—it becomes virtually invisible to both satellites and ground-based observation. Attribution becomes nearly impossible. A sudden drop in global hash rate could stem from a technical outage or a covert strike.

A cyberattack on a nation’s mining infrastructure now holds the same weight as a targeted strike on a refinery or a power plant. It may be more disruptive. By undermining hash power, an attacker can induce delayed block times, higher transaction fees, and widespread market volatility. In such cases, the line between cyberwarfare and monetary warfare blurs. An assault on Iran’s mining capabilities wouldn’t just cripple its financial inflows—it could rattle global crypto markets, ripple into institutional portfolios, and even impact central bank strategies experimenting with digital currencies.

What we are witnessing is the quiet emergence of a new kind of arms race—one where hashrate, encryption, and energy infrastructure converge to define financial sovereignty. Iran mines in silence beneath nuclear bunkers. China manages the hardware and manipulates perception. North Korea hijacks the flow itself, injecting malicious code and laundering the results. Each nation has found its own vector, but all are converging on the same realization: in the post-dollar world, value is not just stored in code—it is created, protected, and weaponized through it. And this time, the battlefield is a ledger, the bullets are algorithms, and the rules are still being written.

ENERGY ENERGY ENERGY

To understand the strategic trajectory of cryptocurrency in global geopolitics, one must begin with a foundational truth: all power, in every sense of the word, originates with energy. Whether in kinetic warfare, economic dominance, or information control, energy is the precondition—the raw force that underwrites sovereignty. This is no less true in the cryptographic realm. Bitcoin, often mischaracterized as a purely digital abstraction, is in fact grounded in physics. It is minted not through financial will or political consensus, but through the expenditure of measurable, convertible, scarce energy.

Critics who point to Iran’s relatively small contribution to the global Bitcoin hash rate—estimated at just 3–5% in public studies—miss the deeper architecture of the game. Hashrate maps rely on IP-based tracking, which can be easily obfuscated through VPNs, proxy nodes, and third-party relays. The history of Chinese mining itself proves this. Even after the official 2021 crackdown, China’s hash rate appeared to collapse in public indexes. Yet, months later, data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance revealed that mining activity had not only persisted but rebounded, indicating a complex, resilient web of distributed operations cloaked beneath layers of misdirection. The real takeaway isn’t the percentage—it’s the opacity. Suppose China could hide a majority share of the global mining network behind regulatory theater. In that case, there is no reason to believe Iran, or any other sanctioned actor, cannot do the same—especially if mining is occurring inside hardened, subterranean energy facilities insulated from external observation.

The question of energy traceability raises another layer of complexity. Yes, Bitcoin mining generates heat, and large operations typically require air or liquid cooling systems that emit detectable thermal signatures. But this assumes conventional architecture. When energy is sourced directly from nuclear reactors, particularly in facilities built deep underground for secrecy and defense, much of that waste heat can be repurposed, dissipated across layers of subterranean infrastructure, or masked entirely by the same shielding that protects uranium enrichment operations from surveillance. Moreover, satellite thermal imaging is not an omniscient tool. Cloud cover, terrain, and shielding materials—combined with the scale of Earth’s surface—make it entirely plausible to hide mid-sized operations from detection, especially if co-located with facilities already designed to evade scrutiny.

As for the argument that Bitcoin is inherently transparent and traceable—that each coin is permanently etched into the blockchain, that laundering is visible and therefore preventable—this too is technically accurate, yet practically misleading. While every transaction is recorded, the identities behind the wallets are not. Sophisticated actors can layer transactions through mixing protocols, privacy coins, and smart contract-based swaps, making forensic tracing extraordinarily difficult. Chainalysis, one of the world’s leading blockchain analytics firms, has repeatedly acknowledged the evolving sophistication of laundering techniques used by nation-state hackers. North Korea’s Lazarus Group, for instance, has successfully moved hundreds of millions through mixer protocols like Tornado Cash and cross-chain bridges, exploiting the technical lag between blockchain transparency and law enforcement capability.

The larger picture here is not about isolated facts but about strategic convergence. The thesis that nations are using nuclear or hydroelectric assets to quietly mine cryptocurrency is not speculative—it is grounded in precedent and emerging pattern. From Iran’s public admission of state-sanctioned mining to Venezuela’s launch of a state-backed crypto (the Petro), from China’s manipulation of hydro flows to subsidize mining in Sichuan, to North Korea’s cyber-theft and laundering, the signals are clear: energy is being converted into digital assets, which are then weaponized as economic tools.

What is unfolding is a new form of sovereignty—one that detaches itself from traditional currency models and reattaches to the one resource no nation can fake: energy. In this framework, energy becomes crypto, and crypto becomes influence. It is not just a currency; it is leverage, liquidity, and lawfare all at once. This reconfiguration makes Bitcoin and its derivatives more than financial instruments. They are strategic vectors, capable of bypassing sanctions, destabilizing markets, and redrawing the boundaries of fiscal control.

The weaponization of electricity—converted into hashpower, transmuted into value, and deployed anonymously—is not a future scenario. It is already in play. The only reason it remains under-discussed is that its infrastructure is designed to be invisible, and its movements deliberately mimic the randomness of the network within which it thrives. But once viewed through the lens of energy sovereignty, the pattern becomes clear. Nations are no longer just storing power—they are minting it.

Hashrate Hegemony

And so here we are—standing not at the edge of speculation, but at the threshold of revelation. What was once dismissed as digital folklore or libertarian fantasy now exposes itself as the scaffolding of a new geopolitical reality. We are not theorizing about change; we are witnessing it in real time. The statecraft of the 20th century—defined by the hard steel of deterrence, oil-backed currencies, and overt shows of force—has been quietly replaced by something colder, more elegant, and far more elusive.

Power is no longer projected solely through armies or aircraft carriers. It flows through transformers, substations, and buried conduits feeding algorithmic mints humming below the surface. The nations that understood this first were not those celebrated for innovation or transparency. They were the sanctioned, the isolated, the ideologically estranged—states forced to innovate in silence. Iran, China, North Korea. They did not adopt crypto as a hobby. They reverse-engineered it as a sovereign weapon.

Energy has always been the spine of civilization. What we’re seeing now is the mutation of that truth. Nuclear reactors and hydroelectric behemoths are no longer just about domestic lighting or military deterrence. They are the engines of a new form of financial autonomy. They power machines that mine digital gold—Bitcoin—not as a commodity, but as a shield, a sword, and a state-controlled printer for a currency that cannot be frozen, cannot be sanctioned, and cannot be traced without a war chest of quantum computing and luck.

This is no longer about decentralization. That myth collapsed the moment hashrate concentrated in state-aligned megafarms and underground fortresses. The illusion that Bitcoin belongs to the people was the perfect cover story. In truth, it has become the reserve currency of the unaligned, the disenfranchised, and the quietly powerful. The Iranian facilities struck last week wasn’t just about enrichment. It was about minting. Taking it offline wasn’t a nuclear de-escalation—it was a financial decapitation. And markets felt it.

North Korea understood this before most. It didn’t need to mine when it could simply take. It weaponized code, infiltrated wallets, and stripped nations of their value one protocol at a time. China, master of duality, outlawed crypto in public while silently dominating the hardware and energy flows behind it. Iran, constrained by sanctions but rich in infrastructure, built a mint beneath rock and concrete, daring the world to try and trace its ledger through a blast door.

What we are witnessing is not the rise of cryptocurrency—it’s the dawn of hashrate hegemony. Power becomes crypto. Crypto becomes leverage. Leverage becomes influence. The model is no longer hypothetical. It is operational.

And here’s the final truth: when your economy can be mined in silence, when your resistance can be funded anonymously, and when your infrastructure is your treasury, then the old world order is obsolete. This is the crypto-nuclear age of covert power. You were never supposed to see it. But now that you do, understand that the battlefield is already built. It’s humming, encrypted, and sovereign. The goal posts of the game didn’t change. The game being played has.

It’s increasingly clear that what we’re witnessing in the mainstream narrative isn’t simply misdirection—it’s containment. The media isn’t distorting the truth to protect sensitive geopolitical strategy. They’re spinning outdated frameworks because the reality underneath is too complex, too disruptive, and too deeply encoded for the average person to process without breaking the illusion they’ve been conditioned to live within. The aim isn’t to deceive maliciously—it’s to preserve a system that was never designed for mass understanding. And now, as the financial architecture shifts beneath our feet, the reset isn’t coming to save anyone—it’s coming to reveal who was never meant to survive it.

That doesn’t mean it’s too late. That doesn’t mean the door is closed. But it does mean adaptation is no longer optional. We are moving into an era where comprehension is currency—where those who can decode, shift, and move with the new flows of power will not only endure but lead. This is why figures like President Trump have begun to speak openly about cryptocurrency, despite mockery from established institutions. His stance isn’t random. It reflects a more profound awareness that financial sovereignty in the next era will not be about bank accounts or GDP—it will be about who controls access to code, energy, and the flow of information.

The ridicule from intelligence veterans and media figures isn’t a sign of ignorance—it’s a reflex. Because when new paradigms threaten old hierarchies, those invested in the old order don’t fight the technology; they mock the messenger. But the signal is there, for those willing to see. This isn’t about coins or tokens. It’s about understanding the terrain ahead and refusing to be dispossessed by those who prefer the world remain illegible to the many.

There is still time, but not for much longer. Those who learn—who shed the fixed mentalities and discard the scripts—will move with grace into what comes next. The rest will call it chaos, not because it is, but because they were never taught the language of control.

So now you see it, not through speculation, but through architecture—intentional, encrypted, and already operational. What began as a digital experiment is now the primary lever of power projection in a world tilting away from legacy systems. Energy is the denominator, code is the language, and Bitcoin is the carrier signal of a new kind of sovereignty—one mined in silence, distributed without consent, and weaponized beneath every outdated assumption about what constitutes war, finance, and control. But if you’ve made it this far, know this: the game may have been replaced, but your agency hasn’t been erased. The future will not belong to the obedient—it will belong to those who see the ledger, understand its weight, and dare to write their entry into it. There’s still time to adapt. Learn the flows. Master the signal. Become fluent in energy. The sovereigns of this era will not be crowned—they will be decoded.

If you like my work, you can tip or support me via TIP ME or subscribe to me on Subscribestar! You can also follow and subscribe to me on Rumble and Locals or subscribe to my Substack. I am 100% people-funded. www.toresays.com

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Digital Dominion Series is now on Amazon: VOLUME IVOLUME II, and Volume III – and Pre-order for Digital Dominion Volume IV is now on sale.

The post IC SERIES| Iran’s Underground Economy: The Nuclear-Crypto Synthesis Behind Sanctions PART III appeared first on Tore Says.

25 Jun 03:57

Trump calls for special prosecutor to investigate 2020 election

Gpscruise

whatever they find, please get it into AI. I just asked and no AI thinks 2020 was rigged. When measuring related lawsuits, it prefaced the 300 lawsuits calling them trump lawsuits...... I only trust French voting method....

"A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America! Let the work begin!"
24 Jun 20:15

Jasmine Crockett says she's 'supposed to make the f*cking decision' to go to war

Gpscruise

iran can sue in world court and get a puppy

Crockett said that here power "comes from the Constitution. And it is clear that I have power. And somehow, because we got a thug sitting in the White House, he has decided to ignore my power." 
22 Jun 17:43

Trump Calls For Special Prosecutor To Investigate Rigged 2020 Election

by M.D. Kittle
Gpscruise

we either need to rig an election ourselves or shut up.

A voter casts her ballot early during the 2020 presidential election.It's long past due for a broader look into what happened in 2020 and the lie of 'the most secure [election] in American history.'
20 Jun 20:30

Anxiety Attack

by Tyler Durden
Gpscruise

i listen to "coffee and a mike" podcast. Kuntsler is the only guest that will contest the hosts' opinions. For that he is my favorite.

Anxiety Attack

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

- Marcus Aurelius

You must have noticed by now how this Fourth Turning bidness disorders the collective mind.

The churning zeitgeist is hard on the nerves, while something strange is birthed by mankind, the end of one way of life and the beginning of another.

Everybody’s got a story, and most of them are pretty spooky — A-I Globalist hell. . . de-pop and neo-slavery. . . chemtrail death. . . lizard people. . . caliphate on-the-march across Western Civ. . . World War Three. . . escape to Mars. . . . Mercy!

The last thing you might imagine is a tranquil evening in the town square among happy and prosperous neighbors, the dogs frisking and the children chasing each other as lights begin to twinkle against the lovely violet sky. Rather, you have to wonder just when is that hard rain a’gonna fall? When will some obdurate enemy try to bust a cap in your country’s ass? And at the center of this psychic maelstrom, the provocative visage of Mr. Trump.

So, let’s stipulate that it’s natural to be alarmed by events. But must you lose your mind? Many did during the Covid set-up, and they have not recovered. Most particularly the political Left. The Covid operation was supposed to rid the world of DJ Trump for good, and it flopped. What it accomplished politically for four years was to demonstrate that the Left cannot be trusted to run our national affairs. That, and the cumulative failures of lawfare, have made the Left crazier than ever — while the Democratic Party goes broke and bleeds out support-wise.

Meanwhile, the political Right struggles to hold things together, especially the morale of the people. The great national megaphones — CNN, The New York Times, et al. — are no help at all. They only multiply the mental disorder. And they will do everything possible to undermine the efforts of MAGA to reform a system that foundered under corruption and delusion. Where there is not gridlock these days, chaos breaks out. . . violence of action and opinion.

The focus of all this angst for the moment is Israel. Suspicion runs deep that Israel “owns” America, bends us to its will, treats us like a mere lackey in its quest to dominate the world. It does this, they say, through AIPAC, its chief lobbyist, stuffing money into every pocket and every campaign treasure-chest in DC. In reality, political payoff-wise, AIPAC, at $3.3-million (according to OpenSecrets.org) doesn’t hold a candle to the National Association of Realtors at $63.5-million, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, at $30-million, and the US Chamber of Commerce, at $29.6-million.

Of course, the AIPAC suspicion tends to redound upon plain-old, age-old hatin’ on the Jews. (Full disclosure, yours truly is one.) It’s true enough, for such a low percentage of the US population, Jews seem to run an awful lot of things here: Wall Street firms, Ivy League universities, medical research, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Broadway, the news media. How to account for that? Well. . . it is said that in the shtetls of old Europe, the richest fathers married off their daughters to the smartest young men in the village. Hence, their offspring sailed into Ellis Island with a certain advantage. It could be as simple as that. What else might it be? Luciferian magic, some seem to think.

So now, obviously, Israel is engaged in trying to beat the crap out of Iran in order to persuade them to discontinue that country’s quest for deliverable nukes. Every other means of persuasion has failed, you understand, while Iran has never ceased to advertise its wish to “wipe Israel off the map” — a leitmotif not subject to disambiguation. Strange to relate, this has utterly inflamed the political Left against Israel and the Jews. Strange especially because until the day-before-yesterday the political Left in America was dominated by Jewish orgs, Jewish money, and Jewish individuals.

As we speak, Jewish Democratic Party lawyers run the Lawfare endeavor: Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, Benjamin Wittes, Michael Bromwich, Brooke Goldstein (Exec Director of The Lawfare Project org). Marc Elias has served as the Left’s chief election law finagler through three national elections, while Norm Eisen coached Special Counsel Jack Smith, New York AG Letitia James and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg in mounting their cases against Donald Trump.

Now, ironically-to-the-max, The Lawfare project is battling against the wild outbreak of antisemitism on Ivy League campuses (surprise, surprise) — Harvard, in particular, where the antisemitic frolics are presided over by the university’s Jewish president, Alan Garber. So, now it’s Jew-on-Jew, which is just another angle on the political Left eating itself alive. In case you’re wondering, I consider the Jewish lawfare ninjas a disgrace to my ethnic group, for the simple reason that their years’ long exploits against Mr. Trump have been altogether garishly dishonest. The lawfare gang has done much more damage to our country than AIPAC ever has.

And also now, at this inflection point in the Fourth Turning, Mr. Trump stands by in Israel’s campaign to put Iran’s nuke project out-of-business. This dilemma has inflamed both ends of the political spectrum. Looks like Mr. Trump is very reluctant to commit the US to an act of war. He is apparently unconvinced that our bunker-buster MOABs can successfully penetrate Iran’s nuclear Fordo mountain stronghold. For the moment, he is playing for time, probably hoping that Israel alone can “finish the job” (de-nuke Iran) somehow without US intervention. There is even some reasonable hope that Iran’s mullah theocracy can be tossed out, at best by the Iranian’s themselves.

Israel is much-resented for beating up on its enemies. It left Gaza for dead after the horrific Oct 7, 2023, rape, murder, and hostage attack. The American Left has labeled Israel “Hitler 2.0” for that. The American Left is insane of course. The news media is working the story hard that Israel is now hated by everybody in the world, even Ol’ Tucker Carlson. The Jewish lawfare ninjas are just layin’ low on this one, which seems a bit churlish for such otherwise combative punks. Only Alan Dershowitz dares speak up for Israel, and he’s not associated with the Left anymore. It remains for Mr. Trump to keep a clear head about this while everybody else runs around with his and her hair on fire.

I will make a bold prediction: Iran will be successfully de-nuked. The world will be better for it. Eventually, world opinion about Israel will shift. The world will be grateful that Israel dared to take on this problem. Eventually, too, the lawfare ninjas will find themselves in court — but, this time, sitting at the defendant’s table on a seditious conspiracy rap. That will toast my bagel.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/20/2025 - 16:20
20 Jun 14:29

INSANE: Leftist Group Accuses PragerU of Trying to ‘Protect White Supremacy’

by Tyler O'Neil
Gpscruise

pragerU should recruit some democrats OR rename themself. Everyone knows pragerU is the opposite of SPLC

Last week, the Trump White House hosted PragerU CEO Marissa Streit to launch a patriotic exhibit called “The Founders Museum,” a joint effort involving the White House, PragerU, and the Department of Education.

That seems a rather odd thing for an “antigovernment extremist group” to do, yet that’s exactly the label the Southern Poverty Law Center applies to PragerU. According to the SPLC, this nonprofit, best known for its five-minute educational videos, secretly works to “protect white supremacy” and belongs on a “hate map” with chapters of America’s most notorious hate group, the Ku Klux Klan.

The SPLC’s ire against PragerU comes as no surprise. After all, the SPLC has a long track record of putting mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits on its “hate map,” and PragerU’s videos spread far and wide, encouraging Americans to defend family values, free markets, systems based on merit rather than identity—in short, the virtues of America.

This patriotism explains why PragerU is celebrating America’s 250th anniversary at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, so why does the SPLC hate it so much?

SPLC’s Beef With PragerU

As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC gained its reputation by suing Klan groups into bankruptcy. Now, it uses a “hate map” to suggest that mainstream conservative nonprofits are somehow akin to the KKK. This map inspired a terrorist attack in 2012.

Back in 2018, the SPLC insinuated that PragerU has connections to the alt-right movement, even while admitting that PragerU published a video condemning the alt-right. Dennis Prager—who has been recovering in the hospital as the SPLC attacks him—eviscerated this disgusting attack at the time.

When the SPLC added PragerU to the “hate map” in May, it also published its “Year in Hate and Extremism” report, which mentions PragerU in two sections—the “anti-student inclusion movement” and the opposition to the Left’s diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.

“In 2024, [DEI] initiatives became ground zero for hard-right mobilizations to whitewash American society and protect white supremacy,” wrote SPLC research analysts Maya Henson Carey and R.G. Cravens.

Carey and Cravens frame DEI as “essential in ensuring pluralism … and promoting democracy.” Such programs “promote teaching accurate histories of American inequalities as structural.” This sentence smuggles in the notion of critical race theory, which teaches that American society is fundamentally unjust and oppressive against certain races, classes, LGBTQ+ identities, and more.

Critical race theory inspired The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which attempted to redefine America’s Founding—placing the real beginning of America with the arrival of the first slaves, rather than the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

PragerU naturally disagrees with this. Yes, America has struggled to live up to the ideals of the declaration, but critical race theory effectively denies the real progress of abolishing slavery and defending civil rights. It also encourages Americans to judge each other by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.

“The antigovernment group PragerU calls DEI ‘an affront to America’s core values’ that must be ‘cast … into the dustbin of history alongside all the other racist and discredited ideas of the past,’” the SPLC noted. Right-thinking Americans agree with PragerU on this score.

Fighting the Left’s Takeover of Education

The SPLC also attacked PragerU as part of an “anti-student inclusion movement,” including Moms for Liberty (which has been on the “hate map” since 2023).

The SPLC uses this framing to suggest that the parental rights movement is the aggressor in the cultural battles over education, while conveniently ignoring the Left’s ideological seizure of the classroom. In fact, the SPLC runs its own program—long called “Teaching Tolerance” but now rebranded as “Learning for Justice”—pushing critical race theory, transgender identity, and other leftist social causes in schools. The retreat away from tolerance is instructive.

When the parental rights movement calls for putting an end to classes teaching that blacks are inherently oppressed and whites inherently oppressors, for removing pornographic books from school libraries, and for parental opt-outs to LGBTQ+ lessons, the SPLC says that amounts to “promoting far-right ideological narratives.”

The SPLC claimed that PragerU is a “significant actor in this disinformation ecosystem,” and that it “specializes in promoting far-right propaganda through professionally produced media.”

“Critics have accused PragerU materials of promoting nationalism, anti-DEI narratives and the whitewashing of historical events as patriotic education,” the SPLC noted. “These narratives play into broader moral panic campaigns that portray public schools as battlegrounds for the nation’s cultural future.”

So, SPLC’s attack on PragerU boils down to two things: PragerU fights the SPLC’s woke agenda in schools and PragerU loves America too much.

By claiming that PragerU’s great sin is being insufficiently negative about America’s history and telling kids about the virtues of our Founding, the SPLC effectively admits there’s really nothing to justify PragerU’s presence on the “hate map.”

Americans should be grateful that PragerU, not the SPLC, is advising the White House’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary.

The post INSANE: Leftist Group Accuses PragerU of Trying to ‘Protect White Supremacy’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

19 Jun 14:09

Only 16% Of Americans, 19% Of Trump Voters Want US To Join Israel's War On Iran

by Tyler Durden
Gpscruise

it smells of deceit. WMD bullshit

Only 16% Of Americans, 19% Of Trump Voters Want US To Join Israel's War On Iran

As President Trump reportedly considers issuing an unconstitutional order to commit the US military to Israel's war on Iran, a new poll finds very little public support for an American attack on Iran -- even among those who voted for Trump in 2024.   

According to an Economist/YouGov poll taken between June 13 and 16, only 16% of Americans "think the US military should get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran. In an even more significant finding, only 19% of people who voted for Trump in 2024 support American military involvement. (23% of all self-identified Republicans support going to war.) Similarly, 56% of all Americans say the United States should engage in negotiations with Iran. That avenue has even greater support among Trump supporters -- with 63% advocating negotiations. 

via YouGov

On the other hand, some of the poll's findings illustrate the effectiveness of decades of government propagandizing about Iran that's been echoed by establishment media. For example, 61% of Americans say Iran's nuclear program poses either an "immediate, serious threat" or "somewhat serious threat" to the United States. In 2007, the US intelligence community issued a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded with "high confidence" that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. That same conclusion has been periodically reiterated by the intelligence community ever since, including just three months ago. Similarly, 50% of Americans and 68% of Trump voters classify Iran as an "enemy" of the United States. A quarter of Americans categorize Iran as "unfriendly." 

Interestingly, the poll also asked respondents to characterize Israel in the same way. Here, 10% said Israel was unfriendly and 6% called Israel an enemy; 61% said Israel was either an ally or friendly, while 23% said they were unsure. Against the top-line finding of 16% of Americans saying Israel is either "unfriendly" or an "enemy," some groups with above-average negative convictions about Israel include Hispanics (21%), 18- to 29-year-olds (21%), 30- to 44-year olds (20%), income under $50k (18%) and liberals (22%).  

The finding of broad unpopularity of another US war in the Middle East comes alongside a rising chorus of voices demanding that the decision should be made by the Congress, as required by the United States Constitution. On Monday, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna introduced the "Iran War Powers Resolution" that would prohibit the US military from "unauthorized hostilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran." Also on Monday, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine introduced a resolution in the upper chamber that would require a debate and vote before any use of force against Iran.  

"The Constitution does not permit the executive branch to unilaterally commit an act of war against a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked the United States," said Massie "Congress has the sole power to declare war against Iran. The ongoing war between Israel and Iran is not our war. Even if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution." A coalition that spans ideological lines is forming to back the resolutions, and the Ron Paul-affiliated Campaign for Liberty has posted a webpage that makes it quick and easy for citizens to urge their representative and senators to sign on.  

Speaking at an April event hosted by Bucknell University's Open Discourse Coalition, Sen. Rand Paul elaborated on why America's founders vested warmaking power in the Congress: 

The most important thing is -- and it doesn't sound that exciting -- it's the process. We have to have a vote. You get a vote through your representatives. It's the dispersion of power. It's trying to keep power from being centralized in one authority, and warmaking is probably the most important of that. And Madison, when he was writing about this in the "Federalist Papers," said "the executive branch is the branch most prone to war. Therefore, with studied care, we have vested that power in the legislature."

On Monday, President Trump posted a disturbingly religion-charged text sent to him by US Ambassador to Israel, zealous Christian Zionist and perpetual Iran hawk Mike Huckabee. In it, Huckabee likens Trump's position to that of President Truman in 1945 -- the year he ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki against the convictions of America's top military leaders. Appealing to Trump's ego, Huckabee also said, "The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else."

There's no doubting his sincerity on that point: Given the universally low public support of US military engagement in Israel's war, neither Huckabee nor Israel want those decisions made by the people's representatives in Congress. 

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/18/2025 - 18:50
19 Jun 14:07

U.S. Reportedly Scrapping Alcohol Limits In Favor Of Vague "Drink In Moderation" Guidance

by Tyler Durden
Gpscruise

we need to let 18 year olds get into bars and meet women. Yeah, I said that......

U.S. Reportedly Scrapping Alcohol Limits In Favor Of Vague "Drink In Moderation" Guidance

A new report from Reuters, citing multiple sources, reveals that the upcoming U.S. Dietary Guidelines may drop the long-standing recommendation that adults limit alcohol consumption to one drink per day for women and two for men.

While not yet confirmed, the shift would represent a significant departure from decades of public health messaging, replacing the guidance with a vague call to "drink in moderation."

It also raises questions about whether the Department of Health and Human Services, even under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s leadership, remains an agency still captured by industry influence, drifting far from the "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) mission.

Here's more color from Reuters that really would only mark a significant win for the alcohol industry, which has lobbied heavily against tighter restrictions:

The updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which could be released as early as this month, are expected to include a brief statement encouraging Americans to drink in moderation or limit alcohol intake due to associated health risks, the sources said.

The guidelines are still under development and subject to change, two of the sources and a fourth individual familiar with the process said.

. . . 

The fourth source said that the scientific basis for recommending specific daily limits is limited, and the goal is to ensure the guidelines reflect only the most robust evidence.

Critics, including public health advocates, warn that the new language downplays well-documented risks such as increased cancer, including breast cancer, even from moderate drinking.

Industry leaders, such as Diageo and Anheuser-Busch InBev, spent millions lobbying during the review process, concerned about increasing scrutiny from public health authorities. 

All of this comes as Goldman analysts have pointed out deteriorating alcohol demand trends across the U.S.—underscoring broader challenges facing the industry:

Given that this is a Reuters report based on anonymous sources, the details remain unconfirmed. However, if the reporting proves accurate, the shift would represent a significant victory for the alcohol industry—and further reinforce the perception that HHS remains agency captured.

 

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/18/2025 - 20:30
17 Jun 14:47

Chokepoint Watch: GPS Jamming Impacts Tankers Across Strait Of Hormuz

by Tyler Durden
Gpscruise

you can buy a gps spoofer for $5k. Not sure the range....

Chokepoint Watch: GPS Jamming Impacts Tankers Across Strait Of Hormuz

Despite Israel and Iran volleying missiles and bombs at one another over the weekend, Brent crude futures showed a surprisingly muted reaction Monday morning, initially gapping higher Sunday evening but flat to down. 

Goldman Sachs analyst Ananya Prakash added color about the market's restrained response, telling clients the "situation feels relatively contained" for now, with attention centered on potential supply disruptions—particularly the extreme scenario of Iran moving to close the Strait of Hormuz.

Bloomberg reports a surge in GPS jamming around the Strait of Hormuz, scrambling navigation for more than 900 vessels and hinting at a new form of disruption for the world's most critical maritime chokepoint. 

Here's more from the report:

Starboard Maritime Intelligence and Bloomberg data showed vessels sailing impossibly straight lines in the region, zig- zagging across the water, or appearing onshore. The glitches — which have affected oil tankers, cargo ships, tugs and fishing boats among others since Friday — increase reliance on radars, compasses and eyesight, boosting the likelihood of collisions.

The Joint Maritime Information Center, an international naval task force monitoring the area, warned on Sunday that there are instances of "extreme jamming" of signals from the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.

GPSJam—a site that publishes daily heat maps of GPS/GNSS disruptions affecting aircraft—shows multiple "high-interference" zones clustered around the Strait of Hormuz.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said on Monday it had received multiple reports of increasing GPS interference in maritime chokepoint:

UKMTO has received multiple reports and monitoring of AIS confirms, that there is increasing electronic interference within the waters of the Gulf and Straits of Hormuz. Whilst the level of electronic interference continues to rise across the wider region, the levels and intensity inside the Gulf are having a significant impact on vessels positional reporting through automated systems (AIS).

Despite reports of "high" GPS jamming across parts of the maritime chokepoint, there are currently no signs of an imminent Iranian blockade. However, any move to choke off the strait, which handles roughly a quarter of global oil trade, would likely send Brent crude futures soaring into triple-digit territory. 

However, a separate Bloomberg report found some oil tanker operators and managers have paused offering their vessels for Middle East routes since Friday to let the dust settle.

JPMorgan commodity analyst Natasha Kaneva issued a warning over the weekend, stating that the odds increased of a "worst-case scenario" —defined as "the oil price reaction turning exponential rather than linear, with the impact on supply potentially extending beyond a 2.1 mb/d reduction in Iranian oil exports"—could push prices as high as $120–$130 per barrel. Read the full note here.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/16/2025 - 09:25
17 Jun 14:39

Only Bitcoin & Gold Can Stop Governments From Destroying The Currency

by Tyler Durden
Gpscruise

toresays.com says something possibly bad is brewing in BTC. She ways they are confiscating cold-wallets somehow.....

Only Bitcoin & Gold Can Stop Governments From Destroying The Currency

Authored by Daniel Lacalle,

Allow me to remind you of a few uncomfortable truths.

Government spending is out of control in developed nations. Furthermore, no interventionist government wants to cut spending or balance the budget. Government spending empowers politicians, and reducing it means losing the grip on the economy.

Interventionist governments aren’t concerned about debts, deficits, or inflation. Inflation is a deliberate policy, and interventionist governments seek to nationalize the economy while imposing total control over productive sectors by issuing continuously devalued currencies.

Government spending is printing money. Politicians are happy to promise more free stuff by endlessly spending because they know they won’t pay for it and that it will make citizens and businesses more dependent and submissive to political power. No government can truly reduce debt without cutting spending.

Inflation is evidence of the loss of solvency for the issuer of money. It is a de facto slow default. Inflation serves as a policy that justifies and perpetuates significant government imbalances, shifting the financial burden onto real wages and deposit savings.

The fallacy of balancing the budget through higher taxes leads to economic stagnation and more debt. High taxes are not a tool to reduce debt but to justify high indebtedness. Tax receipts are cyclical whereas government expenditures are consolidated and annualised.

No interventionist government is going to willingly act to reduce debt and spending because they can always tax more and blame others for their problems. Furthermore, central banks have stopped playing the essential role of curbing fiscal excess to become enablers of rising fiscal imbalances.

Central banks play a crucial role in the fiat world due to the intertwining of monetary and fiscal policy. The system will gradually collapse if central banks do not stop the growth of government fiscal imbalances.

However, the independence of central banks is diminishing daily, and their policies tend to conceal excessive government spending and debt. Meanwhile, governments ignore the fact that they have surpassed the three limits of government debt: economic, fiscal, and inflationary. More government debt means lower growth, more taxes generate weaker receipts, and more government spending perpetuates inflation.

Now that central banks have stopped being the essential limit to government excess, there are only two alternatives: gold and Bitcoin.

Gold has already overtaken the euro as the second largest asset after the US dollar in global central banks. In a few months, it will be the largest asset. Global central banks have lost confidence in sovereign debt from developed countries as a reserve asset. Thus, developed nations’ long-term bond yields rise above inflation rate expectations.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, has shown investors and citizens that a decentralised currency can gradually become a low-volatility reserve asset, a generalised means of payment, and a unit of measurement. As global citizens see Bitcoin as an increasingly viable alternative to fiat money, more are using it to store value and protect themselves against inflation.

Investors do not trust developed economies to maintain their solvency. Gold and Bitcoin are now playing the role that central banks have abandoned: reminding governments that they cannot spend and print currency forever. Bitcoin may be a teenager and more volatile, but the powerful message to the world is clear: the years of uncontrolled government spending and printing are over.

Obviously, governments do not like this. And central banks that have stopped being as independent as they should be, like the ECB, are looking to eliminate the risk of independent currencies taking away the monopoly of money by issuing a legally imposed central bank digital currency (CBDC). Interestingly, the U.S. administration is doing the opposite, banning CBDCs and embracing crypto as the next monetary revolution.

The ECB is admitting the euro’s enormous loss of utilisation in global transactions and panicking by issuing a surveillance tool disguised as money, the CBDC. The US administration wants to cement the dollar’s reserve status by attracting global investment in crypto.

Bitcoin and gold are now playing the essential role that independent central banks should be enforcing. Central banks are unnecessarily dovish and continue to disguise bloated government imbalances. Gold and Bitcoin are essential parts of the answer to the inflationary temptations of governments. The only things that will save us from government excesses are decentralisation and independent money.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/17/2025 - 07:45
12 Jun 20:31

Tennessee Sues US Department Of Education Over Hispanic Student Funding

by Tyler Durden
Gpscruise

there are so so many jobs i cant take since i am not bilingual. All public facing jobs....

Tennessee Sues US Department Of Education Over Hispanic Student Funding

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A civil rights lawsuit filed on June 11 in federal court for the Eastern District of Tennessee claims that a program providing federal money to colleges and universities if Hispanic students make up at least 25 percent of the student body is unconstitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on June 3, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

The lawsuit was brought by the state of Tennessee and Students for Fair Admissions, a group whose lawsuit led the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 to strike down the use of racial criteria in student admissions at institutions of higher learning in a case called Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College.

Wednesday’s complaint names the U.S. Department of Education and Education Secretary Linda McMahon as defendants.

The plaintiffs argue that the federal government’s Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) grant program unconstitutionally discriminates based on race and ethnicity, according to the complaint.

The Education Department’s Hispanic-Serving Institutions Division provides “grant funding to institutions of higher education to assist with strengthening institutional programs, facilities, and services to expand the educational opportunities for Hispanic Americans and other underrepresented populations,” the Department of Education’s website states.

Congress appropriated $350.6 million for the program in fiscal 2024, education think tank New America reports.

The department may not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity, “even when Congress orders it to,” the complaint states.

Despite this, under the federal Higher Education Act the department allocates HSI program funding to colleges and universities only if they meet the “arbitrary ethnic threshold of 25 percent Hispanic” student enrollment, according to the complaint.

Tennessee operates a variety of colleges and universities, all of which serve Hispanic students and low-income students. “But not one of them qualifies to receive grants under the HSI program” because they don’t possess “the right mix of ethnicities on campus,” the complaint states.

“Funds should help needy students regardless of their immutable traits, and the denial of those funds harms students of all races,” according to the complaint.

In its current form, the program engages in “unconstitutional racial balancing” and operates outside the constitutional authority of Congress. The 25 percent minimum Hispanic enrollment provision functions as “a strict racial gatekeeper,” determining which schools may receive millions of dollars under the program, Students for Fair Admissions said in a statement.

Racial balancing is the practice of using race as a factor to seek proportional representation of racial groups in institutions such as schools. Even before its ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, the Supreme Court held that racial balancing policies must be weighed under the strict scrutiny standard, which means they must advance a compelling governmental interest and be narrowly tailored.

Tennessee argues the HSI program presents its schools with an impossible choice: they must either forgo millions of dollars in federal grants or participate in illegal racial balancing in admissions so they can boost Hispanic enrollment. A new state law specifically forbids race-based preferences in education, so now state schools are “at risk of violating either state or federal law no matter which direction they turn,” the statement said.

Students for Fair Admissions president Edward Blum said the HSI program is unconstitutional because it conditions receipt of government money on a student body’s racial composition.

The Supreme Court determined in the 2023 ruling that such practices are “patently unconstitutional.”

“Discriminating against colleges, universities, faculty, and students based on race violates the fundamental principle of equal protection under the law,” Blum said in a statement.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Department of Education for comment. No reply was received by publication time.

Tyler Durden Thu, 06/12/2025 - 12:40
12 Jun 15:46

Autistic girl, 3, beaten to death by foster parents who would get upset over how she chewed food: report

by Shane Galvin
Gpscruise

wonder what would have happened if she dropped girl off at firestation?? We need that.

“You need to be careful with my mom,” one of the couple's other foster children told investigators.
11 Jun 19:20

Donald Trump responds to Elon Musk’s late-night apology after ugly public feud

by Diana Glebova
Gpscruise

Musk has a very gentle voice in explaining hard things. He is very very valuable in that regard.

President Trump has responded to Elon Musk's apology after the former "first buddy" admitted late Tuesday he had gone "too far" in his personal attacks on the commander in chief.
11 Jun 14:27

We Need A 'Kill Switch' On Foreign Powers Tampering With Our Electric Grid

by Tyler Durden
Gpscruise

people mistakenly think open source means unsafe, like only trade secrets are safe. This is wrong. The most secure thing on the planet is on github. We need to get all firmware open sourced. I may speak to my legislators. Example is pgp the old-standard for privacy. here it is. https://github.com/pgptool/pgptool

We Need A 'Kill Switch' On Foreign Powers Tampering With Our Electric Grid

Authored by Gary Abernathy via The Empowerment Alliance,

It has long been acknowledged that the United States’ energy infrastructure isn’t particularly secure, a concern exacerbated by the lack of a central planning process for our nation’s piecemeal electric grid. Presidential administrations and Congress have been slow to address the problem, apparently daunted by the mere size and scope of the challenges the needed upgrades would present.

That needs to change now. The recent news that China apparently installed hidden “kill switches” in solar equipment sold to the U.S. was the latest in a long list of reasons to be concerned about our electricity infrastructure and the foolhardy rush to replace traditional energy sources with so-called “renewables” using technology that is often sourced from China.

As Reuters reported, “Rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues … Using the rogue communication devices to skirt firewalls and switch off inverters remotely, or change their settings, could destabilize power grids, damage energy infrastructure, and trigger widespread blackouts, experts said.”

As one source summarized it, “That effectively means there is a built-in way to physically destroy the grid.” Or, to put it in even simpler terms, the U.S. is purchasing Chinese equipment complete with a “kill switch” that would allow China to disable the U.S. power grid at any moment.

Even more concerning, the problem is not relegated to the United States. Britain’s GB News reported, “Chinese companies dominate the market for power inverters, with firms like Huawei and Sungrow controlling more than half the market in 2023, according to Wood Mackenzie research. The European Solar Manufacturing Council estimates that more than 200 gigawatts of European solar power capacity relies on Chinese-made inverters.” (One gigawatt is equal to one billion watts.)

As Christoph Podewils, the council’s secretary general, put it, “This means Europe has effectively surrendered remote control of a vast portion of its electricity infrastructure.”

The Chinese embassy in Washington dismissed the allegation.

The relatively sparse news coverage of this startling discovery is evidence of either the mainstream media’s complacency, or its intentional effort to downplay any development that might contradict its radical climate change narrative. Surely, this item led the evening newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC, right? Sadly, no.

If ever there was a wakeup call regarding the urgent need for the U.S. to be even more committed to energy independence, it has arrived in the form of China’s ability to remotely turn off the U.S. power grid.

Fortunately, President Trump is working hard to reverse the Biden administration’s disastrous mandates that would have replaced affordable, reliable and increasingly clean traditional energy sources with untrustworthy and costly alternatives. Trump’s early declaration of a national energy emergency defined the dangers of relying on foreign sources of energy and spelled out several needed steps, including upgrades to our energy infrastructure.

But the added knowledge of Chinese subterfuge embedded within crucial components being installed in the U.S. electric grid adds even more urgency to the need to not only produce more domestic energy, but also to domestically develop more technology and manufacture more of the parts we currently import from outside U.S. borders.

While U.S. security experts should be lauded for discovering the Chinese “kill switches,” how many security threats have gone undetected? So-called “renewable” technologies like wind and solar were already suspect in regard to their reliability, as evidenced by the recent massive grid failure in Spain, Portugal and parts of France. We should be all the more wary of “alternatives” when the parts used to connect them to our power grids are sourced from foreign adversaries.

The episode again highlights the vital need for tougher regulations to ensure our nation’s energy security. The Empowerment Alliance’s model legislation – the Affordable, Reliable and Clean Energy Security act (ARC-ES) – would require “energy sources that are primarily produced within the U.S. and infrastructure that will reduce our reliance on foreign nations for critical materials and manufacturing.”

The time has passed for any reasonable argument suggesting that such legislation is not urgently needed, both at the federal and state levels. The notion of attacks from foreign adversaries on America’s energy infrastructure has often been the stuff of fantasy and “what-if” scenarios. Those have now been replaced with concrete evidence of nefarious, embedded components from a foreign superpower, just waiting for someone in Beijing to flip a switch and send Americans hurtling into a powerless abyss.

Let it sink in: China was secretly embedding technology in components shipped to the U.S. that could have triggered a massive power outage.

It’s time for Congress to embed a “kill switch” of its own on the ability of foreign countries to disable the U.S. power grid. That assurance can only come when we take America’s energy independence from being a worthy goal to a mandated reality.

Tyler Durden Sun, 06/08/2025 - 19:50
10 Jun 14:09

10 years after the downfall of a same-sex marriage canvassing study, tenure, some better practices — and an engagement

by Kate Travis
Gpscruise

this is really interesting to read. "Feelings" metrics.... R math....

A study on how conversations can change minds grabbed headlines when it was published — and again five months later when retracted.

“Gay Advocates Can Shift Same-Sex Marriage Views,” read the New York Times headline. “Doorstep visits change attitudes on gay marriage,” declared the Los Angeles Times. “Cure Homophobia With This One Weird Trick!” Slate spouted.

Driving those headlines was a December 2014 study in Science, by Michael J. LaCour, then a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Donald Green, a professor at Columbia University.

Researchers praised the “buzzy new study,” as Slate called it at the time, for its robust effects and impressive results. The key finding: A brief conversation with a gay door-to-door canvasser could change the mind of someone opposed to same-sex marriage. 

By the time the study was published, David Broockman, then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, had already seen LaCour’s results and was keen to pursue his own version of it. He and fellow graduate student Joshua Kalla had collaborated before and wanted to look more closely at the impact canvassing could have on elections. But as the pair deconstructed LaCour’s study to figure out how to replicate it, they hit several curious stumbling blocks. And when they got a hold of LaCour’s dataset, or replication package, they quickly realized the results weren’t adding up. 

The two graduate students found themselves in somewhat uncharted territory for how to share their critique. They wrote up their findings, recruiting help from Yale statistician P. Aronow. They shared the report with Green, the senior author on the paper, who confronted LaCour with the critique.

Then, the trio posted the report with its unassuming title, “Irregularities in LaCour,” online. 

It was “like our personal Cuban Missile Crisis,” Broockman said in an interview with Retraction Watch last month. “There was basically this period between when our little PDF report went online and our little world exploded.” 

Their revelations about “statistical irregularities” and false statements triggered the paper’s downward spiral, cataloged in nearly real time on Retraction Watch and widely reported elsewhere, culminating in the paper’s official retraction 10 years ago this week.

A decade later, Broockman, Kalla and Green continue to study persuasion in politics, among other topics. Their involvement in one of the most widely publicized retractions had some lasting effects on how they approach research. And the intervening years have also brought some welcome changes to research and data practices in their field. 

‘There’s no rule book for this’

After Broockman and Kalla’s report went public, their peers were unsure how to react. “A lot of the fears we had felt like they were starting to come true,” said Broockman, now an associate professor at Berkeley. “People were like, ‘is this the right thing to do? Was this the right procedure?’” he said. “We were like, ‘there’s no rule book for this.’”

The same is true today. Post-publication peer review has gained more prominence since 2014, thanks to data sleuths, PubPeer and other efforts to police the literature. This week, a team of sleuths published a series of 25 guides on how to spot integrity issues. But a post on PubPeer is unlikely to draw attention beyond certain circles, and formal investigations trigger processes that move at an academic pace. 

“I think there’s still a cultural problem in academia — and there was at the time — there’s just a lot of costs associated with criticizing existing research,” Broockman said. “The stories that you’re worried people are going to tell about you, I think that remains a big deterrent for people to come forward with whatever issues they have. I think academia has made a little bit of progress on that and could make more.”

David Broockman

When Broockman and Kalla spoke with us, news had just broken that MIT called for the withdrawal of an AI study done by an economics graduate student. Kalla hadn’t been familiar with the research — which had not yet been published but was posted as a preprint — or the university’s announcement. But he had read Stuart Buck’s May 18 newsletter recounting his critique of the study — and the backlash Buck faced for asking questions about it. 

“He got pushback for not following proper etiquette, for not being kind and understanding and kind of wrong to be questioning the research paper,” said Kalla, now an associate professor at Yale University. “I don’t know if the norms have changed over the last 10 years, but Stuart is raising some of those same concerns that we had 10 years ago.”

Sometimes, no matter which option a person chooses, there’s pushback, Broockman said.

“I think it’s a problem that so many people’s first instinct in these circumstances is to criticize the person raising the issue,” he said. “That’s really problematic. I think Stuart’s post shows that this remains a problem.”

Kalla said he encourages early-career researchers to take a direct, respectful approach when critiquing anyone’s work. “The key advice I give to graduate students is to have that kind of respect and curiosity, since oftentimes there aren’t the smoking guns that David and I had 10 years ago,” he said.

‘The hero here is open data’

In 2014, publishing datasets, code and documentation with research papers was relatively uncommon. But that’s ultimately what led Broockman and Kalla to realize the “irregularities” they had found with LaCour’s study execution were something more.  

“The hero here is open data. That’s what led us to do this,” Broockman said. “This is one example – it’s an extreme example – of why open data is important.”

“Ten years ago, the idea of pre-analysis plans, the idea of open data, the idea that you need to have reasonable sample sizes and studies, that was much more like a fringe, vanguard thing,” Broockman said. “My sense is that in the three main social science quantitative fields of psychology, political science and economics, I think we won that war. I think that’s pretty universal now.”

Joshua Kalla

Kalla was somewhat less certain. “I’m not sure if I would say the war is totally over. I think there’s definitely still lots of pushback, especially around both pre-analysis plans and statistical power,” he said. “There’s a perception that our job is to publish and to keep our jobs, and not necessarily to do the best research possible. And sometimes these scientific best practices come at odds with those competing goals.” 

Kalla and Broockman are meticulous researchers by nature, but their involvement in the Science retraction amplified that trait. “I think given the prominence of this retraction, I always feared people are going to double check my work,” Kalla said. “So I think that that made me always be careful, to try extra hard to make sure everything is buttoned down, everything is double and triple checked.” 

Green acknowledged he didn’t do his due diligence as a coauthor, telling us at the time

Convinced that the results were robust, I helped Michael LaCour write up the findings, especially the parts that had to do with the statistical interpretation of the experimental design. Given that I did not have IRB approval for the study from my home institution, I took care not to analyze any primary data — the datafiles that I analyzed were the same replication datasets that Michael LaCour posted to his website.  Looking back, the failure to verify the original Qualtrics data was a serious mistake.

The study and its fallout prompted him to make changes in his collaborations. “My data-related collaborations now involve teams of people (rather than single individuals) working on data collection and data analysis,” Green said last month by email. “Research materials are shared and date-stamped.  Replication materials work from basic inputs to final outputs.” And, he added, he no longer supervises doctoral students from other schools.

Trust but verify

A year after the LaCour retraction, Broockman and Kalla published a study finding that 10-minute, in-person conversations between door-to-door canvassers and voters in South Florida could “substantially reduce transphobia” and that the gender identity of the canvasser didn’t matter. (The irony of the finding’s similarity to LaCour’s, and its publication in Science, wasn’t lost on the media either.) 

Since then, they’ve conducted “at least nine or 10 replications in various forms related to different issues,” from work on transphobia to immigration rights, Kalla said. “This style of non judgmentally exchanging narratives through door-to-door canvassing can durably reduce people’s prejudicial views towards these various out groups.”

Most recently, they posted a preprint of a study on how endorsements and special interest groups affect voter behavior in primaries and general elections. By surveying 31,000 respondents during 2024 elections in 27 congressional districts, they found “primary voters actually struggle to identify which candidates match their views. So they rely on other cues—especially from interest groups who might help drive polarization,” Broockman posted on Bluesky.

Just as they’ve stayed on theme with their research, so too have their opinions on the infrastructure for research. Shortly after the LaCour retraction, Broockman and Kalla wrote an editorial in Vox reacting to coverage citing “a growing number” of retractions. They cautioned retractions were a sign that the system is strong, not weak. They wrote at the time:

The fact that we are especially likely to see and hear about the errors scientists make does not suggest scientists are especially prone to making mistakes. Rather, it shows that scientific errors are increasingly likely to be detected and corrected instead of being swept under the rug.

Has that view changed? “When scandals like this MIT thing this week come out, those should make people more confident in academic research, because they show there is an ecosystem to catch this stuff,” Broockman said in our recent interview. “I think we should be wary of proposals to over-regulate academic research, to solve for these rare events.”

He continued: “But if we’re going to not over-regulate the doing of the research, that means we need the fire alarm — and that’s what you guys [Retraction Watch] are — and we need the researchers doing the research knowing that there’s a reasonable chance they will get caught.”

He likened blatant fraud cases like LaCour’s to “the airplane crashes of academic research” — they get a lot of attention, but in terms of what  affects more people, “they attract far disproportionate attention,” he said. “If I were making a top five list of ways academia is not producing research that is as truthful as it could be, I don’t think fraud would be in my top five.” Issues like p-hacking, selectively including data, and deviating from research plans are all smaller infractions that are bigger issues, he said.

Donald Green

Carelessness has a large effect in the literature, too. “For me, the biggest takeaway is, sure, fraud happens,” Kalla said. “I think the bigger concern in research is sloppiness.” He and Broockman are systematic in their collaborations, carefully checking each other’s code and work. “And I think that extends to collaborations with other people as well. The trust-but-verify mentality,” Kalla said, “and definitely not in a skeptical, hostile, fraud based way. It’s very easy to make mistakes.”

Green also continues to study U.S. public opinion and political behavior, branching out to study the influence of mass media in low- and middle-income countries. “Several of my field experiments since then have focused on how narrative entertainment shapes beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral intentions,” he said. Those include studies on how a Tanzanian radio drama influenced attitudes on early and forced marriage, and the influence of a media campaign on violence against women in Uganda.

Coda

Ten years on, Green, Broockman and Kalla say the study and its demise still come up periodically, but far less often than it did in the year or two immediately after. 

“My sense is that this episode is discussed fairly widely when scholars and instructors assess the replication crisis in social science, in part because the case illustrates both why research might fail to replicate (in this instance, due to fraud) as well as the norms and institutions that have emerged to expose replication failures (such as the availability of replication data that in this case exposed how fabricated data were grafted onto an existing dataset),” Green said. 

He talks about it indirectly in his undergraduate textbook, but “students seem to be less and less familiar with the episode as time passes,” he said. “I suppose that a senior now would have been in elementary school when it happened.”

Every once in a while a student will ask Kalla about the case, he said, and Broockman said it mostly comes up when he’s talking to researchers in other disciplines, but not so much anymore. 

For Broockman, the story has an added personal note: Eight years ago, it came up on a first date — with the man he’s now engaged to. “He had listened to the ‘This American Life’ episode about all of this,” he said. “So maybe that served me well.”


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10 Jun 13:41

FBI IDs suspect who attacked ICE agents with rocks during LA riots

"You can run, you can’t hide. We are coming after you federally. If you assault a police officer, if you rob a store, if you loot, if you spit on police officers, we’re coming after you."
10 Jun 13:07

‘Bitcoin Family’ hides crypto codes etched onto metal cards on four continents — after kidnapping wave.

by Kane
Gpscruise

i hope he has some small wallets for kidnappers.... Just sayin, he is always vulnerable and should hire a guard like rich people do. Seems to be kidding himself.

09 Jun 20:26

Waymo pulls self-driving cars out of downtown LA after 5 torched by rioters

Gpscruise

i predicted robot-abuse

The company said that it had removed its vehicles from downtown Los Angeles, and would not be serving that area "out of an abundance of caution."
09 Jun 15:51

Steve Bannon calls on Trump to deport Elon Musk: ‘Strong belief that he is an illegal alien’

by Victor Nava
Gpscruise

musk just joined DOGE to free up more money for him.......

"I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien," Bannon said.
09 Jun 15:50

NYC now has a 15 mph speed limit for e-bikes — but critics doubt it will make city streets safer

by Craig McCarthy, David DeTurris, Haley Brown
Gpscruise

make car manufacturers allow cruise controls to operate at lower speeds so they use them more often. Currently most cut out at 30mph. No help in school zones.....

Mayor Eric Adams announced the speed limit for out-of-control electric bike riders would be reduced to 15 mph — but locals doubt whether it will make the streets any safer. The new speed limit for e-bikes, electric scooters and pedal-assist commercial bicycles comes as it’s become a fact of life for pedestrians to have to...
08 Jun 21:33

Mexican flag-waving masked protester becomes the symbol of LA anti-ICE riots: ‘Perfect propaganda for Trump’

by Anthony Blair
Gpscruise

there are so many jobs i cant have that involve speaking spanish, almost anything in transportation, public facing jobs. It sucks.

Observers are saying that foreign flags at the protests give President Trump and Republicans easy talking points as they take a hard line against the anti-ICE protesters.
05 Jun 13:39

Remaking K–12 Classes For A Healthier America

by Tyler Durden
Gpscruise

just lets walk outside as needed.

Remaking K–12 Classes For A Healthier America

Authored by David Mansdoerfer via The Epoch Times,

America’s kids are navigating a health crisis, and our outdated K–12 health classes aren’t helping.

With childhood obesity at 20 percent, teen mental health issues doubling, and chronic diseases looming, the current curriculum—think food pyramids, anti-drug lectures, and awkward sex-ed—is woefully inadequate.

It’s time to transform these classes with a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) approach, empowering students with practical, science-based tools for lifelong wellness.

Nutrition education needs a complete overhaul. Ditch memorizing calorie counts for hands-on lessons in reading labels, spotting hidden sugars, and cooking affordable, nutrient-dense meals. Schools could partner with local farmers or chefs to make it fun, showing kids that real food isn’t just for influencers. Imagine middle schoolers mastering a stir-fry or high schoolers debating ultra-processed foods’ impact on their bodies. These skills build confidence and independence, setting kids up to make smarter choices in a world of fast-food traps.

Mental health demands equal focus. Anxiety and depression rates among teens have surged, yet coping strategies are rarely taught. A MAHA curriculum would introduce age-appropriate mindfulness, stress management, and sleep science. Elementary students could practice breathing exercises; high schoolers could explore how social media algorithms hijack their attention. Teaching kids to set tech boundaries isn’t coddling—it’s equipping them for a digital world where mental resilience is non-negotiable.

Physical activity must evolve beyond dodgeball and humiliating fitness tests. Only 24 percent of kids meet daily exercise guidelines. Health classes should inspire movement through yoga, strength training, or outdoor challenges. Schools could use wearable tech to gamify fitness, rewarding effort over athletic talent. The aim? Make exercise a joy, not a chore, fostering habits that stick into adulthood.

Prevention ties it all together. Kids need to grasp how lifestyle shapes their future, from cutting diabetes risk to boosting heart health. Lessons could use real data—like how 10,000 steps a day lowers disease risk—or feature doctors sharing relatable stories. This isn’t about scaring kids; it’s about showing they hold the reins.

Skeptics might call this overhaul costly or unrealistic, but poor childhood health habits fuel billions in healthcare costs annually. MAHA classes are an investment, like building roads—do it right, and the benefits compound. Start with pilot programs, retrain teachers, and tap community resources. This isn’t partisan—it’s common sense. Every parent wants their kid to thrive. By remaking health classes, we give students the tools to build healthier bodies, minds, and futures.

Let’s stop lecturing kids on health and start teaching them how to live it.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/03/2025 - 17:40
30 May 14:49

Pluralistic: AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (27 May 2025)

by Cory Doctorow
Gpscruise

The point of the human isn't to catch the AI's errors so much as it is to catch the blame for the AI's errors


Today's links



A magnified image of the inside of an automated backup tape library, with gleaming racks of silver tape drives receding into the distance. In the foreground is a pile of dirt being shoveled by three figures in prisoner's stripes. Two of the figures' heads have been replaced with cliche hacker-in-hoodie heads, from which shine yellow, inverted Amazon 'smile' logos, such that the smile is a frown. The remaining figure's head has been replaced with a horse's head. Behind the figure is an impatiently posed man in a sharp business suit, frowning at his watch. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (permalink)

On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/405-ai-is-the-demon-god-of-capital-ft-hagen-blix

One actual therapist is just having ten chat GPT windows open where they just like have five seconds to interrupt the chatGPT. They have to scan them all and see if it says something really inappropriate. That's your job, to stop it.

Blix admits that's not where therapy is at…yet, but he references Laura Preston's 2023 N Plus One essay, "HUMAN_FALLBACK," which describes her as a backstop to a real-estate "virtual assistant," that masqueraded as a human handling the queries that confused it, in a bid to keep the customers from figuring out that they were engaging with a chatbot:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/essays/human_fallback/

This is what makes investors and bosses slobber so hard for AI – a "productivity" boost that arises from taking away the bargaining power of workers so that they can be made to labor under worse conditions for less money. The efficiency gains of automation aren't just about using fewer workers to achieve the same output – it's about the fact that the workers you fire in this process can be used as a threat against the remaining workers: "Do your job and shut up or I'll fire you and give your job to one of your former colleagues who's now on the breadline."

This has been at the heart of labor fights over automation since the Industrial Revolution, when skilled textile workers took up the Luddite cause because their bosses wanted to fire them and replace them with child workers snatched from Napoleonic War orphanages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

Textile automation wasn't just about producing more cloth – it was about producing cheaper, worse cloth. The new machines were so easy a child could use them, because that's who was using them – kidnapped war orphans. The adult textile workers the machines displaced weren't afraid of technology. Far from it! Weavers used the most advanced machinery of the day, and apprenticed for seven years to learn how to operate it. Luddites had the equivalent of a Masters in Engineering from MIT.

Weavers' guilds presented two problems for their bosses: first, they had enormous power, thanks to the extensive training required to operate their looms; and second, they used that power to regulate the quality of the goods they made. Even before the Industrial Revolution, weavers could have produced more cloth at lower prices by skimping on quality, but they refused, out of principle, because their work mattered to them.

Now, of course weavers also appreciated the value of their products, and understood that innovations that would allow them to increase their productivity and make more fabric at lower prices would be good for the world. They weren't snobs who thought that only the wealthy should go clothed. Weavers had continuously adopted numerous innovations, each of which increased the productivity and the quality of their wares.

Long before the Luddite uprising, weavers had petitioned factory owners and Parliament under the laws that guaranteed the guilds the right to oversee textile automation to ensure that it didn't come at the price of worker power or the quality of the textiles the machines produced. But the factory owners and their investors had captured Parliament, which ignored its own laws and did nothing as the "dark, Satanic mills" proliferated. Luddites only turned to property destruction after the system failed them.

Now, it's true that eventually, the machines improved and the fabric they turned out matched and exceeded the quality of the fabric that preceded the Industrial Revolution. But there's nothing about the way the Industrial Revolution unfolded – increasing the power of capital to pay workers less and treat them worse while flooding the market with inferior products – that was necessary or beneficial to that progress. Every other innovation in textile production up until that time had been undertaken with the cooperation of the guilds, who'd ensured that "progress" meant better lives for workers, better products for consumers, and lower prices. If the Luddites' demands for co-determination in the Industrial Revolution had been met, we might have gotten to the same world of superior products at lower costs, but without the immiseration of generations of workers, mass killings to suppress worker uprisings, and decades of defective products being foisted on the public.

So there are two stories about automation and labor: in the dominant narrative, workers are afraid of the automation that delivers benefits to all of us, stand in the way of progress, and get steamrollered for their own good, as well as ours. In the other narrative, workers are glad to have boring and dangerous parts of their work automated away and happy to produce more high-quality goods and services, and stand ready to assess and plan the rollout of new tools, and when workers object to automation, it's because they see automation being used to crush them and worsen the outputs they care about, at the expense of the customers they care for.

In modern automation/labor theory, this debate is framed in terms of "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (humans who are conscripted to assist technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

There are plenty of workers who are excited at the thought of using AI tools to relieve them of some drudgework. To the extent that these workers have power over their bosses and their working conditions, that excitement might well be justified. I hear a lot from programmers who work on their own projects about how nice it is to have a kind of hypertrophied macro system that can generate and tweak little automated tools on the fly so the humans can focus on the real, chewy challenges. Those workers are the centaurs, and it's no wonder that they're excited about improved tooling.

But the reverse-centaur version is a lot darker. The reverse-centaur coder is an assistant to the AI, charged with being a "human in the loop" who reviews the material that the AI produces. This is a pretty terrible job to have.

For starters, the kinds of mistakes that AI coders make are the hardest mistakes for human reviewers to catch. That's because LLMs are statistical prediction machines, spicy autocomplete that works by ingesting and analyzing a vast corpus of written materials and then producing outputs that represent a series of plausible guesses about which words should follow one another. To the extent that the reality the AI is participating in is statistically smooth and predictable, AI can often make eerily good guesses at words that turn into sentences or code that slots well into that reality.

But where reality is lumpy and irregular, AI stumbles. AI is intrinsically conservative. As a statistically informed guessing program, it wants the future to be like the past:

https://reallifemag.com/the-apophenic-machine/

This means that AI coders stumble wherever the world contains rough patches and snags. Take "slopsquatting." For the most part, software libraries follow regular naming conventions. For example, there might be a series of text-handling libraries with names like "text.parsing.docx," "text.parsing.xml," and "text.parsing.markdown." But for some reason – maybe two different projects were merged, or maybe someone was just inattentive – there's also a library called "text.txt.parsing" (instead of "text.parsing.txt").

AI coders are doing inference based on statistical analysis, and anyone inferring what the .txt parsing library is called would guess, based on the other libraries, that it was "text.parsing.txt." And that's what the AI guesses, and so it tries to import that library to its software projects.

This creates a new security vulnerability, "slopsquatting," in which a malicious actor creates a library with the expected name, which replicates the functionality of the real library, but also contains malicious code:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

Note that slopsquatting errors are extremely hard to spot. As is typical with AI coding errors, these are errors that are based on continuing a historical pattern, which is the sort of thing our own brains do all the time (think of trying to go up a step that isn't there after climbing to the top of a staircase). Notably, these are very different from the errors that a beginning programmer whose work is being reviewed by a more senior coder might make. These are the very hardest errors for humans to spot, and these are the errors that AIs make the most, and they do so at machine speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

To be a human in the loop for an AI coder, a programmer must engage in sustained, careful, line-by-line and command-by-command scrutiny of the code. This is the hardest kind of code to review, and maintaining robotic vigilance over long periods at high speeds is something humans are very bad at. Indeed, it's the kind of task we try very hard to automate, since machines are much better at being machinelike than humans are. This is the essence of reverse-centaurism: when a human is expected to act like a machine in order to help the machine do something it can't do.

Humans routinely fail at spotting these errors, unsurprisingly. If the purpose of automation is to make superior goods at lower prices, then this would be a real concern, since a reverse-centaur coding arrangement is bound to produce code with lurking, pernicious, especially hard-to-spot bugs that present serious risks to users. But if the purpose of automation is to discipline labor – to force coders to accept worse conditions and pay – irrespective of the impact on quality, then AI is the perfect tool for the job. The point of the human isn't to catch the AI's errors so much as it is to catch the blame for the AI's errors – to be what Madeleine Clare Elish calls a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn't just about increasing productivity, it's about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality. Take what's happened to the news industry, where mass layoffs are being offset by AI tools. At Hearst's King Features Syndicates, a single writer was charged with producing over 30 summer guides, the entire package:

https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/

That is an impossible task, which is why the writer turned to AI to do his homework, and then, infamously, published a "summer reading guide" that was full of nonexistent books that were hallucinated by a chatbot:

https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

Most people reacted to this story as a consumer issue: they were outraged that the world was having a defective product foisted upon it. But the consumer issue here is downstream from the labor issue: when the writers at King Features Syndicate are turned into reverse-centaurs, they will inevitably produce defective outputs. The point of the worker – the "human in the loop" – isn't to supervise the AI, it's to take the blame for the AI. That's just what happened, as this poor schmuck absorbed an internet-sized rasher of shit flung his way by outraged social media users. After all, it was his byline on the story, not the chatbot's. He's the moral crumple-zone.

The implication of this is that consumers and workers are class allies in the automation wars. The point of using automation to weaken labor isn't just cheaper products – it's cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers' professionalism and pride in their jobs.

That's what's going on at Duolingo, where CEO Luis von Ahn created a firestorm by announcing mass firings of human language instructors, who would be replaced by AI. The "AI first" announcement pissed off Duolingo's workers, of course, but what caught von Ahn off-guard was how much this pissed off Duolingo's users:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/25/0347239/duolingo-faces-massive-social-media-backlash-after-ai-first-comments

But of course, this makes perfect sense. After all, language-learners are literally incapable of spotting errors in the AI instruction they receive. If you spoke the language well enough to spot the AI's mistakes, you wouldn't need Duolingo! I don't doubt that there are countless ways in which AIs could benefit both language learners and the Duolingo workers who develop instructional materials, but for that to happen, workers' and learners' needs will have to be the focus of AI integration. Centaurs could produce great language learning materials with AI – but reverse-centaurs can only produce slop.

Unsurprisingly, many of the most successful AI products are "bossware" tools that let employers monitor and discipline workers who've been reverse-centaurized. Both blue-collar and white-collar workplaces have filled up with "electronic whips" that monitor and evaluate performance:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips

AI can give bosses "dashboards" that tell them which Amazon delivery drivers operate their vehicles with their mouths open (Amazon doesn't let its drivers sing on the job). Meanwhile, a German company called Celonis will sell your boss a kind of AI phrenology tool that assesses your "emotional quality" by spying on you while you work:

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/processmining-algomanage

Tech firms were among the first and most aggressive adopters of AI-based electronic whips. But these whips weren't used on coders – they were reserved for tech's vast blue-collar and contractor workforce: clickworkers, gig workers, warehouse workers, AI data-labelers and delivery drivers.

Tech bosses tormented these workers but pampered their coders. That wasn't out of any sentimental attachment to tech workers. Rather, tech bosses were afraid of tech workers, because tech workers possess a rare set of skills that can be harnessed by tech firms to produce gigantic returns. Tech workers have historically been princes of labor, able to command high salaries and deferential treatment from their bosses (think of the amazing tech "campus" perks), because their scarcity gave them power.

It's easy to predict how tech bosses would treat tech workers if they could get away with it – just look how they treat workers they aren't afraid of. Just like the textile mill owners of the Industrial Revolution, the thing that excites tech bosses about AI is the possibility of cutting off a group of powerful workers at the knees. After all, it took more than a century for strong labor unions to match the power that the pre-Industrial Revolution guilds had. If AI can crush the power of tech workers, it might buy tech bosses a century of free rein to shift value from their workforce to their investors, while also doing away with pesky Tron-pilled workers who believe they have a moral obligation to "fight for the user."

William Gibson famously wrote, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." The workers that tech bosses don't fear are living in the future of the workers that tech bosses can't easily replace.

This week, the New York Times's veteran Amazon labor reporter Noam Scheiber published a deeply reported piece about the experience of coders at Amazon in the age of AI:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is palpably horny for AI coders, evidenced by investor memos boasting of AI's returns in "productivity and cost avoidance" and pronouncements about AI saving "the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years":

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andy-jassy-8b1615_one-of-the-most-tedious-but-critical-tasks-activity-7232374162185461760-AdSz/

Amazon is among the most notorious abusers of blue-collar labor, the workplace where everyone who doesn't have a bullshit laptop job is expected to piss in a bottle and spend an unpaid hour before and after work going through a bag- and body-search. Amazon's blue-collar workers are under continuous, totalizing, judging AI scrutiny that scores them based on whether their eyeballs are correctly oriented, whether they take too long to pick up an object, whether they pee too often. Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times national average. Amazon AIs scan social media for disgruntled workers talking about unions, and Amazon has another AI tool that predicts which shops and departments are most likely to want to unionize.

Scheiber's piece describes what it's like to be an Amazon tech worker who's getting the reverse-centaur treatment that has heretofore been reserved for warehouse workers and drivers. They describe "speedups" in which they are moved from writing code to reviewing AI code, their jobs transformed from solving chewy intellectual puzzles to racing to spot hard-to-find AI coding errors as a clock ticks down. Amazon bosses haven't ordered their tech workers to use AI, just raised their quotas to a level that can't be attained without getting an AI to do most of the work – just like the Chicago Sun-Times writer who was expected to write all 30 articles in the summer guide package on his own. No one made him use AI, but he wasn't going to produce 30 articles on deadline without a chatbot.

Amazon insists that it is treating AI as an assistant for its coders, but the actual working conditions make it clear that this is a reverse-centaur transformation. Scheiber discusses a dissident internal group at Amazon called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, who link the company's use of AI to its carbon footprint. Beyond those climate concerns, these workers are treating AI as a labor issue.

Amazon's coders have been making tentative gestures of solidarity towards its blue-collar workforce since the pandemic broke out, walking out in support of striking warehouse workers (and getting fired for doing so):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately

But those firings haven't deterred Amazon's tech workers from making common cause with their comrades on the shop floor:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power

When techies describe their experience of AI, it sometimes sounds like they're describing two completely different realities – and that's because they are. For workers with power and control, automation turns them into centaurs, who get to use AI tools to improve their work-lives. For workers whose power is waning, AI is a tool for reverse-centaurism, an electronic whip that pushes them to work at superhuman speeds. And when they fail, these workers become "moral crumple zones," absorbing the blame for the defective products their bosses pushed out in order to goose profits.

As ever, what a technology does pales in comparison to who it does it for and who it does it to.


Hey look at this (permalink)



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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Bulk of American calories comes from sweet drinks https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050527111920.htm

#20yrsago Chicago’s Bean sculpture is free to photograph, at last https://memex.craphound.com/2005/05/27/chicagos-bean-sculpture-is-free-to-photograph-at-last/

#15yrsago Man single-handedly building a metro rail https://englishrussia.com/2010/05/24/the-most-unusual-metro-in-the-world/

#15yrsago Canada’s copyright minister: superinfringer https://memex.craphound.com/2010/05/27/canadas-copyright-minister-superinfringer/

#15yrsago Pinkwater’s ADVENTURES OF A CAT-WHISKERED GIRL, sequel to Neddiad and Yggyssey https://memex.craphound.com/2010/05/27/pinkwaters-adventures-of-a-cat-whiskered-girl-sequel-to-neddiad-and-yggyssey/

#10yrsago Real estate bubble drives urban blight https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-are-there-so-many-shuttered-storefronts-in-the-west-village

#10yrsago IRS leaks 100K taxpayers’ data to identity thieves https://theintercept.com/2015/05/27/data-breaches-wreak-havoc/

#10yrsago Swiss cops’ dawn raid snags top FIFA officials https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/sports/soccer/fifa-officials-face-corruption-charges-in-us.html

#5yrsago The Toronto Star's new owners donated to far-right Tories https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#plutewatch

#5yrsago How to pay artists while fighting censorship and Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#pay-artists

#5yrsago Ammosexuals point their guns at their crotches https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#youll-shoot-your-eye-out

#5yrsago Twitter's porn filters are dampening discussions of "cumgate" https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#cumgate

#5yrsago West Virginia's governor Jim Justice: billionaire, deadbeat https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#injustice

#5yrsago Hertz's bankruptcy was caused by private equity looting https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#hertz-uranus

#5yrsago Facebook shelved research that showed they were sowing division https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#joel-kaplan

#5yrsago Youtube is automatically blocking criticism of the Chinese Communist Party https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#communist-bandit

#1yrago Against Lore https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_than_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)
  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING


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23 May 16:15

Kash Patel Shuts Down the Deep State’s Nerve Center

by Victor Davis Hanson
Gpscruise

Memphis

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello. This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently, Kash Patel, who’s been under fire by the Left in a variety of ways, the new FBI director, he announced that he is shutting down the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., where there’s about 1,500 employees, as I understand it.

There was a lot of outrage. But remember that this was not his original decision. It was the decision during the Biden administration of then-FBI Director Christopher Wray that this 50-year-old building was unsuitable. It was decrepit.

But what was more interesting, in addition to thinking he was going to shut down the building, we don’t know where he wants to relocate the headquarters.

I would prefer—I think some of you—if he put it in Kansas City or somewhere away from the proverbial deep state in Washington. He also said he didn’t understand, of the 35,000 employees, why a third were in Washington. Washington, as dangerous as it can be, does not account for a third of all crimes.

So, he’s trying to disperse or recalibrate the FBI. And are we going to lament the closure of that office and what it represents symbolically? I don’t think so.

Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, was the head of the Special Counsel’s Office. Remember that? And he had the dream team—the all-stars, a hunter/killer team—with the Left. He was almost giddy about that they were gonna get President Donald Trump on Russian collusion. Forty million dollars, 20 months later, they didn’t find anything.

We found all sorts of improprieties within that investigation. Andrew Weissmann and others cleaned their cellphones so that no one could see their text messages. We had Peter Strzok and Lisa Page dismissed from the investigation because of their notorious and now infamous tweets.

We had Robert Mueller go before the House Intelligence Committee and claim that he didn’t know what the Steele dossier was nor what Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS was. That was impossible. Those were the two catalysts that prompted his own appointment.

His successor was James Comey. He’s in the news right now for that weird tweet where he said he was walking on the beach and he saw “8647”—get rid of Trump; or maybe, you know, kill Trump; or whatever “86” can mean, it can mean a lot of stuff—and he didn’t understand it. But he’s also got a novel coming out right now about a supposed right-wing celebrity who threatens people and then something happens to the people he threatened. Was this a stunt for his book? I don’t know, but it’s in line with his character.

He went before the same House Intelligence Committee on 245 occasions. He pled either “I don’t know” or “I can’t recall” or “I don’t have that information” or “I shouldn’t give you that information.” Two hundred and forty-five times.

He was the one that set up Michael Flynn and bragged about how naive Michael Flynn was not to have an attorney when he sent agents in to ambush him on the Logan Act. My gosh, nobody ever invokes that.

He was the person who lied to Donald Trump and said, “We don’t have an investigation of you, Mr. President.” And then he went out and recorded that conversation. He did have an investigation. And then he had a third party leak it to The New York Times.

He was the one who hired Christopher Steele. He was an FBI contractor. They used the Steele dossier, which was fraudulent, to get FISA court warrants to, I think, unproperly and unlawfully spy on people like Carter Page. That same office gave us Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who doctored a FISA email to spy on Carter Page.

That same office then gave us the successor to James Comey, interim Director Andrew McCabe. He lied four times, the inspector general said, to federal authorities and three of them were under oath, which was a basis for his firing.

He was followed by Christopher Wray. Why was he spying on parents at school board meetings? Why was he spying on what they called “radical-traditional Catholics”? Why did they go after abortion protesters, but not in the same way people who were protesting pro-life?

And why did they do the Mar-a-Lago raid? Why did they go in there with props and special files and scattered the files on the ground, where they were not there when they came, and then take pictures of them and add a little “classified”? Why did they take away 13,000 documents? And out of the 13,000 documents, they only found 102 that were classified, 0.007%. I could go on with Christopher Wray. This is what he gave us.

He had the chief counsel, James A. Baker, of the FBI working with Twitter and Facebook to suppress news of Hunter Biden’s laptop. The laptop was authenticated by Christopher Wray’s FBI. They kept it silent while 51 supposed intelligence authorities said that it was Russian disinformation. Why didn’t the FBI say, “No, it’s not. We’ve authenticated it for over a year”? Why? Why? Why?

Add it all up—Mueller, Comey, McCabe, Clinesmith, Christopher Wray, Strzok, Page—and I think it’s been a very good but overdue thing to close down that Washington office and close a sad chapter in the history of a once-great agency.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Kash Patel Shuts Down the Deep State’s Nerve Center appeared first on The Daily Signal.

22 May 13:46

Washington state cities, towns allowed to set residential speed limits of 10 mph under new law

Gpscruise

never understood why car manufacturers are allowed to have cruise control fade out at 30mph, not say 10

20 May 21:30

Microsoft Layoffs 7,000 as AI Restructuring Begins

by Wilbert S
Gpscruise

if you are an expert, you might be employable and cheaper!

The tech world just got another jolt, and this time, it's Microsoft in the spotlight. The news about Microsoft layoffs is making the rounds, and it’s not a small shake-up. The company is cutting about 7,000 jobs. Why? Because it’s betting big on AI. That’s right—real people are losing their jobs while the company shifts gears to chase artificial intelligence. It's part of a broader shift we’re seeing across the industry, where automation and cost-cutting often outweigh long-term employee retention.

Microsoft Layoffs: A Big Hit to the Workforce

Microsoft announced that 7,000 roles are getting the axe across departments like sales, support, and engineering. These layoffs represent roughly 5% of its global workforce. This isn’t new for them—Microsoft has done layoffs before—but this one is bigger than most in recent memory. According to the company, the move is part of a longer-term strategy aimed at reducing layers to become more efficient and focused. What’s especially jarring is the number of teams affected all at once. Some have said entire departments are being dissolved or absorbed into AI-focused groups to implement organizational changes and position the company for success.

Not Just Numbers on a Chart

Frank Shaw, who handles communications for Microsoft, said the company is “prioritizing AI and cloud services” and moving away from older roles. Corporate speak aside, this means a whole lot of people are being shown the door. Most of these cuts are hitting their Washington State offices, where many employees are based—where Microsoft has a massive footprint. In Redmond alone, Microsoft employs tens of thousands of people, many of whom have deep roots in the community. Layoffs on this scale could shake the local economy, hitting everything from housing to small businesses that rely on Microsoft employees.

The AI Trade-Off

Artificial intelligence is cool, sure. It’s fast, efficient, and can do things most people can’t. But here’s the truth: investing in AI is expensive. Microsoft is spending billions to stay ahead, especially in its partnership with OpenAI. Increasing investments in AI have been a significant focus for Microsoft, with spending rising alongside metrics like operating margins and net income. According to financial disclosures, Microsoft has committed over $10 billion to this collaboration. So, to afford all that? They’re cutting jobs. The company is flattening its org chart, removing levels of management, and getting rid of jobs they think won’t help them grow in the AI era. The hope is to move faster and stay lean, but that efficiency comes with real human costs.

July and June Could Be Hard Months

Internal emails show the layoffs will roll out slowly, starting in June and wrapping by July. Significant layoffs were also implemented in January. That means a lot of uncertainty for thousands of employees. Some already know they’re out. Others are still waiting. Either way, it’s weeks of tension, rumors, and low morale. Being in limbo like that takes a toll—even on people who survive the cuts. Some managers have reported that morale has dipped significantly, even among teams not directly affected. The slow rollout has caused confusion and speculation across departments.

The Spokesperson Spin

Microsoft spokesperson, Frank Shaw, says these organizational changes will best position the company for the future. That’s the corporate line—just like we hear every time a big company does mass layoffs. But the reality is that these “strategic shifts” come at a cost that can’t be softened with buzzwords. These are real people with bills, kids, careers. No clever phrase makes it better. The lack of transparency around which departments are targeted has only added to employee frustration. Some staff say they’re learning more from news articles than from internal briefings.

Success at What Cost?

Let’s not forget—Microsoft is doing well. Like, really well. Microsoft shares closed at $500, highlighting a peak in the company's stock value. They posted a 17% jump in revenue recently, pushing quarterly earnings over $60 billion. Microsoft shares just hit their record highest price ever, and analysts continue to raise price targets for the stock. Investors are thrilled. So if they’re flush with cash, why the cuts? Simple: it’s about being lean, fast, and focused on the AI future. But it still feels wrong to claim victory while putting thousands out of work. The optics are tough—especially when executive bonuses are expected to rise this year.

Welcome to the Dynamic Marketplace

They keep calling it a dynamic marketplace, but let’s be honest—it’s cutthroat. Companies are moving fast, making bold calls, and leaving people behind. Microsoft is just one of many trying to stay ahead. They are embedding AI capabilities into their core platforms, such as Microsoft 365 and Azure, to enhance business operations and drive growth. They want success in a dynamic world, and they think AI is the ticket. Maybe it is. But if that future leaves thousands behind, is it really a win? The pressure to adapt quickly is real, but there has to be a better balance between innovation and stability.

A Trend, Not an Outlier

Microsoft isn’t the only one making cuts, as they plan to lay off thousands of employees as part of a broader organizational restructuring. Significant financial reporting and market performance were highlighted on a Monday, with stock trading metrics showing notable highs.

Meta, Amazon, Google—name a tech giant, and they’ve probably done layoffs in the past year. In just the first month of 2025, the industry saw more than 30,000 jobs disappear. Some say it’s a market correction after over-hiring during the pandemic. Others believe it’s a redirection of capital toward technologies like AI. Either way, the trend is clear, and more layoffs are likely coming. The entire tech landscape is shifting under our feet.

What Comes Next?

For Microsoft, the roadmap is all about AI. On May 13, 2025, Microsoft announced layoffs impacting 3% of its workforce, a significant move amidst ongoing organizational changes. They’re plugging it into everything—Office, Teams, Windows, you name it. Their tools like Microsoft Copilot are being marketed as productivity game-changers. They’re betting that smarter tools will drive future growth and keep enterprise clients locked into their ecosystem. It might work. But only time will tell if losing 7,000 people in the process was a smart move—or a big mistake dressed up as innovation. Employees and analysts alike are watching closely to see if the gamble pays off.

The Human Toll

Behind every number is a person. Someone who showed up to work, worked overtime, trained new hires, and believed in the mission. Now, they’re packing up their desk. Some are parents. Some are new grads. Others were just months from retirement. When you’re laid off, it’s not just a job you lose—it’s stability, identity, and a sense of direction. Stories are surfacing online from those affected—some caught off guard without severance, others scrambling to find new roles in an already saturated job market.

Lessons From the Layoffs

If you work in tech, you’re probably watching all this closely. The big lesson? Job security doesn’t really exist—not even at a place like Microsoft, where recent layoffs have reduced layers of management to streamline operations. Roles are shifting, AI is moving in, and the skills that mattered last year might not matter tomorrow. Staying flexible and constantly learning? That’s the new normal. Upskilling in AI, data analytics, and cloud infrastructure is becoming essential, not optional. Employees are realizing they need to adapt quickly or risk being left behind.

Final Thoughts

Yes, Microsoft had its reasons for the cuts. Yes, they want to grow. Amy Hood, Microsoft CFO, emphasized the company's focus on operational efficiency and management structure, highlighting the strategy to improve performance and agility by reducing layers of management. But can we really call it growth if it sidelines thousands of people? AI might change the game, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of compassion. The company may say this is about the future, but it’s people who make up the present. And right now, they’re hurting. There’s a fine line between evolution and erosion—and it’s worth asking whether Microsoft has crossed it.

Weekly Reflection

As we move through 2025, one thing is clear: the tech industry is changing fast. But behind every buzzword and bold decision are people who helped build these companies. Layoffs can be strategic, but they’re also deeply personal, affecting the total headcount of employees and the overall workforce. Let’s not lose sight of that. In chasing innovation, companies need to remember the people who helped get them there in the first place. Compassion isn’t a weakness—it’s a responsibility. Let’s hope Microsoft and others don’t forget that in the race to automate everything.

Also Read: How Artificial Intelligence Will Dominate the Future of E-commerce

The post Microsoft Layoffs 7,000 as AI Restructuring Begins appeared first on Dumb Little Man.

19 May 20:24

Bruce Springsteen ignores question about Trump feud while signing autographs

by Fox News
Gpscruise

my democrat neighbor spends every waking minute honing talking points. I point to a photo on my wall showing Eisenhower making Germans walk past the dead in 1943.

Springsteen previously called Trump administration "corrupt, incompetent and treasonous" during Manchester concert.
19 May 19:48

Scott Adams reveals he expects to be 'checking out from this domain sometime this summer' after prostate cancer diagnosis

Gpscruise

i was a superfan, until i realized he never spoke to legislators, just another talk-radio guy.

"So my life expectancy is maybe the summer. I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer."
13 May 21:24

Trump to sign executive order to cut prescription drug prices by 30% to 80% — he says to match other countries

by Reuters
Gpscruise

love the guy, but wont that make them too expensive in say slabobia ??

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he would sign the executive order on Monday morning to pursue what is known as "most favored nation" pricing or international reference pricing.
12 May 16:52

Boy wins girls track events in Maine.

by Kane
Gpscruise

not sure if i have mentioned this, but its mens fault this occurs. Let me elaborate. Trans want to dress as women. Fine. When they come into mens locker room dressed as woman, we need to allow and be-cool about this. Thats probably all they want. We men shamed them out of our locker room. Shame on us men.