It bears repeating that USAID serves as proof of two things that are antithetical to the tankie Left (tm): the parties are not the same so elections have consequences, and America can play an important, positive role in the world. They cannot accept these two things, nor admit that the hundreds of thousands of people who have died from USAID cuts thus far would be alive today if Kamala Harris had won and Trump/Musk hadn't gotten into the White House—which is funny, because Elon Musk is also denying his role in killing all of these people (*horseshoe theory intensifies*). But they can’t accept that the end result of America’s absence on the world stage isn’t industrialized nations coming together to help people or the end of capitalism, but a vacuum that leaves a whole lot of hungry, sick, and dead people.
Or, maybe they can accept it, and think you should accept it, too:
grabbing a GETTI / PHOTOPWNED / WHATEVER pay-to-use image off Image Search and leaving the watermark in used to be ironically low-effort... now it marks it as honest photo-repurposing-without-remuneration ratther than """"""""""""""""Artificial"""""""""""" """""""""""""""""""Intelligence""""""""""""""""""" slop powered by water-terrorism. Better watermarked than waterscorched I guess.
Mark Greenberg analyzes the federal actions that restrict immigrants' access to benefits and services—and why their reach extends to lawfull
July 24, 2026
The Trump administration has initiated a multi-front effort to restrict access to a wide range of public benefits, assistance and services for non-citizens. The administration often frames its actions as focused on illegal immigrants, but the efforts will affect access to benefits and services for a much larger group, including U.S. citizens and citizen children.
One set of restrictions were enacted when last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act narrowed eligibility for SNAP, Medicaid, Medicare, ACA premium tax credits, and the Child Tax Credit. The changes primarily affect lawfully present immigrants rather than unauthorized immigrants, because unauthorized immigrants were already ineligible.
The other efforts have flowed from a dramatic “reinterpretation” of requirements of federal law enacted by Congress in 1996. The 1996 law specified when groups of non-citizens would be eligible for “federal public benefits,” and also said these restrictions would not apply to benefits necessary for the protection of life or safety. The administration has acted to broaden what counts as a “federal public benefit,” end access to services and assistance needed for the protection of life or safety. Courts have limited implementation of these provisions while litigation is ongoing.
Under a July 2026 public charge rule, when a person is seeking to become a lawful permanent resident, officials will be expected to consider any use of means-tested benefits by the individual or their children in support of a finding that they are “likely to become a public charge.” The administration estimates roughly 1.3 million people will disenroll from or forego enrolling in benefits programs and a $13 billion annual reduction in program expenditures, because eligible citizens and non-citizens will avoid benefits participation due to the rule.
It's always fun when an author claims their work contains no politics, because either they're blatantly lying, or they genuinely think they're telling the truth and you get a lot of insight into what assertions about human nature they regard as so obviously and self-evidently true as to lie outside the political sphere.
Do threats and punishments make people change their behaviour to the desired? Or does it make them prepare for the punishment? The answer will shock you.
On Bluesky, users quickly embraced the term "pervert glasses" to refer to Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses, following a shocking investigation.
'Contractors told the newspapers that they were watching people “going to the toilet, or getting undressed,” often not knowing that they were even recording or being recorded. Automated systems designed to blur faces often failed, the contractors claimed, effectively giving them a front row seat of somebody’s most intimate moments.'
Meta contractors in Kenya told two Swedish newspapers that they're being told to review highly sensitive footage recorded by smart glasses.
'It’s not just Meta using offshore data annotators in countries like Kenya, Colombia, and India to train their AI models. As Agence France-Presse reported last year, workers have had to put up with reviewing often gruesome crime scene images, and even dead bodies.
'The trend is reminiscent of social media content moderation, a practice that has relied on exploitative labor in the developing world for many years now.'
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