Spocko

@davidhogg111 @ClcpierceCarol @NEAToday @AFTunion I like what you said on the @JoyAnnReid show about the #RedFlagLaws that you got passed in Florida. (For those who missed the segment, here's the whole clip.) youtu.be/i_UgsUUQvvo digbysblog.net/2022/06/01/cop…

The comments 🤣

@DeanBaker13 Good point @DeanBaker13 Who can we investigate who's behind it #SEC? Let's say people connected to Trump ARE behind it, so the DOJ won't investigate, who has standing to sue insiders? Who was financially injured by the trading? Can we get them to speak up?

sure people are paying more for gas and worried about their kids in the military, but at least Trump and his family are doing well.

The least surprising thing I’ll see today.

the reason mark zuckerberg is spending $200 million lobbying for digital IDs and ‘age verification’ is because meta’s entire revenue basis is selling ads and businesses have finally realized they’re paying lots and lots of money for their shit to be viewed by bots.

The air traffic controller cleared the fire truck onto the runway. Seconds later, the same controller screamed “stop, stop, stop.” The plane was doing 93 to 105 mph. Both pilots are dead. Everyone will frame this as controller error. One controller was simultaneously managing a United flight that aborted takeoff after an anti-ice warning, dispatching a fire truck across an active runway, and sequencing an inbound Air Canada landing at highway speed. At 11:40 PM. On a mandatory overtime shift at a facility that has been understaffed for years. A system that assigns one person that workload will produce exactly this outcome. The only variable is when. The FAA is short approximately 3,000 controllers. The headcount dropped 13% from 2010 to 2024 while flight volume rose 10%. Over 40% of the FAA’s 290 terminal facilities are understaffed. The New York TRACON, which manages the most congested airspace in America across LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark, has been chronically below target. Newark was operating at 59% of its staffing goal. LaGuardia handles 900 flights a day. The hiring pipeline is broken at every stage. Only 2% of applicants complete the full process. Training takes up to 6 years. The FAA Academy in Oklahoma City is a bottleneck, with roughly 35% of trainees washing out. Congress blocked legislation to build a second academy. In one recent hiring cycle, the FAA brought on 1,512 candidates and lost 1,300 in the same window. Net gain: around 160 controllers for an entire country. Three things need to happen and everyone who can make them happen has known for years. Congress needs to fund and authorize a second FAA training academy. One facility in Oklahoma City cannot produce enough controllers for 900 million annual passengers. Members of Congress from Oklahoma have actively blocked this. That needs to end yesterday. The FAA needs to cut certification time. Six years from application to fully certified controller is absurd. The agency’s own data shows tower simulators reduce certification time by 27%. They’ve installed them at 95 facilities. That should be every facility, and the simulated hours should count toward more of the certification requirement. The FAA needs to stop plugging staffing gaps with mandatory overtime. Controllers at understaffed facilities are working six-day weeks rotating between morning, mid, and night shifts. The NTSB has flagged fatigue repeatedly. The controller last night was managing overlapping emergencies during a nighttime operation. Overtime is not a staffing plan. It’s a countdown to the next runway collision. The controller said “I messed up” to a Frontier pilot who watched the whole thing. The pilot responded “No man, you did the best you could.” One of them is right. The answer determines whether this happens again.

Americans need to know which officials traded stocks before Trump posted about Iran last night.

5 minutes before Trump’s announcement: * $1.5B notional worth of S&P500 (ES) futures are bought in a single clip. * $192M notional of oil futures (CL) sold. More than 4x-6x any other trade size during the market close. Insiders profited from his lies in broad daylight!

"20% of the world's chili supply passes through The Strait of Hormel." - Staff Chief Of Joints @the_etrain@beige.party @LOLGOP I liked this line so much, I illustrated it! #StraitOfHormuz

"20% of the world's chili supply passes through The Strait of Hormel." - Staff Chief Of Joints. @the_etrain@beige.party I liked that line so much, I illustrated it! #StraitOfHormuz

fixed it

JD Vance in September 2025: "If you celebrate Charlie Kirk's death, you should not be protected from being fired for being a disgusting person."

@jay_schiavone @smalls2672 @DeanBaker13 I made this Mashup of Jeffrey Epstein talking to Trump & pointing to the gas prices saying "You did this!" I took the photo in Fremont CA on March 20th 2026 at 11 am. As I was taking the photo a guy jogged by & said, "It's not going down!" #GasPrices #Trump #Epstein #IranWar

@jay_schiavone @smalls2672 @DeanBaker13 Epstein gave Trump advice on his casino & his ghost is still giving him great investment advice.

Why did the former head of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts send a massive payment to Jeffrey Epstein in 2018?

@JoJoFromJerz @Acyn #CoryLewandowski denied all this, but remember what he said UNDER OATH. "I have no obligation to be honest to the media."

Corey Lewandowski is about to find the fuck out.

@CameronCorduroy I had a $600,000 over 5 years NSF Physics grant terminated last year because our grant mentioned "polarization" which was included in the banned terms list. We were discussing the polarization of light. We never got the grant reinstated.

@FrankConniff This never would have happened it the good ol' days when TV's were fine pieces of furniture showing the Dumont Network!

A few days ago, Billy knocked over my TV. It survived, but it hit my laptop, destroying the monitor. Now he’s knocked it over again and outright killed it in cold blood. If the little prick wasn’t so impossible not to love, he’d be in big trouble.

@FrankConniff Not all cats are so loveable.

@felixprehn @iwelsh "Steward Health Care, owned by Cerberus Capital, filed bankruptcy with $9 billion in debt after closing hospitals across Massachusetts." Cerberus Capital co-founder & CEO is now Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg. @RepBeccaB asked AG Bondi about his ties to Epstein.

Private equity firms bought 500 hospitals. Death rates in their emergency rooms went up 13%. They fired 12% of the staff. Then they paid themselves billions in dividends. A Harvard study just confirmed what doctors already knew: people are dying so investors can hit quarterly targets. Exactly what happens. A PE firm buys a hospital using debt. The debt gets placed on the hospital's balance sheet, not the firm's. Now the hospital owes hundreds of millions it never borrowed. To service that debt, the hospital cuts costs. Costs mean nurses. The numbers from the Harvard/University of Chicago study are horrifying. After PE acquisition, emergency department salary spending dropped 18.2%. ICU salary spending dropped 15.9%. Hospital-wide employees were cut 11.6%. Emergency department deaths rose 13%, seven additional deaths per 10,000 visits. A separate study found patients undergoing surgery at PE-acquired hospitals had 17% higher odds of dying within 90 days. Steward Health Care, owned by Cerberus Capital, filed bankruptcy with $9 billion in debt after closing hospitals across Massachusetts. The CEO lived on a $40 million yacht while emergency rooms went dark. Eight hospitals serving 2 million people nearly disappeared because a PE fund extracted more cash than the system could survive. The private equity industry has poured over $1 trillion into healthcare. They operate a quarter of ERs nationwide. This isn't going away. The investing angle nobody talks about. Non-PE hospital operators like HCA Healthcare (HCA) and Tenet (THC) are the direct beneficiaries. Every time a PE hospital closes or deteriorates, patients flow to the nearest competitor. HCA has returned 1,200% since 2011. Patient volume from PE closures is a structural tailwind nobody's pricing in. Medical staffing firms (AMN Healthcare, Cross Country) charge premium rates specifically because PE hospitals cut staff. The staffing shortage IS the business model for these companies. The disruption play: outpatient surgical centers (SCA Health, now part of UnitedHealth) are pulling profitable procedures out of hospitals entirely. PE-owned hospitals lose their highest-margin surgeries to outpatient, and the death spiral accelerates. Pull up tradevision and monitor healthcare M&A alerts, hospital closure filings, and patient volume migration data. When a PE-owned hospital announces "restructuring," the patient volume shift to competitors like HCA starts within 30 days. That 30-day window is when the competitor's earnings revisions haven't updated yet. Free to try. (a private equity firm bought your local hospital. borrowed $500 million in the hospital's name. fired 12% of the nurses. emergency room deaths rose 13%. then they paid themselves dividends. nobody went to prison. they're currently buying another hospital.)

This is wild. 143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history. Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots. Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget. Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard. The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.