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The Catalyst could be demolished to make way for a seven-story building with condos. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local file)

SANTA CRUZ >> Two Santa Cruz residents have launched an effort to purchase The Catalyst Nightclub building that is slated for redevelopment into 64 condominiums. The campaign went online on Wednesday and by Friday afternoon more than 1,100 individuals had pledged to pitch in more than $540,000 to make the purchase, according to the website. 

Jay Brown and Jeremy Stone, longtime friends and Santa Cruz residents, are leading the charge. The two said they plan to meet with the developer and see if they are open to selling it, though the buildings are not listed for sale. Brown and Stone said they might try to purchase a different property if the developer doesn’t bite. 

When asked if it was not premature to launch this campaign prior to speaking with the property owner, Brown said the pledges are important to “signal to the city, to The Catalyst, to the developer — we really want to maintain and preserve The Catalyst.”

“The topic of The Catalyst and its connection to downtown and how downtown is shifting is something that the city is like abuzz with all the time,” said Stone, a music producer, owner of westside recording studio Sonivore and member of the Santa Cruz Arts Commission. 

“A lot of people feel as if they don’t have any control over how things are changing and where it’s going. We saw this opportunity with The Catalyst and we decided that it would be an incredible thing to do for the community,” Stone said.

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The owner of 1009, 1011 and 1015 Pacific Ave. is GSH Ventures, a multinational real estate firm and developer. The properties were listed for sale for $4.5 million last year after its longtime owners decided to sell. 

Representatives of GSH did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on Friday.

Brown said when he and Stone initially launched the effort, they did not realize that the building had already sold — but they still intend to ask to buy it. Their top priority is “to be an ally to The Catalyst,” Brown said, and they have a meeting set with The Catalyst’s business manager Igor Gavric next week.

Gavric said at a community meeting in January about the development, “The Catalyst has full intention of continuing to operate, at 1011 Pacific or wherever.”

Stone and Brown have not collected any money yet, they said, the pledges are a way to gauge how much Santa Cruz residents want to save The Catalyst. They said they envision it becoming a “community-owned venue,” but haven’t ironed out the details of how exactly that would work.

The two also said they are open to pivot, and channel the energy from the campaign into a different project or a different building if that’s what makes the most sense. 

“It’s a testament to what the city and the people in Santa Cruz want that they showed up in numbers, with so much energy behind it,” Stone said.

Santa Cruz City Council candidate Hector Marin launched a ballot initiative campaign in an attempt to protect the building as a historical monument, but ultimately came up short of the signatures required.

City leaders said the designation wouldn’t have affected the developer’s plans as state law allows housing proposals to lock in development standards in place when the proposal is submitted.

GSH Ventures submitted a pre-application to the city in November for a seven-story building with 64 condos and ground-floor commercial space. The development would require demolishing The Catalyst, which has occupied the space since the 1970s.

City leaders initially said the developer would allow The Catalyst to rent the bottom floor of the building to continue operating, but later walked that back, saying the developer was open to it but had not made a deal with The Catalyst.

The Catalyst’s lease in the building expires in 2028.

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The post Santa Cruz residents make bid to purchase Catalyst building as community-owned venue appeared first on Santa Cruz Local.

This week was the best of times for Akamai and the worst of times for Cloudflare. On the same evening, content delivery network mainstay Cloudflare announced it was cutting about a fifth of its staff in a realignment around AI, its competitor Akamai announced a seven-year, $1.8 billion deal with a leading LLM provider that Bloomberg identified as Anthropic. Akamai CEO Tom Leighton said this was the largest deal in the company’s history and that it came after another large, unidentified frontier-model developer signed a $200 million deal last quarter. “These leaders in AI have chosen Akamai because their AI workloads need the scale, performance and reliability that our cloud platform provides,” he said during the company’s first quarter earnings call on Thursday. Akamai, which has 4,300 locations in 700 cities across 130 countries, won the deal against stiff competition from hyperscalers and neoclouds. He said Akamai’s ability to manage and scale complex distributed systems, as well as its low latency, tipped the scales in its favor. Given the supply chain constraints in datacenter space, especially as it relates to memory costs and the infrastructure needed inside of large datacenter buildouts, one analyst asked if Akamai planned any increase to its capital expenditures this year to pay for it. Akamai executive vice president and CFO Ed McGowan said that was not likely. “We’ve been able to get the supply chain ready. We anticipate receiving all the goods that we need to deliver this services over the next seven years within the next 12 months,” he said. “Now there’s always potential for slippage and delays, but we have mechanisms in our contracts to deal with, if, in say six months from now, prices were to go up. So we’ve taken that into consideration.” McGowan said it is a consumption-based contract over seven years, so as soon as Akamai ramps the necessary capacity, it will start taking revenue, which he expects to begin happening later this year. Winning this deal and ones like it has been Akamai’s goal in the AI era, Leighton said. “This has been the strategy all along. So we’re very pleased to be executing against it,” he said. “The goal has been to be deploying a distributed inference platform, distributed compute platform that would be desired by enterprises across the spectrum … The platform is to a point where we can do that, and I think you'll see more of this going forward.” On the same day, across the country, Cloudflare was spelling out the bad news to its employees that it planned to cut the workforce by 1,100, roughly 20 percent. Cloudflare co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn said it was not about cutting costs, but about building a company that meets the AI moment. “We have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere,” they wrote in a blog post. Cloudflare’s revenues grew 34 percent year over year to reach $639.8 million in the first quarter. It posted a net loss of $22.9 million. It expects to pay up to $150 million in severance and benefit payments related to the layoffs. While Akamai’s stock price surged 26 percent on Friday, Cloudflare dropped 23 percent. With a market cap of over $69 billion, Cloudflare still has more than three times Akamai’s market cap. ®

ABC isn’t rolling over after the Federal Communications Commission demanded the network to upend decades of precedent and hand out airtime to the right. The FCC, led by censorious Trump appointee Brendan Carr, requested that Texas-based KTRK-TV—which is owned by ABC and parent company Disney—submit to its demand that programming like “The View” be forced to meet “equal time” requirements.

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. The race to replace Pelosi: A conversation with Scott Wiener Check out Daily Kos’ exclusive interview. Trump’s dumb tariffs get spiked in court—again That’s a whole lot of “winning” … Want the Epstein files? Here are some about UFOs. The truth is alien to the…

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Some found out they didn't qualify for WARN Act protections like two-months notice because the company had classified them as remote workers.

A cartoon by Brian McFadden. Support my Patreon for early access and exclusives.Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, or at my website. Related | The Supreme Court’s attack on voting rights is already causing chaos…

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The invisible force behind all of this is no mystery to anyone paying attention to the city's tech economy. San Francisco is home to some of the most valuable private companies in the world, and their employees have been quietly accumulating — and, increasingly, cashing out — fortunes.

Esta traducción fue generada utilizando inteligencia artificial y ha sido revisada por un hablante nativo de español; si bien nos esforzamos por lograr precisión, pueden ocurrir algunos errores de traducción. Para leer el artículo en inglés, haga clic aquí.

El Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville podría recibir cierto alivio financiero en las próximas semanas gracias a una legislación dirigida a ayudar a hospitales en crisis económica.

El Proyecto de Ley de la Asamblea 108 (AB 108), firmado por el gobernador Gavin Newsom el jueves, es una medida presupuestaria de emergencia que asigna casi 25 millones de dólares para apoyar a hospitales públicos y sin fines de lucro que estén “experimentando dificultades financieras inmediatas y significativas.”

La medida busca estabilizar a un pequeño número de hospitales del estado que, de otro modo, no podrían pagar sus deudas antes del 1 de julio. Para ser elegibles, los hospitales deben tener menos de 10 días de efectivo disponible, haber agotado otras opciones financieras y contar con más de la mitad de sus pacientes inscritos en programas públicos, como Medi-Cal o Medicaid, o no tener seguro médico, según el proyecto de ley.

El Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville cumple con esos criterios.

El senador estatal John Laird, defensor del proyecto, declaró a Lookout que los 25 millones de dólares se distribuirán entre los hospitales seleccionados según sus necesidades. Laird, quien actualmente preside el Comité Senatorial de Presupuesto y Revisión Fiscal del estado, dijo que existen planes para proponer una asignación adicional de 200 millones de dólares en el presupuesto estatal 2026-27 para apoyar a hospitales en dificultades.

Laird indicó que podrían pasar algunas semanas antes de que los hospitales seleccionados reciban los fondos, pero afirmó que trabajará con la oficina del gobernador para acelerar la distribución del dinero.

“Estos hospitales son proveedores esenciales de atención médica en comunidades que a menudo tienen pocas alternativas,” dijo Laird en un comunicado separado. “La AB 108 proporciona un salvavidas inmediato para ayudar a mantener operando servicios críticos de salud mientras la Legislatura continúa trabajando en soluciones más amplias y de largo plazo.”

El director ejecutivo del Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville, Stephen Gray, declaró a Lookout por correo electrónico que la aprobación de la AB 108 representa una “potencial victoria clave” para el centro médico, ya que brinda la oportunidad de solicitar subvenciones a través del programa de préstamos para hospitales en crisis, del cual el hospital ya se ha beneficiado anteriormente.

“Esto es de importancia crítica para el hospital mientras enfrentamos desafíos fiscales provocados por retrasos en el financiamiento y recortes a nivel federal,” dijo Gray.

El último año y medio ha traído importantes desafíos financieros para el Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville. En enero, el hospital reportó una pérdida cercana a los 23 millones de dólares en 2025 tras reducciones en el financiamiento estatal y federal, junto con una disminución en el número de pacientes.

Gray declaró previamente a Lookout que el hospital generó 137 millones de dólares en ingresos en 2025, cifra que estuvo 35 millones por debajo de lo esperado. Añadió que el hospital logró ahorrar 9 millones de dólares en su presupuesto de gastos mediante recortes en suministros y una contratación de personal más eficiente.

El hospital espera perder entre 4.5 y 10 millones de dólares en los próximos tres años, principalmente debido al proyecto republicano de reconciliación presupuestaria aprobado el verano pasado, que redujo casi 1 billón de dólares en fondos para los reembolsos de Medicaid de los que dependen los hospitales públicos.

“Si calificamos para esto y logramos recibir parte de esos fondos, sería un gran impulso para nosotros”, dijo el presidente de la junta directiva del hospital, Tony Nuñez.

Nuñez afirmó que el Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville atraviesa actualmente una situación financiera difícil y está tratando de recuperarse. “Al menos [los fondos] nos ayudarían a seguir avanzando en esa recuperación,” dijo Nuñez.

El verano pasado, la dirección del hospital comenzó la búsqueda de una posible alianza con proveedores regionales de atención médica, como CommonSpirit Health (administrador del Hospital Dominican de Santa Cruz), Sutter Health y UC San Francisco, para ayudar a gestionar las operaciones diarias del hospital.

Según Nuñez, la búsqueda de un socio financiero sigue en marcha, y la junta directiva debería recibir una actualización sobre el proceso en su próxima reunión a finales de mayo.

El Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville también sufrió un golpe financiero a finales de 2024 cuando fue víctima de un ciberataque, lo que provocó retrasos en el envío de facturas y en la recepción de pagos de compañías aseguradoras y pacientes. El personal del hospital tuvo que trabajar con expedientes en papel durante varias semanas.

El hospital tuvo que utilizar dinero de su fondo de emergencia, que ya era limitado cuando se creó el distrito de salud en 2022 tras la compra del hospital a una empresa con fines de lucro. El hospital apenas acaba de recuperarse del impacto financiero de ese incidente.

The post El Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville podría recibir alivio financiero temporal gracias a una nueva legislación estatal appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Following the approval late Thursday of a state bill aimed at helping financially troubled hospitals, Watsonville Community Hospital could expect some financial relief to help weather its ongoing challenges.

Late last year, we reported the news that the Nintendo Switch was getting a price hike, something that did not make folks happy in this lean economic era. But we were told that the Switch 2 would stay at the same price, at least for the time being. Well, that sadly only lasted about six months. Via Polygon, we’ve now learned that the Switch 2 is getting a price increase of $50, to $499.99. The price hike will go into effect on Sept. 1. In Europe, the price goes up by €30 to €499.99. And in Canada, the price will increase by CA$50 to CA$679.99. Nintendo

It appears that Japanese Switch users will be hurt in their wallets the most. Starting on May 25, the cost of all models of the original Nintendo Switch and the Switch 2 will both increase. Also, the price of Nintendo Switch Online subscriptions will increase significantly as well. Nintendo said price increases were occurring “in light of changes in market conditions, and after considering the global business outlook.” A global shortage of computer memory has driven up prices for RAM and storage, which many are saying is another reason. Nothing is getting cheaper these days, and Nintendo is not immune to this.

We don’t expect any of this to really put a dent in Nintendo’s sales, however. The company has apparently sold a whopping 19 million Switch 2 consoles so far. And in its second year, Switch 2 would still be ahead of the original Switch when it comes to sales at the same point during its release timeline. This is the case even with a lower projection of 16.5 million units. In a statement, a Nintendo representative said: “We sincerely apologize for the impact these price revisions may have on our customers and other stakeholders, and we deeply appreciate your understanding.” We’ll see if their apology is good enough that people will shell out more money without complaining too much online. We kind of doubt it.

The post Nintendo Switch 2 Gets a Price Hike Effective September 1 appeared first on Nerdist.

“Alligator Alcatraz”? More like Alligator Albatross. Remember when Alligator Alcatraz, Florida’s massive immigrant detention center, opened? It was just last summer, and President Donald Trump toured the facility. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt gushed over how great it was that it was “isolated and surrounded by dangerous wildlife.” Then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi…

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It's getting more expensive to use the latest models. OpenAI last month bumped the version number of its GPT model family to 5.5, and per-token prices rose too, in some cases doubling compared to its predecessor. For 1 million tokens, GPT-5.5 is priced at $5 (input), $0.50 (cached input), and $30 (output). Its predecessor GPT-5.4 charges $2.50 (input), $0.25 (cached input), and $15 (output) per 1 million tokens. The AI biz claims that the cost increase is offset to some extent by token processing efficiency – delivering better results using fewer tokens. "While GPT‑5.5 is priced higher than GPT‑5.4, it is both more intelligent and much more token efficient," the company said during the rollout. But the cost is still going up, more than efficiency improvements are reducing costs. According to an analysis conducted by OpenRouter, GPT-5.5 is anywhere from 50 percent more expensive to nearly twice as expensive, depending on prompt length. "Our analysis shows that GPT-5.5 actual costs increased 49 percent to 92 percent," OpenRouter said. "Longer prompts, over 10k tokens, saw costs offset by shorter completions. Shorter prompts, under 10k, experience a higher cost increase where completions did not get shorter." That range – 49 percent to 92 percent – factors in the model's token efficiency improvements, which are more relevant for longer prompts. According to OpenRouter's measurements, GPT-5.5 generates between 19 percent and 34 percent fewer completion tokens for longer prompts (10,000 tokens and up). If reports of OpenAI's projected $14 billion loss in 2026 prove accurate, costs will have to rise much more to balance its insistent spending. But this is a problem also faced by rival Anthropic, set to lose a reported $11 billion in 2026. Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 arrived without a visible list price change amid claims about an improved tokenizer. The result, according to OpenRouter, is potential savings for shorter prompts but larger bills for longer ones. "Our study of real Opus 4.7 usage shows that actual costs increased 12–27 percent for prompts above 2K tokens when cache absorption is taken into account," the biz said. "Short prompts under 2K were the exception, where significantly shorter completions offset the tokenizer overhead entirely." Expect further price increases for premium models. ®

President Donald Trump gave opening remarks at a Mother’s Day event in the Rose Garden Friday, honoring mothers who’ve lost children in combat or to crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. Of course, Trump couldn’t help but blather about how he redesigned the Rose Garden. “The problem with it is you couldn’t walk on it because this is built on a wetland, and the grass was always…

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35-year-old Benjamin Moore has lived in Mountain Meadows Mobile Home Park, outside Bozeman, Montana, since he was 17. This month, for the first time, he’s withholding his rent.

On May 1, Moore received a rent bill for $947, up 11 percent from the month before, and the second hike in nine months—the product of the park’s sale to an undisclosed buyer. 

Moore hung a sign on his trailer that says “RENT STRIKE.” He and his neighbors in Mountain Meadows and nearby King Arthur Park, organized with the citywide group Bozeman Tenants United, are collectively withholding over $50,000 a month from their landlord. 

Historically, trailer parks have been a relatively affordable housing option—a third of trailer park residents in America live below the poverty line. But on average, their cost of living has risen 45 percent over the past decade. By unionizing, the Bozeman trailer park tenants believe they might be able to fight the most recent rent hike—especially given the state of their housing. 

For years, tenants say, the maintenance hasn’t been attended to: tree limbs hang perilously over trailers, and water shutoffs are a regular occurrence. “I cannot recall a time in the past 20 years where we had three straight months of water and power working all day, every day,” Moore said. 

Shauna Thompson, another resident, calls the water “atrocious…like a Milky Way, like you’re drinking skim milk. It’s very nasty and turned off all the time, without any notice.” And tenants allege that they’ve experienced retribution for maintenance requests, punitive eviction attempts, and unsafe conditions. 

Members of Bozeman Tenants United, including Benjamin Moore and Shauna Thompson, rip up their rent increase notices. Jered McCafferty

“It’s really hard on people here,” Moore said. Some residents are “already paying their entire Social Security check for rent. It’s a very poor neighborhood. We’ve got old folks. We’ve got young families. We’ve got working-class people who can’t afford anything else.”

For the past four decades, a group called Oakland Properties has owned both trailer parks. When they learned about the sale, tenants were scared that their parks would be bulldozed, or that their rent would be increased even further, forcing them to move. 

The tenants attempted to buy the parks themselves, but were decisively outbid. The winning bidder demanded an NDA. The transaction should be finalized next month, park owner Gary Oakland said, but residents still don’t know who’s going to own the land they live on.

This month’s rent hike, Oakland acknowledged, was “part and parcel” of the sale. But for tenants, it’s a catastrophe. On top of the $947 lot rent—more than double the national average—many residents also pay off home loans on their trailers, as well as insurance and utilities costs.

Oakland calls claims of broken utilities “nonsense”: “If it was such a bad place to live, why would the homes be selling for such high dollars?” he said. The rent strike, Oakland points out, is “just a group of people not paying their rent.”

Some people are rationing their medication to make ends meet, Moore said. “There’s one person who canceled Life Alert. It’s either Life Alert or rent, and if you don’t pay rent, they evict you and throw you in the streets.” 

Many of the tenants of King Arthur and Mountain Meadows parks rely on a fixed income to pay their rent.Jered McCafferty

Tenant organizers across the nation have found a foothold in recent years organizing against individual landlords, and Bozeman’s tenant union, situated in one of the fastest-growing communities in the state, is no exception. Tenant unions from Los Angeles to Kansas City to New York have organized to win rent freezes, maintenance, and security in their homes.

Mobile home parks—increasingly private-equity-owned and uniquely at-risk in the face of climate disasters—are organizing, too: a group of trailer park residents in Columbia, Missouri, unionized in February. In Montana, as Rebecca Burns recently wrote for In These Times, mobile homes were already once a site of tenant organizing: buoyed by the state’s miners unions, the first Bozeman-area mobile home tenants’ union won an agreement with their landlord in 1978.  

Oakland says park residents “have been terrorized by the union,” and plans to evict the strikers. The strikers say they’ve retained a lawyer and will fight to stay in their homes.

“I wish none of this was happening,” Moore said. “Your utilities should work. Your place should be safe. You should be able to get in and out of it. These are the absolute basics, and they just haven’t kept them up. And if you call them on it, they threaten you.”

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It’s been a minute since we’ve heard anything about the Bane/Deathstroke team-up movie from DC Studios. With so many DC Studios projects cancelled or postponed, like The Authority, we were starting to wonder if this was ever happening. But now, via Deadline, we’ve had our first positive signs that it’s actually closer to becoming reality. According to the report, director Greg Mottola (Superbad), is possibly in contention to direct the film, which would team up the two DC Comics villains. Mottola directed several episodes of Peacemaker, so he’s clearly in James Gunn’s orbit. There are still no finished contracts for this film, which is still in very early development.DC Comics

Apparently, there is no finished script for this film either, which currently doesn’t even have a title. We doubt it will be called “Deathstroke/Bane,” but who knows. Matthew Orton, who worked on scripts for Marvel’s Moon Knight, wrote a script in 2024. But it’s unclear if that’s the script that James Gunn is going with. In the comics, these two characters don’t have a ton to do with each other, aside from both being Batman adversaries. Deathstroke the Terminator didn’t even start out as a Batman villain, he originated in The New Teen Titans back in the ’80s, and was the team’s primary bad guy. Bane appeared in The Dark Knight Rises, of course, played by Tom Hardy. But we’ve never had the comics-accurate Latino version of the musclebound villain.

Deathstroke has never appeared in a film, aside from a cameo in Justice League’s post-credits scene, played by Joe Manganiello. This was meant to set up a Ben Affleck Batman movie that ultimately never happened. On television, however, the augmented mercenary, whose real name is Slade Wilson, appeared in both the Arrowverse as well as Titans. If you’re thinking “Slade Wilson sure sounds a lot like Wade Wilson, a.k.a. Deadpool,” that’s because Deadpool originated as a spoof character of Deathstroke. Can a movie launch Deathstroke into Deadpool levels of popularity? If they cast the right actor, it’s certainly possible. Now, we wait for the official word from James Gunn on this project.

The post DC Studios’ DEATHSTROKE & BANE Movie May Have a Director appeared first on Nerdist.

Last year, I wrote a viral Bluesky thread about Paulina Borsook, who published a scathing and prescient takedown of Silicon Valley’s sociopathic politics back in 2000.

That thread led to a New York Times profile of Borsook and, within a few months, she landed a book deal to republish her masterpiece. Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech will hit bookshelves on September 15 with a new foreword by me.

My small role in reviving interest in Paulina’s work has been one of the most gratifying experiences of the past two years. I first ran across her name in David Golumbia’s Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. I read her book and, as it turns out, we live a few miles apart. So, we met up.

Mainstream journalists are now grasping for ways to explain Silicon Valley’s far-right radicalization. Some pretend it’s a new development and try to blame it on taxes, regulations, or other trite political rationalizations. But Borsook’s work proves—definitively—that tech’s right-wing politics are nothing new. As she wrote in 2000, explaining the anti-government, anti-public attitudes percolating in tech:

It’s an inability to reconcile the demands of being an individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with a preference for, and glorification of, being the solo commander of one’s computer in lieu of any other economically viable behavior.

Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be. As many political schools of thought do, these techno-libertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.

Cyberselfish will be published in the USA, the UK & Commonwealth, France, Belgium, and Switzerland. Please join me in pre-ordering it! Click here for more information.

Book club, anyone?

Pre-order at this Bookshop link to help support independent bookstores and the Nerd Reich newsletter.

Here is my interview with Paulina from last year (our second-biggest interview, with 142,000 views on YouTube alone!)

OPINION Twice this week we've been told by our would-be tech oligarchs that people are being paid to hate them. Alex Karp said 10 percent of the world professionally hates Palantir and Kevin O’Leary said paid agitators were protesting his Utah data center. This is the familiar language we hear in politics when someone needs a ready scapegoat to explain away unpopularity. We should pay attention to this argument as it transfers from politics to technology, because it is revealing the alleged victims' intent. They have done, and are going to do, some very unpopular things and, when people push back, those complaints need to be quickly marginalized. Just like in a mob trial when the defense lawyer tells the court what the rat is getting from the government to squeal, calling people paid agitators or professional haters invites us to question their motives. Just when we are shocked by Karp's audacity, saying that he doesn't care if the Iran war is unpopular and that Palantir will support it, with the next breath, he tells us to check the pockets of the people picketing. Just when the public stirs and demands to know why a Shark Tank star wants to gobble up all the electricity and water in a state, he says the only green initiative they care about is in their wallet. It's also a dog whistle to those like-minded souls who hunger for enemies and grievance, that even a simple billionaire – doing nothing wrong other than selling software that helps the government select targets to bomb – can be picked on by people that hate America. It lets their compatriots in Podcastistan know how to feel and where to stand if they want to be on the right side of the argument. Are you pro-Iran nuclear weapons blowing up Christian orphanages? Or are you going to be nice to Alex Karp? Are you in favor of being a boss and not even looking at the electricity bill, just sliding your titanium card across the meter like a baller? Or are you going to whine that the data center uses more electricity than everything that is plugged into an electrical outlet in the state of Utah? It makes the argument simple, not for everyone, but for just enough. For the loudest, the angriest, and the most ... patriotic. As those voices rise, reason gets drowned out. The debate gets confused and crucially, people move on. At this moment, the public's attention is fractured and emotions are spent. Focusing outrage on anything complex is next to impossible when there are so many unambiguous abuses of power. All you need to do is muddy the waters a bit and let them swim away. Anyone who sticks around? They're probably getting paid to do it. Getting paid is what this is all about after all. In the last 90 days, Palantir got $858 million from working on unpopular wars with unpopular governments. I mean look, like they say, it was all done to protect the ideal of western liberal democracies, of course. Nothing says you understand the teaching of democracy better than ignoring how the public feels when the warlord is jingling his purse. Why should haters be the only ones getting paid? When we published Karp’s comments about 10 percent professionally hating Palantir, savvy readers at The Register showed they are on to the grift. “I mean, it's the wording itself — 10% “professionally” hates Palantir," wrote commenter Pulled Tea. "Could be right! Bet you many of the people who are doing the hating are dedicated, high-level amateurs." ®

Intel's stock has risen a stunning 490% over the past year, a bet by Wall Street that may be running well ahead of the company's actual turnaround.

What should be an impossible occurrence has now become routine. The conservatives on the nation’s highest court continue to undermine democracy and the Constitution—and if they have to lie to do it, so be it. So perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised to learn that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, in which he blithely destroyed the Voting Rights…

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