deathmtn

That would have been the Janice Raymond incident. That came in the context of my work with Olivia Records. When I was first approached by representatives of Olivia Records, which I think was in 1974, I immediately told them that I was trans and in fact, they had already heard that I was trans from Leslie Ann Jones, who was an assistant recording engineer in San Francisco. So, we were already in clear communication about the fact that I was trans and they were very open to working with me. They mostly wanted to know if our politics agreed and whether or not I could work with a lesbian separatist collective. They badly needed engineering skills.

The collective was very clear that they considered me to be a woman. We spent a long time – about a year, maybe more – in which we got to know each other and by the time that I actually joined the collective, we felt that we knew all that we needed to know about how we were going to get along together. And so, I joined the collective and went to live with them in Wilshire District of LA, where we had three houses: two next to each other and one across the street. There were 13 members of the collective after a while. I think that when I joined there were 11.

That’s the background. I wanted to give you that background because what happened with Raymond was so betraying, so bizarre and so completely unexpected.

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All of a sudden came this thing from left field. We were being broadsided by hate mail. The hate mail initially took a form that was so recognizable that Ginny Berson diagrammed it out. We’d get a letter and the letter would attack one of our albums because of the way that it was engineered and mixed. There were very clear ideas of what constituted a “male” mix and a “female” mix, which nobody had ever heard of before. What it came down to was that “male” mixes had drums, which was linked back to “throbbing male energy.”

This pattern escalated. We were organizing what was for us, a major tour. We wanted to tour the country and provide women’s music for women in major cities along our route. It was the first time anything like that had been attempted. We were very intent on it and it was extremely energy-absorbing. It took all our energy to get it going. We had an entire network of lesbian separatist producers, people who could organize local logistical support, people who could advertise tickets and handle the selling and we wanted it to be completely done by women.

Anyway, we had organized this tour and we had gotten a letter telling us that when we got to Seattle that there was a separatist paramilitary group called the Gorgons. The Gorgons was a group of women who wore camo gear, shaved their heads and carried live weapons. We were told that when we got to town, they were going to kill me.

More than three decades after leaving the Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have begun to unplug from Russia's electricity grid and join the EU's network.
The two-day process began on Saturday morning, with residents told to charge their devices, stock up on food and water, and prepare as if severe weather is forecast.

On first glance, Good Day Fort Collins appears to be a standard local news round-up.

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“I’m a senior citizen here in Fort Collins, and this newsletter is like a lifeline. I don’t have the attention span these days to read the paper, and Facebook is a mess,” reads one testimonial on the sign-up page from “Matthew K., retiree.” “I use Good Day Fort Collins to keep one foot in the town I grew up in, and my friends and family continue to live in,” says “Michael H., expat.”

Google those quotes, though, and you’ll find the same names and testimonials supporting hundreds of other local newsletters across the U.S. “Matthew K.” also lives in Queen Creek, Arkansas; and Post Falls, Idaho; and Marysville, Washington; and Denton, Texas. “Michael H.” grew up in each of these towns, and many more.

It turns out Good Day Fort Collins is just one in a network of AI-generated newsletters operating in 355 cities and towns across the U.S.

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“Local news should be local. The problem is, at this point, there are economic challenges keeping that from happening. Smaller communities rarely can support enough staff to run a traditional news organization,” said Henderson, who currently runs Good Daily from New York City. “I see technology, and LLMs specifically, as our best shot to fix this.”

In fact, Henderson sees his automated newsletter as boosting the work of struggling local news outlets. “The summary is designed to prompt the reader to go read the human’s content…it’s just AI’s job to promote that,” he said. “Local news providers appreciate our work promoting their best local content for free, and often seek out ways for us to promote even more of their content.”

Henderson’s rosy view of his impact on local news publishing was not shared by several outlets I spoke to that are regularly aggregated by Good Daily.

“His claim is, frankly, horseshit. The suggestion that he’s helping news deserts is absurd,” said Rodney Gibbs, the head of audience and product at the National Trust for Local News (NTLN). The nonprofit owns 65 local newspapers across Georgia, Maine, and Colorado, several of which are regularly aggregated by Good Daily newsletters.

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“Consider the Georgia markets he’s targeting — most already have multiple, established news sources that he is recycling as fodder for his newsletters,” said Gibbs. Henderson’s Daily Macon, for example, regularly aggregates half a dozen different publications, including The Middle Georgia Times, the website for NBC affiliate WMGT, and The Macon Melody, NTLN’s own digital outlet, which it launched last summer.

Over the past 90 days, referrals from Daily Macon totaled four engaged sessions, according to Gibbs. “That puts it at the very bottom of our referral sources. It’s clear that Daily Macon is not a meaningful traffic driver,” he said. (In its advertiser media kit, Daily Macon says it has 13,300 subscribers in Georgia and a 26% click-to-open rate.)

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The peculiarities with Good Daily don’t stop there. Henderson has launched a “give back” program in roughly half of the markets he’s operating in, more than 150 towns and cities. Readers can vote each day for one local nonprofit on the newsletter websites. At the end of the year, each newsletter promises to “donate 10% of our advertising profits” to the organization with the most votes.

The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Washington won the 2024 reader competition for Daily Spokane. “News to us,” said Marit Fisher, the museum’s chief marketing officer. “None of us here have ever heard of this newsletter.”

The single most ridiculous aspect of human history is how much of it has been driven by the goal of allowing a tiny portion of a large population to live in luxury. This is a theme found, to varying degrees, in society after society across the world: A lot of people with a low standard of living working in service of the goal of raising the standard of living for some sort of ruler or supreme leader and his family and allies. I understand that this is not some sort of revelation. “You’ve discovered class,” you are now saying in a mocking tone. Beyond the social and political and economic dynamics underlying this process, though—things that make up magisterial fields of inquiry—I think that every once in a while it is well worth taking a moment to gape at the basic ludicrousness of this fact. As societal goals go, an honest reading tells us that we are often not aiming for “better technology” or “philosophical progress.” No, the reality is that, thousands of years and around the globe, the primary purpose of all the work that everyone is doing is “allowing a few jerks and their unbearable kids to live lavishly.” Countless millions through millennia have suffered, dragging stones to build pyramids and losing fingers in dirty factories and getting black lung so that Some Guy Somewhere can sit on a soft pillow and enjoy delicacies.

What an absurd, idiotic goal to organize human society around. Wow!

This is the deal that we already have for the gains of the past 30 years of tech advancement, by the way. Jeff Bezos gets a hundred billion dollars and you get an easy way to order toothpaste. Elon Musk gets four hundred billion dollars and you get a neat car you can buy. This is the standard offer of capitalism. The population at large is supposed to be satisfied with the incidental benefits of the technology itself, as those who control the technology ensure that it is deployed in service of maximizing their own wealth.

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All I am suggesting here is that there is shortcut to the goals that communists were going for, that does not require full revolution. Simply capping how rich people are allowed to get could radically reorient the goals of society by removing the (insane!) thing that our mighty corporations now work towards like insatiable robots of doom.

Jeff Bezos’s $10bn philanthropic fund has stopped backing the world’s leading voluntary climate standard setter, following rising scrutiny over its influence on the body, in a move seen as the billionaire’s latest effort to curry favour with US President Donald Trump.

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Two people familiar with the funding relationship said they believed the move to pause funding of SBTi after December 2024 was partly down to Bezos not wanting to annoy Trump, who has previously described climate change as a hoax.

Hemingway alleged that Zelda sought to destroy her husband, and she purportedly taunted Fitzgerald over his penis size.[156] After examining it in a public restroom, Hemingway confirmed Fitzgerald's penis to be of average size.[156]