Maximalism

Ex-workers on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette founded a cooperative news organization, creating an employee-owned alternative in the media sector. The initiative reflects an emerging model in response to labor conflicts in the press.

“The United States is under surveillance through an increasingly extensive, technologically advanced, and connected surveillance network.

In some cities, such as Houston, Texas, the true scope of this system is a secret. Law enforcement claims that all of this is for public safety: to prevent crimes and facilitate investigations.

Critics consider it an invasion of privacy, susceptible to misuse, and a covert tool that helps ICE in President Trump's deportation campaign.

One company is bearing the brunt of this backlash: Flock Safety. Its network of AI-powered license plate readers spans more than 6,000 communities, generating 20 billion vehicle scans per month. Some vigilante groups have been disabling Flock devices. Social media is full of tips on how to block or disable the cameras.” 1♥1📣

“Senate Bill 1174, introduced by Republican state Senator Suzette Valladares of Santa Clarita, would give contractors with qualifying employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) a modest preference when bidding on state-funded Caltrans construction projects: 2 percent for companies with between 30 and 49 percent ESOP ownership, 3 percent for those with between 50 and 99 percent ownership, and 4 percent for those with 100 percent ownership. Contractors that are signatories to a qualifying collective bargaining agreement or master labor agreement would receive an additional percentage point.”

Its physical location opened its doors on November 15, 2025. "There was a very community atmosphere," Matthew Rivera, a Washington D.C. resident who was there that day, told Inequality.org . "In the end, it was a success for the community."

Today, the bookstore continues to operate both as a place to buy books and as a community space for public education. According to its managers, these differences are intentional and a consequence of its ownership structure.

To be born, the Pascual Workers Cooperative Society had to pay, since 1985, a toll of blood and death, survive more than a thousand days of strike, economic hardships for workers and their families, the loss of their original plants, and government indifference. Forty-one years later, the sugary drinks tax, their expulsion from schools, and a market favoring transnational soda companies have it – again – against the ropes.

Philippe Brun, candidate in the socialist primaries, understood that the gap between gross salary and net salary, devoured by taxes, fees, and contributions of all kinds, annihilated the acceptance of the French social model. To increase the wages of the working population, he wants to introduce a progressive General Social Contribution (CSG), reducing it for employees earning less than 4,000 euros gross per month.

Another good idea - and obvious but taboo - is the forgiveness of the public debt of states accumulated by the ECB. It is made by Melenchon, a bad spokesperson for a necessary proposal.

"One of the great problems of left-wing politics is that precisely the people that Democrats, liberals, and socialists believe should be most enthusiastic about new and ambitious government programs designed to help them are often the least enthusiastic, and they often vote for the party that wants to cut public spending.

One of the reasons, and one that I think we don't talk about enough, is that their experience with government has often been terrible. Their experience with government programs designed to help them is not only inefficient, but also punitive, humiliating, and controlling.

That is because, at times, those programs are designed to humiliate them, punish them, and control them."

"Meta reached a historic agreement on Wednesday with 47 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories, agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in fines and make major changes to its products following accusations that it endangered minors with addictive social media platforms."

"Meta also agreed to limit the time teenagers can spend on its platforms and ban features that encourage mental health problems, which is a direct blow to the core of the company's business: user engagement for advertising."

“Cambodian artists, engineers, and other creative professionals are being invited to work across various disciplines to imagine greener and more equitable futures, as part of the launch of the Solarpunk Cambodia initiative for 2026, ahead of the Clean Energy Week held in September.”

“Solarpunk Cambodia describes itself as a collective of "entrepreneurs and dreamers, artists and neighbors" aligned with the global Solarpunk movement and the Seapunk community of Southeast Asia.”

If summer already seemed like an invasion, now they also go off-road to train. The races are the least of it, but they are significant for being the tip of the iceberg.

"With almost two million participants in mountain races in France, the number of competitions organized throughout the country has skyrocketed. Now it is demanded that this enthusiasm be accompanied by greater respect for local communities and the environment."

Why does sport have to be a sort of exhibitionist expiation? Wasn't Holy Week and the penitents already enough?

In case it wasn't clear that the development of humanoids is oriented towards creating robotic soldiers for the war that the powers are preparing for.

X, like the One Ring in "The Lord of the Rings," corrupts whoever controls it. Possessing it gives a sense of power, but ultimately it deforms you and isolates you (...) It is true that Twitter allows new ideas to spread through society at an unprecedented speed. But those ideas are transformed in a hostile ideological environment, where complex thoughts are reduced to slogans, the currency is the cheers of supporters, and attention depends on conflict.

The platform's algorithmic preference for new and controversial ideas could temporarily give a voice to those who previously had none (...) It favors ideas and voices that resist censorship, spark controversy, and excite supporters. It discards ideas and voices that require nuance or seek a balance between conflicting values and positions (...).

Musk acquired Twitter in 2022. But the damage Twitter caused to Democrats in 2024, and still causes them today, did not come from Musk's management; it came from what they said when the platform had a more Democratic stance and they mistook retweets for persuasion (...)

What we consider reasonable to say, or even think, is based on what those around us say and think. We are all creatures of convention. These platforms surround us with irrational and antisocial voices, which are almost always more interesting than reasonable and polite ones. This can have useful consequences, since every society perpetuates some injustice through convention and courtesy. But it can also lead to strange and destructive outcomes, when attention is focused on people unfit for leadership and political elites lose sight of how unpleasant their ideas have become.

Politics, throughout the Western world, has become more chaotic and uncontrolled since we began delegating our worldview and ourselves to algorithms that only seek engagement and profit. Making the general environment of political communication more hysterical and scandalous does not generate fairer societies or wiser leaders.

Deliberative habits are good for democracies, but bad for retweets; choosing words carefully is a virtue for a president, but not for an artist or influencer».

According to Jonathan Haidt, TikTok offers you new stimuli every few seconds. This bombards the brain with fast dopamine at ages when the brain is plastic. In doing so, it "rewires" the brain's reward system. That is why Gen Z, the first to have TikTok between the ages of six and twelve, has widespread attention difficulties and why when they reach adulthood they declare finding life empty of meaning, without purpose. Purpose is linked to the "slow dopamine" of rationality, the cause-effect relationship, learning, reading, temporal perspective...