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The most unlikeable among them aren’t totally unredeemable. For the most part, they are smart, reasonable people taking desperate actions inspired by desperate circumstances.

The movement’s dogmatic commitment to nonviolence, he argued, was based on a cherry-picked reading of history. Malm accused advocates of both strategic and principled nonviolence in the climate movement of having ignored violent flanks that complemented the effective civil disobedience movements of prior generations. “The civil rights movement won the [Civil Rights] Act of 1964,” he wrote, “because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power.” (His emphasis.)

Earth First!, ALF, and ELF—now even more marginal than in their modest peak in the 1990s and 2000s—mingled “punk and hardcore with dumpster diving and veganism, spiritual voyages and holistic meditation with squatting and guerrilla gardening, fanzines and herbs,” Malm wrote. “All those thousands of monkeywrenching actions achieved little if anything and had no lasting gains to show for them. They were not performed in a dynamic relation to a mass movement, but largely in a void.” When the climate movement finally “took off,” it did so “because it had no connections to the ecosystem of EF!, ALF and ELF.”

The film offers a relatively happy ending that will alarm more conservative viewers. There’s no hero cop, for instance, who shows the crew a righteous path away from property destruction. And they don’t regret their actions.

It’d be ludicrous, Malm acknowledged, to expect saboteurs to systematically dismantle the fossil fuel economy one homemade incendiary at a time. In this and other work, he’s emphasized that only states can do that. Both he and the film’s protagonists, accordingly, articulate eco-terrorism as a kind of DIY market signal meant to force states’ hand into doing something they otherwise wouldn’t

Activists arrested at a music festival protesting a proposed police training facility in Atlanta—to be built on a razed forest—are being slapped with terrorism charges; one land defender was already killed.

The result is an uncomfortable disparity between who does the work that enables these AI models to function and who gets to control and profit from them.

In that way, modern AI research resembles a digital “enclosure of the commons,” whereby the informational heritage of humanity—a collective treasure that cannot really be owned by anyone—is seen by corporations primarily as a source of potential profit.

“There’s a fire in the labor movement, and this election is just a reflection of that,” said Vicente, the Region 9 director. “We have independent unions across this country popping up left and right. The Teamsters are reforming, the UAW is reforming, and we see ourselves not just as the directors of these regions now, but as militants in a labor movement that’s going to have to fight back against the corporations that have reaped untold amounts of wealth off of our backs.”

The UAW is the largest union for manufacturing workers in the United States, but it is also the largest for graduate student workers. UAWD reflects such cross-sector membership, and the caucus’s room at the convention offered a rebuke to concerns about whether grad students and autoworkers can coexist in the same union.

Fain’s father and three of his grandparents were UAW members, and he sees himself as part of a movement that has been decades in the making.

“We’ve exceeded our expectations and punched way above our weight class. All we really want is union democracy so we can make decisions on behalf of the membership at this convention. We don’t want top-down strategy because look where it got us. The membership doesn’t want to go there again.”

Browning, the vice president and Administration Caucus member, said that they would not go into negotiations as a divided union. “Let’s support our president and International Executive Board,” he told the crowd. One reformer did his part to encourage such unity by standing behind the delegates from one of the most recalcitrant UAW regions, loudly shaming them into standing up.

Many will wonder why these firms, if they are so concerned with their images as benevolent world-shapers (in Mayne’s words) and stewards of the environment, would even take on a project as obscene as The Line. The answer, of course, is money and fame. Indeed, the participation of the likes of Morphosis and Adjaye Associates makes a lot more sense if one dispels the notion of the architect as an artist or artisan, devoted to crafting lovely little things at a critical remove from society. Thom Mayne, David Adjaye, and all the others are not individual great men and women of the arts. They are at their core bosses: capitalists running firms employing the thousands of often well-meaning people lured into the field by architecture schools and the promise that they, too, could one day have their name on a building, only to instead be subjugated to ten hour days of drudgery and the other myriad indignities of wage labor. And so it goes.

The interesting thing about the United States’ system of capitalism is that it’s quite decentralized: the Fed only controls indirect levers of power like the base interest rate and other, private institutions use these simple signals as barometers for their collective action. When the Fed began raising rates last year, everyone downstream began tightening the screws on their investments, and so on. When interest rates rise, private equity and venture capitalists know that their capital pool will dry up and so they direct their portfolio companies to cut headcount, who then cut their suppliers and so on.

I visited 1455 Market this week before Tuesday’s hellacious deluge and after the news that Reddit will soon move out of the space that it occupies in the 45-year-old structure. The internet forum will relocate by September to 303 Second St., a 10-story office complex at Folsom and Second streets.

However, stock trading should always be looked at skeptically when analyzing financial issues

In the 1990s Liemandt was the golden boy of enterprise software

Others say Crossover is running the cloud equivalent of a software sweatshop.

Disgruntled employees be damned—the pool of skilled workers in emerging countries appears to be bottomless.

The music Heidecker did dabble in was heavy on the comedy: there were spoof Bob Dylan tracks and a band called the Yellow River Boys, whose album Urinal St Station featured tracks such as Slurp it Up and Hot Piss Drinker, along with a blurb that read: “THE album for those of us who believe that the human mouth smiles the most when it is being used as a makeshift urinal. Underground leaders of the pee-freak scene, your shame no longer has to be private!”

I’m trying to be an antidote to the toxic shit on the other side of comedy.