On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Grab your pens and shovels, rabble rouser rebels. Take to the streets. Dig in for the long haul! Globally, communities of creative resistance are saying no to bullies. Artists and scientists, homemakers and caretakers, workers and kindreds in kindness and LOVE. — Unite. CREATE! Imagine. Fear not!” —Sheree Fitch
A government can take away your rights, but no one can take away your belief in those rights. The first points of challenge to fascism are memory and history.” … “I often quote my friend Bill McKibben [the environmentalist]. We were sitting on a concrete floor at an activist space during the Paris climate treaty process [the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015]. Somebody walked up and asked him a question he gets asked all the time. ‘What’s the best thing I can do as an individual?’ He said, ‘Stop being an individual.’ You may have your own quirky playlist and eye-makeup techniques, but you also have this solidarity. When you act, you act with others.”
Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them
An adult choosing to offload a task they understand is making a tradeoff between decreasing effort and increasing efficiency. The capacity to do that task independently exists. The choice is deliberate. The atrophy is (probably) recoverable.
A child offloading a task they’ve never learned to perform is not making a choice. They are skipping a developmental step that was never developed. The capacity doesn’t exist yet. The foreclosure may be permanent—and because they have no independent baseline, they cannot recognize what they’re losing.
The downside of adult offloading is people get less sharp. The downside of adolescents growing up delegating to AI is a generation that was never sharp to begin with. Protecting the space our children need to develop the foundational skills of thinking is now a non-negotiable.
Final report of the Expert Panel on the 28 April 2025 blackout in continental Spain and Portugal
The investigation concludes that the blackout resulted from a combination of many interacting factors, including oscillations, gaps in voltage & reactive power control, differences in voltage regulation practices, rapid output reductions & generator disconnections in Spain, and uneven stabilisation capabilities. These factors led to fast increases of voltage & cascading generation disconnections in Spain, resulting in the blackout in continental Spain & Portugal.”
Postal banking once made Canada Post profitable — and could again
Canada Post offered “postal banking” for more than a century.
And it was a big money-maker, even though Canada Post typically offered its banking customers higher interest rates on their savings accounts than the private banks did. The private banks never liked the competition, and continually pressed Ottawa to end postal banking, which it did in 1969.
I’m Russian. Here’s how propaganda really works (YouTube)
propaganda doesn’t need to make you stupid, it only needs to make you tired”
A population that’s disengaged, cynical, and emotionally exhausted is far easier to manage than one that’s angry and curious.”
propaganda teaches you that paying attention is pointless”
