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  I keep going back to Pamela Swanigan's magnificent 2024 essay "It’s Time To Give Up Hope For A Better Climate & Get Heroic". Tolkien's Long Defeat, the heroic rearguard action of the Elves of Middle-Earth to keep darkness at bay, has become a major source of inspiration for me as I join my chosen battle lines. We won't win, I know. But we can forestall doom for a time, and protect people and things that are beautiful and worth protecting. https://www.noemamag.com/it...

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  Mamdani 's hackers: New York City's Public Interest Technology initiative encodes a vision of technology as an enabler for ordinary people. ... and 3,000 super-skilled techies applied for 35 jobs, though the paycheck is not what it would be in Big Tech and there's no stock options, because most people want their work to be meaningful. Getting people to click on ads is not meaningful. https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/08/find-yourself-a-city/#to-hack-in h/t @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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  RE: https://mastodon.green/@alberto_cottica/117016646104388804 Very interesting insight from Gabriel Zucman: there is now an international movement for taxing wealth, and important initiatives are afoot. The most important of all is prop 40, California's proposed one-time five per cent tax wealth. It is projected to yield 100 billion dollars! That's as much as one year of income produced in California. I knew the various law proposals etc., but I was not seeing the big picture. #econo...

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  It turns out that welcoming to your country lots of migrants, who tend to be young and highly motivated, is good for employment. And therefore for financing welfare. We knew, but it's nice to see the data. https://mastodon.social/@eunews/116997132869716726 #economics #migration #spain

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  The Age of the Digital Armbreaker is here. @pluralistic@mamot.fr has a compelling post on how the practices of finance (which, let's face it, was always there usury lenders in a trench coat) converge with those of Big Tech. Makes me itch to bring the guillotines out! #finance #bigtech https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/25/cruel-cruelty-oh-cruelty/#digital-arm-breakers

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  "My indicator of economic success for our city - told me the deputy mayor of a small city in Moldova - is this: streets full of happy people." #Brussels

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  Why #Ireland 's EU presidency is compromised. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/30/ireland-big-tech-lapdog-eu-presidency-digital-sovereignty?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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  Impressive: a new law in Italy introduced in 2026 a requirement that digital payments terminals (the machines you touch your cards or phones with) be directly connected to cash registers. This apparent technicality led to an additional 5.3 billion EUR of VAT-taxable revenue base in only four months. The expected extra revenue over 2026 is estimated in nearly 3 billion EUR. This is 100% emersion of previously evaded tax, not new taxation. https://lavoce.info/archives/111749/quando-il-pos-parla-...

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  Ok, Fediverse experiment. I am currently walking the Camino de Santiago. Is anyone else? Would be fun to meet up if itineraries allow. Edit: photo added #caminodesantiago #caminofrances

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  Heh, I missed this petition to ban advertising in public spaces in #Brussels. It is now being discussed by the regional parliament. Will be monitoring it. https://democratie.brussels/initiatives/i-168 #banadvertising

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  Won't you look at that. It seems we have liftoff for an *economic* transition away from fossil fuels. The transition needs to be economic, because some poorer countries rely on fossil fuels to service their debt. So debt cancellation is part of the package. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/29/capitalism-colombia-climate-summit-gustavo-petro?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other #economics #NewEconomicThinking

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  Calling all you #rail and #CrossBorderRail experts in the Fediverse! I am walking the Camino de Santiago, and plan to leave it at or near Leon. How do I get to France and then to Brussels? Should I aim for the Euskotren from San Sebastian to Hendaye? RailEurope wants me to go through... Madrid, but that can't be right.

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  If you live in the European Union, I would ask, as a personal favour, that you consider signing this petition for a tax on great wealth. It is reasonable; it would have major impact if put into place; it is very feasible (no revision of the Treaties needed). It is the brainchild of French economist Thomas Piketty, a leading scholar of inequality. https://tax-the-rich.eu #economics #ClimateCrisis

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  RE: https://mastodon.green/@alberto_cottica/116368064283097406 The European Citizens Initiative to demand, on human rights grounds, the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement has cleared both milestones that require the @EUCommission and Parliament to respond to it. It is a clear win for human rights, especially precious in times like these. Success breeds success, so ripple effects are being observed already. I am cautiously getting optimistic here. THREAD 1/2 #Gaza #Iran #pea...

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  RE: https://mastodon.green/@alberto_cottica/116368064283097406 1/4 I am delighted to announce that the European Citizen Initiative (ECI) asking the EU to suspend the association agreement with Israel on human rights grounds has collected over one million signatures. The @EUCommission and the European Parliament have now a legal obligation to respond. 300K signatures were collected in less than one week! I know this because six days ago I wrote a thread to explain how ECIs work and ask people...

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  Reflecting on this point by @pluralistic: THREAD 1/n "The whole point of the conservative project is to take away choices, and corral us into “preferences” that we disprefer. Eliminate no-fault divorce, suppress the vote, gerrymander the electoral map, cram a binding arbi­tration clause into every terms of service and a noncompete into every labor contract, buy up all your competitors, DRM-lock all the media, ban contraception and abortion, ..."

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  La Belgique a bel et bien un gouvernement austéritaire. Sauf que les belges, ils n'ont pas l'habitude, et donc font l'austérité très mal. Réduire 65% les ressources pour les repas gratuits des élèves sortis de ménages modestes, tout en augmentant les salaires des top managers de 12%? La communication est elle aussi... maladroite. Une directrice d'école wallonne écrit aux ministres: https://www.lesoir.be/740115/article/2026-04-10/ladministration-le-culot-dannoncer...

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  @jwildeboer "Public replies to this toot will show up as comments under the blog post." Hello Jan, may I ask what you use to achieve that?

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  Come on, Hungary! Allez l'Hongrie! You can do it. #hungary2026

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  "[Father of convolutional neural networks Yann] LeCun sees the LLM approach as essentially a dead end." #AI https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-04-01/yann-lecun-artificial-intelligence-pioneer

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  I had managed to miss this magnificent essay from @pluralistic . His main point: what's obnoxious about #AI is not the technology, but the economics. For example, I can easily imagine a world in which LLMs are deployed benevolently by not-for-profit actors of the social and solidarity economy. But AI plus capitalism... ugh. "AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble...

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  Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, is a driving force in the debate on how we realign our economies to realign with human happiness and planetary health. He produced this front page for an imaginary newspaper, "The New Economic Times", and published it as an April's Fool. It's meant to be a joke, but it's almost elegiac: job guarantee, global fund for social protection, polluter tax... We live in the shadow...

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  "every innovation report should have two sections: * Did it deliver on the immediate goals? * What did it do to the city’s capabilities?" https://rainerkattel.substack.com/p/kpis-and-innovation-are-natural-enemies This post is by Rainer Kattel, but it also captures my own uneasiness with "impact assessment" ("not everything that can be counted counts", etc.) #cities #indicators #evaluation

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  If you are a European Union citizen, there is a concrete way you can support a peaceful resolution in Iran and Gaza: you can demand the full suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement in view of Israel’s violations of human rights. #peace #palestine #iran THREAD 1/

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  "Behind any ecological crisis there is a corporation, the State, or an unholy marriage of the two." @timparrique is on fire at #ChangeNow2026

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  "Systems of small non-profits do almost all of the re-using and recycling in France. Meanwhile, every month for-profit startups are launched around re-use and recycle, and they all go bankrupt. And yet, powerful stakeholders keep inviting startups, which don't work, to meetings, whereas non-profits, which do, are considered unserious and unprofessional." #ChangeNow2026

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  Kate Raworth bringing down the house at #ChangeNow2026. Genius format as a circus.

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  How interesting. Mete Coban, Deputy Mayor of London, says data centers in London are in direct competition with new housing. Competition for what? Grid capacity. No spare grid capacity, no authorisation to build new housing. One for @gerrymcgovern #ChangeNow2026 #housing #ai

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  "Cities are decarbonising five times faster than the planet as a whole." Mete Coban, Deputy Mayor of London. Is that true? Do you have a reference, Fediverse? #ClimateCrisis #cities

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  Full house (overfull, even) for the Beyond Growth session at #ChangeNow2026 with Kate Raworth, Olivier De Schutter and others. #NewEconomicThinking