Curt N
LightNews LightNews
curtnaus.bsky.social
Curt N
@curtnaus.bsky.social
630 followers 720 following 1.6K posts
He/him. Husband, father, citizen. Mostly messing around here. Not loving the Era of Artificial Reality despite enjoying escapist activities. There’s a difference.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Curt N
chadloder.bsky.social
These ridiculous mega-projects like "datacenters in space" (doomed by thermodynamics) make a LOT more sense when you realize they're massive Ponzi schemes designed to transfer wealth from pension funds to VC's through "fee stacking."

It's the old Assets Under Management con. It should be illegal.
carlquintanilla.bsky.social Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 7d
“.. Skeptics believe the technical risks are being underestimated and say space-based data centers won’t be competitive on cost, especially if power and other constraints ease on the ground.”

@wsj.com
www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-a...
December 11, 2025 at 9:29 AM
Reposted by Curt N
pgourevitch.bsky.social
There are 56,000 of them, the wealthiest 0.001% of the planet with at least €254 million in assets. Together, they now own three times more than the poorest half of humanity or 2.8 billion adults …Back in 1995, the 0.001% held "only" twice as much as the poorest half.

www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/a...
The ultra-rich are claiming an increasing share of global wealth, report shows
The wealth of the ultra-rich is undergoing a historic surge. This is the key takeaway of the third major report of the World Inequality Lab co-directed by French economist Thomas Piketty, which emphas...
www.lemonde.fr
December 10, 2025 at 12:57 PM
curtnaus.bsky.social
Bucks (school board) no longer sucks
taniel.bsky.social Taniel @taniel.bsky.social · Nov 5
—Coloradoans fund free school meals
—JD's half-brother loses
—PA Dems flip Erie County exec, Bucks DA + sheriff
—PA Dems oust all GOPers from Bucks school boards once ground 0 of conservative takeover
—Charlotte approves transit tax
—Dems flip CT towns like New Britain.
(And that's not all!)
November 5, 2025 at 6:30 AM
Reposted by Curt N
the-syllabus.bsky.social
Capitalism’s promise of prosperity has always been shadowed by ecological destruction and persistent exploitation. Our podcast of the week excavates capitalism's critics, many of whom anticipated crises now intensifying.

With @johncassidysays.bsky.social on @climatepod.bsky.social

buff.ly/x4otfzM
October 30, 2025 at 12:03 PM
Reposted by Curt N
abigaillarson.com
Guillermo del Toro on wealth: "a wealthy man is a man who has enough, not a man that needs more. If you have enough to invite someone for a beer? You're rich. If you have a yacht, planes, islands, and you still need more? You're not rich."
Guillermo del Toro quote "...think about wealth for me for example. A wealthy man that has enough..." "not a man that needs more. If you have enough to invite somebody to beer..." "...you're rich. If you have, whatever-" "- yachts and planes and islands and you STILL need more? You're not rich."
October 27, 2025 at 1:37 AM
Reposted by Curt N
bicycleidiot.bsky.social
RIP Kaleb Horton
kalebhorton.ghost.io/2025-so-far/
I also have advice. Everybody loves reading advice on the computer, so I'll share it: the best thing you can do right now is log off as hard as you can. Go outside, talk to people in real life where it's actually kind of rude to talk about the news, try to actually see the friends you usually just text message. Go for a long drive and turn the phone off while you do it. Get back into your hobbies or pick one and learn it for a while. Watch one of those studio movies that reviews called "wildly miscalculated" and you haven't seen since high school. Play an album you like but find embarrassing. Go to free community events even if they sound stupid. If you take the freeway, try the surface streets. Go to a bad diner and just order some bad coffee because even bad coffee is good coffee. You can't help anybody when you're exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of "I would love to be dead right now" on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that's wonderful because we're not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.
September 27, 2025 at 1:01 PM
Reposted by Curt N
gailsimone.bsky.social
I hope you all read this from me.
rphutch1975.bsky.social The Ghost of Future Xmas Past💙💛 @rphutch1975.bsky.social · Sep 13
To describe the current state of the world as a daily show of deepening horrors is a massive understatement.

However, I read something today that I think more people should see and read.

I hope she doesn't mind my me sharing it here.

I'd rather be an X-Men by @gailsimone.bsky.social
September 13, 2025 at 4:53 PM
Reposted by Curt N
whstancil.bsky.social
I want Democrats who understand that the goal is to lay waste to Trump, his toadies, his movement, and his party, and that after you’ve done that you can turn the country over to the survivors and they can quibble over how to fund the social safety net with less-than-existential stakes
August 2, 2025 at 1:56 PM
curtnaus.bsky.social
I just goddamn hate that the argument against taking cell phones away from kids in school is mostly “but if someone breaks in and shoots at them, they won’t be able to tell their parents whether they’re ok”.

As the framers intended, I guess.
July 30, 2025 at 6:30 PM
curtnaus.bsky.social
This is so goddamn good. More people need to be talking like this.

*Of course* Sam Altman wants basically all the money in the world.

That’s how he creates his spacefaring race of AI agents who will conduct commerce at an infinitely rising rate. Yay, more money for Sam.
June 10, 2025 at 2:57 PM
Reposted by Curt N
rebeccasolnit.bsky.social
There was a nice conversation about this on Outrage and Optimism. www.outrageandoptimism.org/episodes/the...
The End of Oil? Inside the Hidden Decline of Fossil Fuels | Earth Day Special
In this Earth Day special, we sit down with Mark Campanale, founder of Carbon Tracker and ask, are we witnessing the beginning of the end for fossil fuels?
www.outrageandoptimism.org
May 11, 2025 at 11:02 PM
Reposted by Curt N
jennamclaughlin.bsky.social
My story breaking this news exclusively was 7K+ words and had almost all of this in it, and more:
www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...
April 18, 2025 at 1:58 AM
Reposted by Curt N
naomiaklein.bsky.social
THE RISE OF END TIMES FASCISM

My first major piece of the new Trump era, co-written with @astra.bsky.social.

The governing ideology of the far right has become a
monstrous, supremacist survivalism.

Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
The rise of end times fascism
The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them
www.theguardian.com
April 13, 2025 at 1:32 PM
Reposted by Curt N
bitshammer.bsky.social
April 11, 2025 at 5:53 AM
Reposted by Curt N
altcdc.altgov.info
We heard the rumors. Maybe president panican will declare martial law, maybe he won’t. But do you think this clown car of incompetent sycophantic signal leakers can keep all 300 million of us down? Absolutely not. We will not comply. Here’s some advice from Oliver Kornetzke. Let’s get weird.
You want to know what non-compliance looks like? It looks like whatever the hell you want it to look like. It’s not about heroism or martyrdom. It’s about being a magnificent, ungovernable pain in the ass. It’s about weaponizing inconvenience, absurdity, and joy against a system that demands fear and obedience. Throw a wrench in the works—everywhere, all the time. Fill their inboxes with existential poetry. Tape absurd messages in public places: “Authoritarianism gives you hemorrhoids.” Get petty. Get weird. Flush their toilet paper. Release crickets in inconvenient places. Spoil their scripts, trip their rhythm, yank the narrative from their hands. Because here’s the ugly truth they don’t want you to hear: authoritarianism only works when the people allow it to work. It’s a performance, a bluff, a collective hypnosis. Break the spell. Mock it. Undermine it with your refusal to kneel. But here’s the thing—this has to be everywhere. Everyone. We need resistance so widespread, so creatively chaotic, so utterly unmanageable, that the regime cracks under the weight of its own overreach. Be bold. Be clever. Be feral. And above all—DO NOT COMPLY.
April 11, 2025 at 1:07 AM
Reposted by Curt N
clarajeffery.bsky.social
5/ You can listen to it on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/4...

Truly, a must-listen.
40 Acres and a Lie
News Podcast · It’s often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But “40 acres and a mule” was more than that. It was real. 40 Acres and a Lie tells the history of an often-misunderstood governm...
podcasts.apple.com
April 10, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Reposted by Curt N
leahreich.com
I had a very intense revelation about social media, tech, and friendships thanks to a deeply personal moment in therapy, and I share it all with you this week in my newsletter.

www.leahreich.com/the-great-va...
This is a deeply vulnerable thing to share in a public way. We are way off the usual path of a tech newsletter. But I share it because, when I told a friend about this incredibly embarrassing breakthrough, he replied that he thinks most people view friendship as a validation pact: we talk about how other people behave toward us, and we each tell the other that we were in the right. And I'd thought it was cynical and depressing enough when my therapist had said "most people have much more superficial relationships than you might expect"!! Then I stopped and realized: Oh my god no wonder social media took over our lives. And then I stopped and realized: Oh my god we're so much more deeply fucked than I ever imagined. Sorry everyone, but it turns out those tech jerkoffs really do understand how friendship works.
April 9, 2025 at 10:56 PM
Reposted by Curt N
lamentablyawake.bsky.social
Love that capitalism is the best possible system that can never be replaced and that we're all going to suffer terrible hardship because the winners of capitalism asked an LLM how to do tariffs.
April 3, 2025 at 11:23 AM
curtnaus.bsky.social
I’m at a massive trade deficit with the Girl Scouts. Curse them and their delicious cookies!

Working on a tariff implementation plan now.
April 3, 2025 at 12:31 AM
Reposted by Curt N
jay.bsky.team
The future is a web of branching paths, and each choice opens up new possibilities as it closes others. This is as true for a civilization as it is for an individual. The more our collective intelligence can inform each choice, the better our chances of finding paths through to a beautiful future.
graphic of branching lifelines, with the path taken traced through it. past paths no longer in play are greyed out, possible future paths spread out like a network of roots in front
March 31, 2025 at 6:22 AM
Reposted by Curt N
bcmerchant.bsky.social
More and more people are saying this
March 28, 2025 at 2:05 AM
Reposted by Curt N
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
”Miyazaki said, 'I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.' He also said, 'I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.'"
OpenAI CEO Responds to ChatGPT Users Creating Studio Ghibli-Style AI Images
The latest version of OpenAI's image generation technology has resulted in a flood of users sharing images transformed in the style of Studio Ghibli.
variety.com
March 27, 2025 at 12:01 PM
Reposted by Curt N
designthinking.lol
Thank you! It worries me a great deal. I'm trying to keep my own kid on the pens and paper for as long as I possibly can. I did a little follow up to this strip, too. The whole situation makes me feel so sad and angry.
March 27, 2025 at 9:37 AM
Reposted by Curt N
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social
NEW: @motherjones.com reports that one of the men renditioned to El Salvador is Neri Alvarado, who was working in Dallas as a baker. An ICE agent told him they were questioning all men with tattoos.

Neri has an AUTISM AWARENESS TATTOO in honor of his 15-year-old brother with autism.
A picture of Neri Alvarado, a young man, standing next to his brother, who is a young teenager. Both are smiling for the camera and wearing matching shirts. Neri has his arm around his brother. A picture of Neri's tattoo, which is an autism ribbon in rainbow colors with his brother's name "Neryelson" written on it.
March 26, 2025 at 7:49 PM
Reposted by Curt N
jeisinger.bsky.social
NEW: How Elon Musk’s SpaceX secretly allows investment from China.

They are funneled through offshore secrecy havens, according to court documents.

@justinelliott.bsky.social & @josh-kaplan.bsky.social:

www.propublica.org/article/elon...
March 26, 2025 at 10:43 AM