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Carl T. Bergstrom

@carlbergstrom.com

When the head of ICE starts talking about how great it would be to have Amazon Prime for shipping human beings to a concentration camp in El Salvador that no one ever leaves, you’ve gone way past “it could never happen here.”

ICE director envisions Amazon-like mass deportation system: ‘Prime, but with human beings’ • Michigan Advance

The leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that his dream for the agency is squads of trucks rounding up immigrants for deportation the same way that Amazon trucks crisscross American citi...

michiganadvance.com

April 9, 2025 at 10:42 PM

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Samantha Keely Smith

@samanthakeelysmith.bsky.social

Here I Lay Me Down
60 in x 68 in, oil on canvas, 2023

( in the studio )

#contemporarypainting
#landscapeofthepsyche
#innerworlds #samanthakeelysmith
#lightinthedarkness #resilience #hope #riseup

March 30, 2025 at 11:01 PM

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The Oatmeal

@theoatmeal.bsky.social

Helpful advice

March 14, 2025 at 9:36 PM

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Leah Reich

@leahreich.com

Speaking of tech, this week I wrote about gamification, Taylorism, Apple Watch (again), Duolingo, and how all the data we collect and that gets collected about us loses sight of what's most important: The human being. You.

www.leahreich.com/ungamify-you...

Do you remember about a decade ago, when empathy was a big industry buzzword? Everyone was so eager to show how empathetic they were that even companies were trying to prove it. The height of absurdity was when the Harvard Business Review published an article entitled – I wish I were joking – Corporate Empathy is Not an Oxymoron, which argued that empathy can and should be measured. That we should have an empathy metric to better measure how empathetic companies can be. I wrote a whole thing about how angry this made me, and isn't it fun, I'm still angry. But now I'm angrier, and for even bigger reasons. It's like every aspect of our lives have been Taylorized. Everything we do and feel needs to be measured, weighed, compared, increased, reduced, improved, and all in the service of...who? Or what? The big data that help these companies drive up their stock prices, and the little data that help us feel like we have some measure of control in lives that are ever more at the mercy of the various technologies we're beholden to?

March 13, 2025 at 2:04 PM

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Samantha Keely Smith

@samanthakeelysmith.bsky.social

Days Of Splendor
60 in x 78 in, oil on canvas, 2023

(in the studio)

#contemporarypainting
#landscapeofthepsyche
#innerworlds #samanthakeelysmith
#lightinthedarkness #resilience #hope

March 8, 2025 at 7:48 PM

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Leah Reich

@leahreich.com

In this week’s newsletter I wrote about innovation, how so many tech products exist to solve problems created by other tech products, and how much I hate my Apple Watch.

www.leahreich.com/we-dont-need...

Real, deep innovation is so much more than having a cool new idea no one's thought of, and then hyping that idea all the way to market. For every product release or feature update you have suffered through, I can promise there's at least one user researcher somewhere in the background begging people to listen to the fact that people don't want it, don't need it, aren't interested in it. That maybe what we should do is listen to the problem they're experiencing and understand it fully, so we can try to come up with a solution that actually fixes it, rather than one that kicks the problem down the worse or compounds it so we have to come up with another solution down the road.

February 20, 2025 at 2:58 AM

Brian

@dbbrian.bsky.social

The Cinodrome, a hidden gem of Maker YouTube.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXJW...

Designing a HOME OFFICE That Disappears in Seconds

YouTube video by Dave Fogler at the Cinodrome

www.youtube.com

February 20, 2025 at 1:01 PM

Brian

@dbbrian.bsky.social

“But every minute I take back – every minute you take back – is a minute we take away from them.”

Leah Reich @leahreich.com · Jan 9

Maybe now is not the time, and I swear I am going to move off substack, but I wrote about what constant information and emotion is doing to my brain. Your brain too? Read it here.

open.substack.com/pub/leahreic...

Maybe you’re right. Things do feel remarkably bad, like the wheels are really coming off everywhere you turn. Nothing feels safe or even particularly reliable. There’s a pervasive sense of unease and danger that feels more heightened and more insistent than I can remember ever feeling, maybe in my lifetime.
But I keep thinking about that feeling I had last Friday, the sense that I absolutely had to write about this subject that, under normal circumstances, I almost undoubtedly would never have written about. This feels like something I need to unpack – something we all need to unpack, frankly – because we as individuals have to start doing something about it to save ourselves. No one else is coming to save us, obviously.

January 9, 2025 at 1:59 PM

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Leah Reich

@leahreich.com

I need everyone to understand something VERY IMPORTANT: the tech industry is made of people who see a lot of data and insights, cherry pick the one graph that says what they like, then use it to "prove" what they want to happen. This is how the entire industry works. These people are mercenaries.