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Lisa Schmeiser

@lschmeiser.bsky.social
2.4K followers 619 following 5.1K posts

Editor in Chief, No Jitter; podcast @ The Incomparable; writer of a Beehiiv newsletter (notes-from-economy-class.beehiiv.com) parent/partner/community volunteer/aspiring long distance swimmer.

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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
A really good book that outlines the importance of connective labor in forming societal buy-in across individual differences is Allison J. Pugh's The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World. Go read it! bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
bookshop.org
The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World
A timely and urgent argument for preserving the work that connects us in the age of automation "A compelling case for valuing care as a societal good and as skilled labor."--The Nation With the rapid ...
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
East Bay Regional Park District has closed its lakes & lagoons for the season, right in time for the usual October heat to settle in. We need to reconfigure budgets to accommodate a few more weeks of lifeguarding every fall:
A screen capture of Weather Underground's projected temperatures for the next week or so; it's gonna be hot, but good luck if you want to swim at a park.
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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 25/09/2026
seeing the coffee interview question go from linkedin to threads to bluesky has been really wild to watch. soon it might be something someone in real life talks about
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The subreddits around relationships already feature posts from people who discover their partners gambled away the kids' college funds, or girls who are being pressured by their gambler boyfriends to "help out" by going into sex work to pay off the debts. What's the next level after that?
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
At long last, a lifetime of being a devoted brand skeptic pays off. Thank you, Penny Power magazine, for the early indoctrination! www.thecut.com/article/is-i...
A quote about some sort of behavior some shoppers apparently do? "Brands today ask customers for unprecedented levels of loyalty in the form of pre-spend requirements, sales-associate relationships, and a whole lot of waiting but then leave us out in the cold, desperate to figure out what we did wrong."
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John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
People have wondered what happens when the web fully rots out from underneath chatbots and search engines. Now we know at least one answer: AI is watching a lot of YouTube nymag.com/intelligence...
If you pay attention to Google's Al interviews - but also responses in chatbots like ChatGPT or on AI search engines like Perplexity - you'll see this all over the place now. You ask a question and the chatbot will generate a response, as expected. In doing so, it will often pull in citations, which it will quote or summarize. A couple of years ago, these were usually websites. Now, your little Al agent will produce information extracted straight from the internet's millions of hours of recordedAs a guy looking to his phone for help with the pile of bike parts - or a sore neck - this mostly feels like progress. On one side, you've got AI models that are getting better at making certain kinds of information legible and accessible and chaining it together; on another, you've got Al doing automatic transcription of enormous quantities of video created by real people with the intention of reaching other real people.
Mileage will vary: In this narrow area, YouTube is naturally full of high-quality information. For health advice, maybe not so much.
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Micah @rincewind.run · 19/09/2026
Discworld QOTD, from The Truth “So... we have what the people are interested in, and human interest stories, which is what humans are interested in, and the public interest, which no one is interested in.”
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Rhetoric scholars, this is your time to shine — point out the ways in which personifying LLMs benefits management & harms labor.
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Annalee @flowerhorne.com · 19/09/2026
This is why I think it's so important to push back against the personification of LLMs. If a person shoots someone while wearing a hand puppet, they can't claim the hand puppet did the murder.
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NotoriousMIZ @screechysaywha.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Stephen Sondheim wrote Assassins about guys who tried to kill presidents. What if we did a musical like that, but for engineering disasters (a la WTYP)
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CDRE Fool Mental Jackass VI @uncle6.org · 18/09/2026
JEDIT - the miserable lives of the yellow-saber Jedi whose job is to provide tech support and IT infrastructure for the Jedi Order in the waning years of the Republic, including supporting those Forcedamn hybrid Holonet meetings. "This saber is 500 years old, of course it won't hold a charge"
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Ra's Al Groh @uwes98.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Adapt Quantum Criminals into an anthology TV series based on Steely Dan characters
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Terence Lau @terencelau.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Live Hard: Hans Gruber's early work with the revolutionary West German Volksfrei Movement through the late 70s and early 80s.
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CDRE Fool Mental Jackass VI @uncle6.org · 18/09/2026
CRONE WARS: think X-Men, but mutant powers manifest not at puberty - but in perimenopause. Yes, all of a sudden, there are thousands of GenX women with superpowers. Hilarity* ensues.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Absolutely deranged pop culture franchises I would launch if I were queen of the world, a series. (Please add your own)
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 18/09/2026
What the actual fuck I do not approve of contemporaries doing this www.nbcnews.com/news/obituar...
nbcnews.com
Singer-songwriter and Broadway composer Duncan Sheik dies at 56
The “Spring Awakening” composer had been receiving medical care for an ailment that left him in “critical but stable” condition, his family said.
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Murshed Zaheed @murshedz.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
“They are going to spend many millions of dollars against Democrats no matter what … Democrats can either welcome their hatred, a la FDR—promise to save jobs and people from A.I.—and reap some of the financial and political upside. Or they can stick with neoliberalism and get it coming and going.”
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
So I enjoyed this piece on Walmart's play for retail customers — it is the long tail from reporting Teri Agins did for "Hijacking the Runway" & the shifting center of gravity for who *makes* America's styles. But I REALLY enjoyed the reader comments. www.thecut.com/article/can-...
thecut.com
Can Walmart Ever Be Cool?
The superstore swears it’s about to become America’s favorite fashion brand … that is, if customers will buy it.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
At the risk of dating myself: 20 year old me would be like, "And it's called a ... web browser? And people will write online? Not just for newspapers?" For a certain cohort of Gen X, the careers we made as adults did not exist when we were in college.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Someone who's well-versed in market positioning should break down the pros and cons of being known as the studio that's trying to make sure nobody sees a documentary everyone knows about: www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politic...
hollywoodreporter.com
Universal Is Getting Cold Feet on Releasing the Elon Musk Documentary (Exclusive)
The Comcast-owned studio is not yet committing to rolling out Alex Gibney's movie that it paid millions to acquire for non-North American release before the political winds shifted.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
A real must-read story on how Congress' proposed legislation to fight organized retail crime could end up assisting ICE in mass deportations: www.retaildive.com/news/how-the...
retaildive.com
How the retail crime bill could bolster ICE
Concerns are mounting that organized retail crime-fighting legislation, which passed the U.S. House and is now before the Senate, could drag retailers into mass deportations that have little to do wit...
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
This paragraph is an incisive critique of why Ed Sheeran's choices matter, and what his choices say about him and his values. defector.com/massive-own-...
The problem with having no spine is that it's pretty easy to get twisted up into a pretzel over something that really has a simple solution. What's so embarrassing about this situation for Sheeran is that he did not even need to take a firm stance on the genocide in Palestine. The statement for Sheeran could have been so much simpler than that: American Billionaires should not get to decide who opens a tour. Ed Sheeran is richer than almost all of the creative people in the world. He is the one percent of the arts. But to Robert Kraft, who is a billionaire, Ed Sheeran is the little ginger he can hire to play at his wedding to a much younger woman Sheeran was given a chance to stand up for the rights of artists to choose what they do on stage, and he balked.
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Kashmir Hill @kashhill.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The guardrails don't work. Again and again and again www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/w...
Screenshot of text: "A report by Anthropic last week on the misuse of A.I. said that “a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen,” where the Houthis have their stronghold, used Claude for “a sustained effort to develop guided weapons.” Despite Anthropic’s safeguards, the company said, the cell proceeded as far as the test firing of a guided rocket.
The Houthis still rely on their Iranian sponsors for the most sophisticated components in their drones and ballistic missiles, but as the Anthropic report suggested, in recent years they have become much more advanced at building their own weapons systems."
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Matt Pearce @mattdpearce.com · 16/09/2026
“A cloud region losing customer data because of an airstrike—I don’t think that’s ever happened before.” www.wsj.com/world/middle...
wsj.com
AWS Says It Can’t Restore Some Data From Mideast Facilities Struck by Iran
Amazon’s announcement is the first indication that some data stored exclusively in Bahrain and the U.A.E could be gone forever.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I need a smartypants who is interested in both economics and pop culture to calculate the sales impact of having a "controversial" Sydney Sweeney ad campaign attached to your brand. There has to be some number justifying the repetitive deployment of "Specific actress makes 'controversial' ad."
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
If my parents had paid a grown woman to clean my room during college, it's unclear who would have died of embarrassment first, me or them: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/13/w...
nytimes.com
Worried About Your College Kid? Now You Can Hire a Local Mom.
At some universities, parents can pay to make sure their children are cared for, the way they were back home.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Guys, I keep looking for posts of all the "protect women's sports" advocates denouncing the AI video of Steve Sarkasian slapping award-winning sports reporter Holly Rowe. Surely people who want to protect women's sports also want to protect women sports journalists, right?
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Thoughts and prayers to all the ambitious Gen Xers I knew in college and beyond who would make a big show of leaving a party all, "I'm going to run for office some day and I can't be seen doing anything incriminating like having fun."
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
The last eleven days of my life have been HECTIC but I'm making it up to you now with a new Notes from the Economy Class on why we hate AI slop: notes-from-economy-class.beehiiv.com/p/the-inhuma...
notes-from-economy-class.beehiiv.com
The inhumane ick of AI slop
Admit it: You can tell when something is slop and it makes you feel kind of gross, right?
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Sharing this @geekwire.com piece on @fxshaw.com's great new adventure in part because it's a great look at one of tech's most effective comms pros. And on a personal note, working with Frank was one of the smoother parts of my job back when I covered MSFT. www.geekwire.com/2026/microso...
geekwire.com
Microsoft comms chief Frank Shaw to exit after nearly three decades shaping the company’s message
It's the end of an era at Microsoft: Frank X. Shaw, the executive who oversaw the tech giant's communications for nearly three decades, first at an external agency and for the last 17 years as one of ...
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Between this, the Flock cameras used to stalk women, the bots used to harass college girls, and the proposed legislation to check children's genitals, it's clear the end goal is to legally codify women's lack of privacy & thus advance the idea we are property to be monitored from birth.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
" a network of anon burner accounts ostensibly discussing college sports. But they have another goal: destroying young girls’ lives" Why do women pick the bear? 'Tis a puzzlement!
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
... then wouldn't it make sense to rename the state Erie as a way of reflecting the importance of the lake powering its economy and identity?
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Grateful for the context that @crampell.bsky.social provides here: we have someone who has now promised $13000+ to Americans and delivered $0.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
A paragraph like this is both right AND a doorway into a whole separate piece examining how "tech is the heart of the new counterculture" shifted after Web 1.0, and how that shapes our expectations of what technology can/should do. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/o...
"Coders at these labs have sunk untold resources into creating the ideal coding interface. What would a purpose-built plumber’s interface look like? Could it prepare a daily schedule with tools and parts lists, keep customers up-to-date on expected arrival times, take incoming calls and schedule new appointments in open slots and then send out all the bills? Some set of A.I.-enabled devices and processes would surely allow a hotel maid to clean more rooms faster with less hassle and physical strain. But none of that will exist unless someone who understands the technology also takes the time to understand the job."
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I love a commitment to a bit: www.404media.co/doctor-doom-...
404media.co
Doctor Doom Thanked Seattle for All the Surveillance Cameras
‘We must work to crush any dissent to Doom’s vision of public safety,’ the Marvel supervillain told the city as it considered multiple surveillance proposals.
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 09/09/2026
I’m old enough to remember people calling them the ethical ai company.
prospect.org
Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists - The American Prospect
New hires and comments in interviews show that the AI giant is using its capabilities against dissenters.
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Sheera Frenkel @sheeraf.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I won’t name names, because I don’t want to add to the obvious opsec/privacy problems, but posting photos of what Meta’s new AI bot is doing to help organize your life is not a great idea. Seeing people post the name of their therapist, their kid’s tutoring schedule, and wife’s restaurant pick.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Oh, for public editors to explain newsroom decisions like, "Here's why the president lying is not considered newsworthy."
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
"Who owns a reporter's byline?" is about to become a real interesting question.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Several kids in my Girl Scout navigate a range of food allergies & I'm psyched the scouts will be offering a cookie with a recipe designed to avoid 9 major food allergens: www.girlscouts.org/en/footer/pr...
girlscouts.org
Girl Scouts of the USA Debuts Patch Pals™, Its First Dog Cookie, and Girl Scout Sparkables™, Its First Allergy-Friendly Cookie, ahead of the 2027 Cookie Season
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Did I ask to live in a Philip K. Dick story? www.404media.co/a-secretive-...
404media.co
A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over
404 Media is revealing the name of Border Patrol's predictive policing units, which analyze financial data and have local cops pull people over. The people are not suspected of any particular crime.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
New, in Notes from the Economy Class: People are about to get real judgy about the differences between those who scroll and those who turn the page. notes-from-economy-class.beehiiv.com/p/reading-th...
notes-from-economy-class.beehiiv.com
Reading the room you're not allowed into
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
New, in Notes from the Economy Class: People are about to get real judgy about the differences between those who scroll and those who turn the page. notes-from-economy-class.beehiiv.com/p/reading-th...
notes-from-economy-class.beehiiv.com
Reading the room you're not allowed into
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
I have heard a lot of rumblings about data sovereignty and technological sovereignty, and I think it would be foolish to pretend that "how do we get off the American platform?" is not going to be a strategic question for multinational corporations and other countries' governments.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Salesforce changed its disaggregated revenue reporting to reflect its AI-led Agentforce business on 5/1/26. (investor.salesforce.com/news/news-de...) Microsoft is now changing its revenue reporting structure for similar reasons: www.wsj.com/tech/ai/micr...
wsj.com
Microsoft to Change Reporting Structure to Reflect Effects of AI
Microsoft is changing its reporting structure from three segments to two — Agents and Infra and Devices and Consumer — as the company responds to changes brought about by artificial intelligence.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
With the onset of Meteorological Fall, permit me to recommend my feature seasonal blog, California Fall Color. Here is their handy guide to where you'll want to go and when: californiafallcolor.com/2026/08/31/2...
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I can't stop thinking about how Anne Frank died of typhus. How is this different?
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Documentarian Alex Gibney, on Elon Musk: "A dangerous huckster is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data." www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie...
hollywoodreporter.com
Elon Musk Unmasked in Alex Gibney Documentary: “Insane a Person This Chaotic Has So Much Power”
He is the richest man on earth. An explosive new film from the Oscar-winning director suggests he may also be the most dangerous.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
No, it's because the musical edition didn't play in enough theaters: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC77...
youtube.com
Gladiator II: The Musical - SNL
YouTube video by Saturday Night Live
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