iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Justin Mackie

Brent Toderian @brenttoderian.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Finish this sentence: “The biggest obstacle to actually turning MY city into a better city for people is __________________________.”

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Reposted by Justin Mackie

Saganism @sagan.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

"If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves." - Carl Sagan, Pale blue dot

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

Hegseth needs to be fired ASAP. He repeatedly lied on TV about the Signal leak to duck accountability. What message does this send to the troops and civilian military contractors with top secret clearance?

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

The U.S. Travel Association reports 66.5 million international arrivals in 2023. They spent a whopping $160 billion ($129B leisure and $31B business). Note U.S. Travel & Tourism supports roughly 18 million American jobs overall; the jobs can’t be easily offshored. What happens now?

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.” -Carl Sagan

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Reposted by Justin Mackie

Chris Tomlinson @cltomlinson.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Loose lips sink ships, which is why the Pentagon slaps a classification on almost everything. I was an intelligence soldier and a war correspondent, I've never seen an unclassified attack plan. Hegseth should face charges. www.houstonchronicle.com/business/col... @houstonchronicle.com #txlege

houstonchronicle.com

Tomlinson: I’d have gone to jail for those Signal texts

All war plans are classified before the attack, people are punished for leaking them beforehand.

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Reposted by Justin Mackie

WeRateDogs @weratedogs.com · 12/03/2025

This is Tellen. She went to work with her human today. The only agenda item on her calendar is dropping toys in the hallway until someone plays with her. 14/10

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Kara Swisher’s essay on the tech titans is so good—the deft framing, the wit—that I quickly bought her Burn Book: A Love Story. Here is the tech titan essay: www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

theatlantic.com

Move Fast and Destroy Democracy

Silicon Valley’s titans have decided that ruling the digital world is not enough.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Social media posts are now “thought crimes” that can get legal visitors deported. Obvious 1st Amendment violation. When you punish folks for merely stating an unpopular opinion without an accompanying malign action, this is the path to hell.

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Reposted by Justin Mackie

Richard Hanania @hananiarichard.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

I thought censorship was the worst thing you can do to the public square. Musk has shown there is something worse. He doesn't want you to read less biased sources of news or info, he wants to make you into Catturd. On Musk's war on the human intellect. www.richardhanania.com/p/liberals-o...

richardhanania.com

Liberals Only Censor. Musk Seeks to Lobotomize.

The public square is turning into a grotesque idiocracy

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

You’re right. The lack of links beyond their own website is a problem. No credit to the OP.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

How can I buy long puts or synthetic puts on crypto? Multi-year tenor.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

Nice chart. 👍🏼 I would love to see effective tax rate by income bin with a wealth overlay. I last saw this in ProPublica’s Secret IRS files. But, the guy who delivered the info, Littlejohn, is imprisoned.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

So use LLMs to summarize and rerank LLM-generated crap? Ugh. I think this is what paid search like Kagi does.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

This Einstein quote is evergreen. He wrote it one week before he died. Original German: “Wer es in kleinen Dingen mit der Wahrheit nicht ernst nimmt, dem kann man auch in grossen Dingen nicht vertrauen…”

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Sometimes I wish Bluesky’s likes were private. The likes are a trove of public sentiment. But, the risk of blowback for “endorsing” things is real. Even with GDPR, understand social media posts are scraped at industrial scale by actors worldwide. LOL at anyone who thinks GDPR stops this.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

EIA reports the avg U.S. household uses 10,500 kWh in a year. You used nearly 4,000 kWh in one month. You need to start asking questions about why usage is high. What home and away temps do you set? Any deficient seals or insulation? Fridge temp setting. Etc.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

Yes, my point was the CFPB has positive financial value from a taxpayer POV. There are certainly less measurable benefits like a higher-trust banking system. I was not implying CFPB has profit targets or “quotas”.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

A few facts about the CFPB— bsky.app/profile/meet...

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

CFPB reports $19.7 billion in consumer relief in 13 years—an average of $1.5 billion/year. That exceeds their annual spend. So in aggregate, the net dollar impact to taxpayers is positive. CFPB pays for itself.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

The CFPB was created in response to the Great Recession. Recall the market situation was so dire our 74th Treasury Secretary puked from the stress. CFPB spent ~$777 million in 2024 and only has 1,758 employees. Eliminating it would have negligible impact on the Fed deficit.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

That was a lot of numbers. For more numbers, my government data sources and calculations are posted below. Here's to quality weather alerts, honest bailout-free banks, and airplanes that stay in the air.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

Surprisingly, over 60% of the 2.3 million Fed employees are *civilian* Defense employees! See below chart. In contrast, CFPB's 1,758 employee headcount looks low compared to their nationwide anti-fraud mission and the complexity of today's consumer financial products. bsky.app/profile/usaf...

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

Fed total compensation was 5.5% of Actual FY 2022 Fed Receipts but only 4.3% of Outlays. Therefore, even a 50% worker cut would only lower Fed spending by a few percent. But, the impact to critical American agencies like NOAA, CFPB, and FAA might jeopardize American safety and security.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

The changes by DOGE are bewildering. The key motivators seem to be stale tech and the Federal budget deficit. As DOGE slashes heads, the American population continues to grow. It is up 17.4% over the past 20 years. How big is the Federal labor force? It is 1.35% of the American labor force.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

The premise that tariffs help domestic (American) manufacturers can be false. Tariffs on components and intermediate inputs can act like a tax on “domestic manufacturers who use these imports, raising their costs instead of protecting them from foreign competition…”

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Helped someone assemble a new vacuum cleaner. She said that decades ago, you wouldn’t trash the old vacuum. Instead, it would be repaired in a shop. Today many products are short-lived or have nerfed parts: phones, fridges, printers, microwaves. Just put it in a landfill and buy a new one.

media.tenor.com

a man is holding a phone and says i 'm actually kinda sad

ALT: a man is holding a phone and says i 'm actually kinda sad

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

American workers have an international cost competitiveness issue in part because our living costs are high. And there is no better system to opt-in to.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

The new tariffs spotlight international trade and the disturbing lack of viable manufacturing in the USA (outside the high end). How much of a competitive disadvantage are high housing, healthcare, and transit costs for the American workers? Suppose these became half the current cost.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

Here are a couple of beneficial uses of generative AI. 1) Quickly produce an ensemble of weather forecasts to illustrate a range of conditions (Example: GenCast) 2) Make a medical differential diagnosis to boost patient safety And yes, IP issues need to be promptly remedied.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

This post with 2K “likes” shows how social media validation drives attention-seeking and anger rather than truth-seeking behavior. “There is no ethical use for AI” is an absurd, hyperbolic view. How do we reach a consensus in the loud, attention-harvesting world we’ve built?

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Reposted by Justin Mackie

Max Roser @maxroser.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Our Daily Data Insight today — the world has passed “peak child.”

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

January 21, 2025: A rare snow day in Space City. Magical. It feels a bit surreal after 45 days of 100+ degrees in recent memory (calendar 2023). ❄️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Text2video in 2025 is both really impressive and concerning. 🙃 Today, legions of anonymous bots hijack and manipulate online chats. Tomorrow, will convincing fake videos be the next shoe to drop in the push to shape public opinion?

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

24 hours left ⏳ to wear shorts 🩳 on the Gulf Coast in January. Then 🧤🧣🥶 and maybe ❄️.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

He’s right. I followed for Onions the dachshund.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Yes, build something! And thanks for highlighting the Jones Act. Why is manufacturing productivity on a log scale? Also, median U.S. age continues to rise and skilled labor retires. Could this be a factor in the “systemic” manufacturing slowdown?

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Let’s see some reporting on the role of money, inequality, and nepotism.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Disappointed by the low quality H1-B discussion on Bluesky. Let’s invert the issue. I bet there’s some American CS grads that would embrace a coding stint in Japan, UK, and other places. The rub is U.S. grads pay U.S. tuition costs and this may anchor them to higher U.S. wages.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Why are parking lot trees planted with only a small slice of soil exposed to rainfall? The result is shallow, thirsty tree roots. Hurricane Beryl tipped over this tree. Similar, properly planted trees lost a few branches at most.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Thought the Bluesky recommender algo was haywire yesterday when suddenly cat pics were everywhere in my feed. This never happened for dogs or other pet species. Or cats vibes were just trending? 🤔 Observing, not carping. x.com/thezvi/statu...

x.com

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

No New Year’s Resolutions hitting my feed. But, there’s an incredible number of cat pics. 🐈😺 It would be illuminating to see an anonymous list of resolutions—peoples’ *real* resolutions.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

Doh! My flu post had a typo. * “H1N1” is actually swine flu. * “H5N1” is bird flu, a.k.a. avian influenza if you’re wearing dress clothes.

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

How high should the “oh-shit” meter be for zoonotic H1N1 bird flu in humans? One virologist—an emerging disease specialist—said the situation is “grim” and referred to the explosion of human cases. Helen Branswell’s article is below. @helenbranswell.bsky.social www.statnews.com/2024/12/26/c...

statnews.com

CDC says H5N1 bird flu sample shows mutations that may help the virus bind to cells in the upper airways of people

The CDC said Thursday that the mutations, detected in a sample taken from a Louisiana patient, may help bind the virus to the upper airways in people.

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Reposted by Justin Mackie

The Onion @theonion.com · 23/12/2024

Cat Clinging To Side Of Christmas Tree Admits That Was Extent Of Plan theonion.com/cat-clinging...

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Reposted by Justin Mackie

Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 13/12/2024

METAR xkcd.com/3024

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Justin Mackie @meetjmac.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

“Happy” is right that overall nuclear cost is high. Need to run them a long time since marginal production cost is low. Nuclear power can also be cranked up if needed. Wind/solar can’t be cranked and this is a problem absent affordable energy storage. Apples and oranges power sources.

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