Sign in

pdxtonola.bsky.social

@pdxtonola.bsky.social
273 followers 337 following 557 posts

Pickles’ Dad

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Gabrielle A. Perry, MPH @geauxgabrielle.blacksky.app · 10/10/2026
People are discussing how Halloween candy is so terrible these days. A reminder that alot of the candy we eat is made with women’s prison labor. Russell Stover’s factory in Kansas busses in 150 women a day via a convict leasing program to staff their candy factory.
Russell Stover has begun using prison labor to make candy in
Kansas
A Russell Stover candy factory in Kansas has begun hiring incarcerated workers through a work release program, Eoin Higgins reports in his newsletter, The Flashpoint. About 150 women are bussed in from the Topeka Correctional Facility and paid $14 an hour, but the prison keeps some of their wages for room and board, taxes, transportation, and other expenses. When all is said and done, they take home less than $6 per hour. These deductions are high, but elsewhere in the country, they're even higher: In our May series on prison
461073680
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
I Scare You Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 11/10/2026
We live in a surveillance state which spends an order of magnitude more on policing than any other country, how is the most powerful people in the country still feel unprotected? Why do you think that it?
17789178
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
ProPublica @propublica.org · 07/10/2026
NEW: A 26-year-old man has become the de facto advocate of last resort for families who are homeless in Arizona’s most populous county. As ProPublica’s @nicolesantacruz.bsky.social reports, it’s a scene that’s “both heartening and disconcerting.”
propublica.org
Homeless Shelters Around Phoenix Are Full. His Phone Is the Unofficial Hotline for Struggling Families.
Austin Davis, 26, has become a lifeline for some homeless families in the Phoenix area who’d otherwise wait months for shelter. His work has highlighted how the system to care for local families who a...
15850377
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
James O'Malley @jamesomalley.co.uk · 07/10/2026
Holy shit. Someone has decompiled the Adobe suite, rebuilt it in Rust and released it as open source. Either all software is dead or the US copyright laws are about to receive an update. getartcraft.com/apps
getartcraft.com
Crafting Apps: open-source creative tools
Image editing, vector illustration, video, photography, PDFs, motion graphics and page layout: seven native, open-source apps from the ArtCraft team, built in Rust and free to use.
20144301248
pdxtonola.bsky.social @pdxtonola.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Blockchain vibes intensifying www.cnbc.com/2026/10/04/a...
cnbc.com
A 'weird' IPO pull, a tainted reputation and the stalled breakout moment for AI wearables
Apple, Google and Meta are pushing new AI devices and assistants amid growing privacy concerns around wearables.
000
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Lord Piss @lordpiss.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
the lengths that liberals will go to blame their inadequacy and failures on the left is deeply pathetic
527124
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
roterote @roterote.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
For a very clear comparison, emulating Magyar would be removing all the MAGA justices and judges from Federal Courts in the first 100 days. That is the scale of democratic chemotherapy we are discussing.
20825161
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
roterote @roterote.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The US Democrats need to look at their next Presidency as an endless sprint to obliterate MAGA, every day for years. Until the cancer is gone then there should be no time wasted on MAGA tears or conciliation. Only endless justice and rebuilding the democracy. Govern like every day is the last day.
151035256
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Mai El-Sadany @maitelsadany.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Last night, country music star Zach Bryan performed at Gillette Stadium wearing a Free Palestine shirt, with drummer Nate Head and guitarist Noah Le Gros with Hind Rajab and Palestine jerseys. Brilliant solidarity following Robert Kraft's banning of Macklemore at the same stadium.
321941371
pdxtonola.bsky.social @pdxtonola.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
FAA certifying the 737 Max
000
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
brent @murrman5.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
[whispering to paramedic before I pass out] save me but not enough that I have to go to work tomorrow
133211556
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Victoria Law @victorialaw.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Sent an electronic message to a woman in prison back in July. She just got it a few days ago.
24211
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Chicken Puppet 🏳️‍⚧️ @chickenpuppet.online · 15/09/2026
People held their nose and voted for Biden so hard that he’s the only person since Eisenhower to get more votes than “did not vote”, despite getting completely fucked over. This is the thanks you get for doing that
1174365
pdxtonola.bsky.social @pdxtonola.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
(heavy midwest accent) Well, you know, I’m sure the Houthis are just a smidge disappointed in Von Der Leyen too
100
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
the abbot of unreason (an archaeologist) @merovingians.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
people are getting on brent for using 'mental illness' to describe this level of reflexive islamophobia and I don't actually think it's an unfair assessment. this is beyond just individual racism, from Zohran to Abdul there is a kind of almost lurid paranoia about the threat to the Jewish community
1847343
pdxtonola.bsky.social @pdxtonola.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Showtime at the Teatro di San Carlo, they’re tossing fucking roses before I rumble the first opus notes: Nuuuuuuuke Tel Aviiiiiiv!!! The crowd going fucking apeshit now...
000
pdxtonola.bsky.social @pdxtonola.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
000
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Pabst Boo Ronin @pabstblueronin.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
This guy loves not having car insurance sooo much
0721
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 15/08/2026
feels like a lot of the mind-bending weirdness right now is being caused by “a small but influential minority of elites and their vassals desperately trying to force a hard-right vibe shift on an equally-increasingly uncooperative general public.”
251387277
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
"As horrifying as this campaign of premeditated murder is, what might be even more disturbing is the utter indifference of Congress, the public and our allies to such a shocking and unapologetic obliteration of the many laws and norms against targeting civilians." - @martylederman.bsky.social
nytimes.com
The U.S. Boat Strike Campaign Has Now Killed Over 200 People
Residents of coastal communities in Colombia and Ecuador said the airstrike campaign was making many reconsider anything involving the ocean as a livelihood.
02110
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
Utterly chilling reporting from the Prospect and NY times on trumps war in the Caribbean www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/w...
nytimes.com
A Mystery in Trinidad as Bodies Wash Ashore After U.S. Strikes
6539274
pdxtonola.bsky.social @pdxtonola.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
What are runners running from
000
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 12/08/2026
it's objectively so funny this thing can shoot in Arri LogC3
1582
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
not the point of the movie but you can see in the background that Private Ryan’s family is Hot
8432
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
The Onion @theonion.com · 09/08/2026
Night Out More Fun Without Broke Friend theonion.com/night-out-more-fun-wit…
Night Out More Fun Without Broke Friend
331776100
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Gord Jorkins* *but spooky @nothinkyjustvibey.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
There are exactly two lighting configurations on TV now, it's full LED enclosed soundstage or a bunch of 12x12 scrims and it's color graded to 2200K.
4848106
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
jenny tightpants @jtp.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
learning that the WNBA news cycle about trans people involves zero trans people feels like coming accross a cartoon dust cloud that dissipates to reveal there's only one guy in it kicking his own ass
245221852
pdxtonola.bsky.social @pdxtonola.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Never underestimate the power of 11:11
000
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Sean T. Collins @seantcollins.com · 05/08/2026
I'm weirdly upset by Stevens's gracious concession, because it makes her lie from just a few days ago that AES harbors personal animus against Jewish ppl all the more transparent. We should discourage lying to inflame tensions against two targeted religious minorities for personal political gain imo
71031110
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
My editor asked me to write about what happened to summer:
theguardian.com
We launched a war on nature. Now we are in a climate warzone | Rebecca Solnit
Summer is not what it once was. We have been robbed of one of life’s great joys
16992386
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
New Yorkers had to subsidize the $117 million that the NYPD paid out for misconduct lawsuits in 2025 alone, even though most of them were never personally abused by a cop. Where's your worried op-ed on that one?
893072656
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Joad The Wet Sprocket @joadsprocket.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
we're fucking with their water supply, right? like, that's something we're doing. feels like that's germane to the discussion.
1215
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
lottie "frog k" lovely ⚧️🏴‍☠️ @vaporlight.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
WRETCHED PAUL: My perrier is too warm. You awful shit. I ask for caviar and I get roe paste from Ikea? I've been shanghaied onto barges fed me better than this rubbish. I'm going to shit on a baby POLITE, HELPFUL RINGO: No complaints about me feed. Oats is better dry I always say
5825159
pdxtonola.bsky.social @pdxtonola.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Okay aesthetics wasn’t the only red flag
000
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Chris Dwan (he/him) @somershade.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Why did people give this child billions of dollars to play with? Well, to start with he’s “a tall, thin man who combed his hair into a sweeping coif and wore fleeces over turtleneck sweaters.” www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/b...
nytimes.com
Leopold Aschenbrenner Built a Hot A.I. Hedge Fund. Then it Melted Down. (Gift Article)
Situational Awareness, led by a 24-year-old, exploded onto the artificial intelligence scene — and then nose-dived.
75014
pdxtonola.bsky.social @pdxtonola.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
As someone in the arts I feel like these aschenbrenner situations could be avoided if we were all more cognizant of aesthetic red flags. The age of aura and we’ve got no nose for it.
000
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Toby Nangle @tobyn.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
🚨 How exactly *do* PE, private credit, and insurance intersect? Took some time, but here it is: on.ft.com/4kd077o
on.ft.com
Inside the private equity-insurance nexus
When the world’s dullest industry gets very exciting
46216
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 10/06/2026
A sixth of all insurance annuities are sitting in private credit loans, and the vast majority of private credit funds are funded by state and worker pensions. www.wheresyoured.at/hatersguide-...
AI Data Centers Are Fragile, Near-Negative-Margin Businesses Sold As Stable Infrastructure, Funded By Pension and Insurance Funds
This is why Crusoe was able to raise a $750 million credit facility from Brookfield in June 2025, funded out of Brookfield Infrastructure Debt Fund III, which in turn is funded by retirement and insurance funds like the Maine Public Employees Retirement System and the Border To Coast Pensions Partnership. 

Crusoe is an unprofitable business, and makes the majority of its money from lease payments from Oracle and its Stargate Abilene data center that Crusoe is constructing — which means that its survival is tied to that of OpenAI, and Oracle’s willingness and ability to support OpenAI. 

OpenAI, a company that burns billions of dollars a year, cannot afford to pay for the compute it has committed to buying. In the event that OpenAI defaults on its contract, Oracle will be left without any comparable tenant, and Crusoe will be left with no revenue to pay back its debts.

The same goes for the Blackstone- (and pension!) backed loans that are funding Oracle’s Wisconsin and Texas data centers. Oracle does not have the money to pay its debts, and will only have the money in the event OpenAI is able to pay it upwards of $100 billion a year, which will require Oracle to complete the data centers, which will take until, at best, 2028 or 2029.

Apollo’s funded a $3.5 billion “capital solution” as part of the $5.4 billion Valor and xAI data center deal from an unnamed credit fund, but likely one tied to its insurance affiliate Athene. Per The Information, SpaceX (the company that holds both functional businesses like SpaceX’s space program and Starlink as well as diseased AI company xAI) lost $5 billion in 2025, with much of that attributed to xAI, which loses around $1.46 billion a quarter, and made around $107 million in revenue.

A little over a month ago, Blackstone participated in a $10 billion debt financing for Australian data center company…
724753
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 04/05/2026
Retirement funds and pension funds and insurance funds are already a trillion dollars or more deep into private credit. Every single major data center funding deal has involved insurance or pension money. Even the Anthropic private equity deal. www.wheresyoured.at/hatersguide-...
In the aftermath of the great financial crisis, insurance and pension funds found themselves desperate for yield — regular returns — to meet their payment obligations. Private credit has become the yield-bearer of choice, feeding over a trillion dollars of these funds' investments into
leveraged buyouts, Al data centers, loans to software companies, and failing restaurant franchises.
In some cases, asset managers have purchased insurance companies with the explicit intention of using them as funders for future private credit investments, such as Apollo's acquisition of Athene, KKR's acquisition of Global Atlantic, and Blue Owl's acquisition of Kuvare. More on this later, as it fucking sucks.Asset managers offering private credit market themselves as bank-like stewards of capital, but
lack many (if any) of the restrictions that make you actually trust a bank. They self-deal, investing their insurance affiliates' funds in their own equity
investments (such as when KKR used Global Atlantic to invest in data center developer CyrusOne, a company it acquired in 2022), value and revalue assets based on mysterious and undocumented private models, and account for (as I mentioned) 70% of all funding of leveraged buyouts in the last decade, of which 30 to 40% were software companies purchased between 2018 and 2022, meaning that hundreds of billions of dollars of retirement and insurance funds are dependent on overvalued software companies paying loans funded during the zero interest free era.
While a market crash feels scary, what's far scarier is that the present and future ability of many retirement and insurance funds is dependent on whether private equity-owned entities, software companies. and Al data center firms are able to keep paying their debts. If private credit fund returns begin to lag, the retirement and insurance industry lacks a viable replacement, and I don't know how to fix that.
14429113
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Dana El Kurd @danaelkurd.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
It is in fact racist to call an Arab with views you disagree with an antisemite. I know this will be a surprise to many but unless that person is actually saying something antisemitic, the Arab is not genetically predisposed to antisemitism
202458381
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
rob @ok-but-still.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
i'm done looking at shit for a while
4362847
pdxtonola.bsky.social @pdxtonola.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
It’s okay if you enjoyed the Odyssey, chin up man
000
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Screamer Jim @screamerjim.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
2798
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Murshed Zaheed @murshedz.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
“Trump has rejected disaster aid for Democratic-run states at the highest rate in the 47-year history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” Right now people in blue states are basically paying federal taxes as if they’re colonized territories of red states. www.politico.com/news/2026/03...
Trump has denied most disaster requests from Democratic-led states

A graph  showing Presidential approval rates for disaster requests from Democratic-led states and Republican-led states

Source: POLITICO's E&E News analysis of FEMA records
16154702515
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
Why I think it's time for some Governors to come up with a plan to decide whether or not constituents and businesses in state should continue paying federal taxes. We may not be able to physically stop Musk, but we have a legal argument that we already paid for shit we are not getting.
32589129
pdxtonola.bsky.social @pdxtonola.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
And they don’t need to
000
pdxtonola.bsky.social @pdxtonola.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Gotta be some environmental factor to the increase in orca aggression right? Or is this stuff just observed and reported on more often?
000
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 27/07/2026
not a fan of this argument. two obvious implications: a) we should cut Medicaid so fewer people are eligible or b) big corporations should fire anyone on Medicaid immediately popular.info/p/taxpayers-...
popular.info
Taxpayers spend about $2 billion annually on Medicaid for Amazon and Walmart employees
American taxpayers are spending billions every year providing Medicaid benefits to hundreds of thousands of employees of Amazon and Walmart, a new analysis by Popular Information reveals.
3547881
Reposted by @pdxtonola.bsky.social
Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
$TSLA $309. Hasn't had a 2-handle in almost a year.
1824445