Month: March 2025

“Murder, burglaries, losing every week: Life at bottom of the football pyramid” – Sam Cunningham (The I paper)

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“They tried to comply, raising money for floodlights and getting permission from the council, who own the pitch, to install them. “The following season not only do you need floodlights, the ground has to be enclosed and you have to be able to take money from a gate. We couldn’t do it. It’s a public park.

“So we’re down from One to Two. Not because we weren’t any good but because the FA deemed the pyramid should be based on the facilities not ability.

“When a footballer comes here on a Saturday afternoon they’ve got decent changing rooms, good kit, they come into the bar afterwards, we cook good food, we look after them well – what more do you want?”

Many other clubs like the 61 FC are now essentially trapped at the bottom of the pyramid. Old Bradwell United finished top in four successive seasons but were blocked from the league above”

https://inews.co.uk/sport/football/murder-burglaries-losing-every-week-life-bottom-football-pyramid-3468521

“They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed” – J Oliver Conroy (The Guardian)

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“Confusion and disillusion slowly set in. Many people had paid dearly, personally and financially, to come to northern California to solve the alignment problem. They’d devoted years to the mission, often at great opportunity cost to their careers. They’d made the best friends they’d ever had, and then – in an environment where some people believed it was literally impossible to agree to disagree – lost them to bitter intellectual schisms, exhaustion and nervous collapse. They’d sacrificed to be present at the birth of the future, and now discovered that the future was already being born elsewhere”

https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2025/mar/05/zizians-artificial-intelligence

“A television show called the USA” – Hamilton Nolan

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“The protest checked every “what we should be doing now” box—bringing community members into the streets, speaking out, remaining unswayed in our beliefs, taking action—but it was all playing out in an America where the mood to push the the kid in the wheelchair into the mud and laugh has taken hold. The mean spirit of nihilistic vengeance is momentarily unleashed. We will stuff it back in its box, sooner or later. But not yet”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/a-television-show-called-the-usa

“March 3, 2025” – Heather Cox Richardson

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“Enrich estimated that without USAID intervention, more than 16 million pregnant women and more than 11 million newborns would not get medical care; more than 14 million children would not get care for pneumonia and diarrhea (among the top causes of preventable deaths for children under the age of 5); 200,000 children would be paralyzed with polio; and 1 million children would not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. There would be an additional 12.5 million or more cases of malaria this year, meaning 71,000 to 166,000 deaths; a 28–32% increase in tuberculosis; as many as 775 million cases of avian flu; 2.3 million additional deaths a year in children who could not be vaccinated against diseases; additional cases of Ebola and mpox. The higher rates of illness will take a toll on economic development in developing countries, and both the diseases and the economic stagnation will spill over into the United States”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-3-2025

“Monopoly Round-Up: Are We Headed into Recession?” – Matt Stoller

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“How does this economy look good when people feel so bad? One reason is that our stats were collected premised on a reasonably equal society that no longer exists. Today, 10% of high earners account for half of consumer spending. That’s insane. There are actually two economies, one with high earners, and then everyone else. But our stats don’t account for that”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-are-we-headed-into

“Microsoft to retire Skype in May” – John Gruber

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“But man, for a long while, Skype was singularly amazing, offering high-quality / low-latency audio calls at a time when everything else seemed low-quality / high-latency. I continued using Skype to record The Talk Show until a few years ago, and I can’t say I miss it. But I used Skype to record at least around 400 episodes — which means I’ve spent somewhere around 1,000 hours talking to people over Skype. I can close my eyes and just hear Skype’s kinda clunky but distinctive ringtone. In the early days of podcasting, seemingly every show used Skype because it was so much better than anything else. And it was free! It felt like the future. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if not for Skype, podcasting would’ve been set back several years”

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/02/28/microsoft-skype-eol