Notices by Mark Igra (markigra@sciences.social)

Trump: “Harvard has to understand, the last thing I want to do is hurt them,” he added. “They’re hurting themselves. They’re fighting.”

Trump’s attitude on Universities, Ukraine and women. It’s only a problem if you resist. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/us/politics/trump-universities-financial-penalties.html?unlocked_article_code=1.fU8.7j8E.16ztZiwgkg93&smid=url-share

@heidilifeldman cuttingly notes the futility of trying to analyze the legal arguments behind Supreme Court rulings. JFK’s vaccine committee is a great example of this general idea at work — you can’t fight them on science cause they aren’t doing science at all. Science may be flawed and socially constructed and unable to discern ultimate truth, but it produced vaccines that saved millions of lives. Law is squishier, but norms & principles used to constrain it. No longer. https://mastodon.social/@heidilifeldman/114764809189919248

DOGE/SSA marked this person dead and *removed his savings from his bank account,* cancelled his social security and Medicare. #seattle https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/heres-a-dead-person-on-social-security-in-seattle-with-plenty-to-say/

Dems should introduce a #28thAmendment. I’m not a lawyer but something simple like:
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While in office the president shall be subject to the laws of the United States and afforded the same constitutional protections from prosecution as all other citizens.

The president may not pardon themself or anyone prosecuted for a crime committed at the president’s urging.
—
Need to put all pols on the record - do they support criminal presidents. @indivisibleteam does this make sense?

sciences.social is not currently blocking the bluesky bridge. You can of course block the bridge or opt out for your own account. I need to confer with other admins, but given the active community of social scientists on bsky, I think its unlikely we will block at the server level unless we learn of specific problems

My initial sense is aligned with @tchambers as described here https://www.timothychambers.net/2024/02/13/indiewebsocial-and-the.html

This wait-and-see position is largely the same as ours on Threads https://sciences-social.github.io/blog/threads.html

Yesterday when typing in a Google doc, autocomplete suggested the name of an interview subject. I do not store any qual data in Google Drive and all my transcripts use aliases anyway, so it freaked me out. I’m guessing gdocs uses gmail data (at least addresses) as autocomplete fodder and I know I have emailed this person from my university email (gmail) account. I’m guessing AI is going to lead to a lot of inadvertent data leakage as autocomplete++ generates more content. Be careful out there.

@thomasfuchs Recently took my 1991 stereo system out of mothballs. Had to clean some connections, but both LPs & CDs sounded great.

Only problem: soldered-in lightbulbs that made the LCD on the CD player visible no longer worked. Took cannibalized bulbs/board from junker on ebay & they worked! For a week. I do appreciate that LEDs are more reliable than old bulbs, but I guess we'll see if that holds up in 30 years.