Author: sauer@technologists.com

curated news excerpts & citations

Conversation: From record warming to rusting rivers, 2025 Arctic Report Card shows a region transforming faster than expected

The Arctic is transforming faster and with more far-reaching consequences than scientists expected just 20 years ago, when the first Arctic Report Card assessed the state of Earth’s far northern environment.

The snow season is dramatically shorter today, sea ice is thinning and melting earlier, and wildfire seasons are getting worse. Increasing ocean heat is reshaping ecosystems as non-Arctic marine species move northward. Thawing permafrost is releasing iron and other minerals into rivers, which degrades drinking water. And extreme storms fueled by warming seas are putting communities at risk.
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James Eagle: Why the most accurate AI models are still lying

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These twin charts highlight a significant compromise in AI development. Gemini 3 Preview is incredibly capable and answers more questions correctly than its competitors. However, the second chart shows it possesses an 88% hallucination rate. This metric tracks how often the model fabricates an answer rather than admitting ignorance. Essentially, the model has been trained to be helpful above all else, which means it will confidently guess rather than decline a request it does not understand.
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404 Media: How a US Citizen Was Scanned With ICE’s Facial Recognition Tech

Jesus Gutiérrez told immigration agents he was a U.S. citizen. Only after they scanned his face, did the agents let him go.
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“This is a flagrant violation of rights and incompatible with a free society,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “Immigration agents have no business scanning our faces with this glitchy, privacy-destroying technology—especially after often stopping people based on nothing more than the color of their skin or the neighborhood they live in.”
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Dean Obeidallah: Donald Trump is officially a PINO: a President in Name Only

… Trump has something else weighing him down that other second term Presidents didn’t have, namely extreme mental and physical decline. (Even Ronald Reagan didn’t show dementia signs 11 months into his second term like Trump.)

That is why Trump is increasingly becoming nothing more than a figurehead. Or more accurately, a PINO: a President in Name Only. And this very concerning for our nation because we don’t know who is actually making decisions!
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Rebecca Solnit: The Paris climate treaty changed the world. Here’s how

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris climate treaty, one of the landmark days in climate-action history. Attending the conference as a journalist, I watched and listened and wondered whether 194 countries could ever agree on anything at all, and the night before they did, people who I thought were more sophisticated than me assured me they couldn’t. Then they did. There are a lot of ways to tell the story of what it means and where we are now, but any version of it needs respect for the complexities, because there are a lot of latitudes between the poles of total victory and total defeat.
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Miles Taylor: The president just published a “blacklist” of reporters — one giant leap toward autocracy.

Last night, the White House published a video of a laughing Santa Claus entering a home and unfurling a parchment scroll. The music and vibe are festive. But the prop Santa holds is not. It’s a list of journalists and media outlets singled out by the President of the United States — a blacklist.

Throughout history, regimes on the march toward autocracy have relied on ritual humiliation of the press long before they relied on prisons. The press is criticized and branded as an “enemy of the people.” Trump has long done that, and now he’s taking the next step. He’s naming the specific reporters and outlets he deems disloyal, knowing that as long as a large portion of the public accepts that framing, everything that follows becomes easier.
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Fast Company: ‘A willingness to lie’: Why the EPA’s latest Trump-era change is especially concerning

Human activity is driving climate change; that’s a fact that more than 99.9% of scientific papers agree on.

But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has quietly removed that information from a web page explaining climate change’s causes.

It’s yet another move by the Trump administration that downplays climate science. Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax,” repealed numerous climate laws, and has bolstered the use of fossil fuels, the burning of which are the main cause of rising heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.

[current EPA “Causes of Climate Change”
October EPA “Causes of Climate Change”]
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Paul Krugman: Trump Says That You Are the Problem

Everything is perfect. Why aren’t you grateful?
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In fact, until very recently Trump wouldn’t even accept the reality that ordinary Americans don’t share his triumphalism. When Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked him a month ago why people are anxious about the economy, Trump replied

I don’t know they are saying that. The polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.

Since then Trump and his minions seem to have come around to admitting that Americans are, in fact, unhappy with the state of the economy. But if the economy is A+++++, why don’t people see it? The problem can’t possibly lie with him — so it must lie with you. “The American people don’t know how good they have it.”

I put that line in quotes because it isn’t a caricature or a paraphrase. It is, in fact, literally what Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said the other day:
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Michael Thomas: America is Losing Power Projects When It Needs Them Most

Electricity demand is growing faster than it has in decades in the United States. Data centers, manufacturing reshoring, and electrification are driving massive growth in power consumption. But at the moment America needs more electricity generation, the country’s infrastructure developers are cancelling projects at an alarming rate.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been analyzing data to see how many power projects have been cancelled this year. In our latest report, we found that 1,891 power projects with a combined 266 GW of generation capacity have been cancelled in 2025—equivalent to roughly one-quarter of America’s entire current electricity generation capacity.
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Brian Allen: TWENTY-THREE DEAD: Inside the Torture, Neglect, and Silence of ICE Detention

There are numbers that a government can hide behind and numbers that break through the wall of official language. Twenty-three is the latter. Twenty-three people have died in immigration detention this year under the Trump administration, a total that eclipses previous years and forces a painful question into the national conversation. Who were these people, and what happened inside the walls of a system that operates with almost no public visibility?

Two names rise to the surface first because their stories refuse to stay buried. They belong to men who entered the custody of the United States alive and left it dead. …
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Members of Congress reviewing Ge’s case discovered that he had been found with both his hands and both his feet tied behind his back. They were told that a man with his limbs bound in this way had somehow managed to kill himself. There was no plausible method for such an act. …

The second name is Randall Esquivel. He did not die inside an ICE facility. He died because ICE deported him while he was in a vegetative state. Esquivel became gravely ill in custody. Advocates say his medical decline was rapid and preventable. Instead of transferring him to a hospital equipped to care for him, ICE placed him on a deportation flight. …
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