Prices have been rising in the UK, so the Tories are planning to cut welfare benefits.

The Taliban are blocking people from reaching Kabul airport.

Fusion power continues to make progress. Recently one experiment came to 70% of break-even, using a somewhat academic standard of break-even.

Fusion may someday work, but considering the number of advances still needed for it to make a useful contribution to replacing fossil fuels, I don't think 30 years is enough time. And that's how much time we have to finish saving civilization. So we can't do that with fusion power; we need to do that with the forms of generation that already function at commercial scale.

Fossil fuel companies probably hope we will convince ourselves that fusion will save us, so we will let them keep on burning ever more oil for another decade or two. But if we do that, it will be too late.

*Brazil's Indigenous Groups Mount Unprecedented Protest Against Destruction of the Amazon.*

Today's step-by-step deforestation hits them first, and will hit everyone over decades.

*The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks.*

What gives them this power is (1) making users run nonfree software and (2) being able to set their terms and conditions arbitrarily within a very broad range.

The nonfree software enables them to collect data secretly. We need to require that all client software be free, so users can have control over what it does. In particular, so they can fix it not to spy on them, regardless of what the platform owners wish.

The rest of their power comes from imposing whatever terms and conditions they like. There are some legal limits, but not enough. We need to limit what platforms can require, just as we (in some places) limit what conditions a landlord can require in a lease for a residence.

Laws are not invariably good. Indeed, OnlyFans's plan to kick off the core of its clients was triggered by a law whose purposes is repression (sexual and legal). But at least we have a chance, to the extent democracy functions, of changing the law.