David Chico Pham writes on technology, sourdough, and current events.

I helped organize my workplace. We started around when COVID vaccines were starting to circulate. We had about a few people in a slack channel at first, but we grew over time. After 4 years of underground organizing, we went public and won our election. Today I am an elected official for my union.

There is no work I am more proud of -- no app I've built -- than building a worker-led union. I feel that in my bones.

The working class deserves unions. It's the basis of power for everyday people. Moreover, its a way to rein in the excesses of the billionaire class. Here we stand at the abyss, where they tell us to use AI in everything such that they can make more money. Do we see a dollar more in our salaries if we are 5x more productive? Do we have more affordable healthcare if we get those prompts in? Or how about working from home instead commuting to the office while national guard and ICE agents patrol in the city? No we don't.

If there is a path to fighting back and claiming our power, it's organizing, collective action, and unionizing.

I listened to Kara Swisher talked to Trevor Noah. She said she bullied Obama in doing more and getting out there more. These are emergency times and you can't be on the sidelines, just chatting with celebrity friends.

Garrett Graff's excellent essay is on the shutdown and Democrats last chance at using whatever little power they do have. The Democrats must ask themselves an important question: what are laws when they are not enforced?

If appropriations bills are not seen as enforceable contracts, why should any Member of Congress vote to fund any part of the federal government under Donald Trump? You're voting to provide money for lawlessness.

Currently the Democrats are winning public opinion, but not in terms of the above problem. Instead the Democrats went back to their safe topic: healthcare. However, this is one senator that is calling what it is, and that is Chris Murphy.

Meanwhile the media and Republicans are treating this is as politics as usual. Graff is arguing that we are not even remotely in that space.

We aren’t just outside the bounds of normal constitutional operations; we’re several standard deviations outside anything America has ever experienced before. We can clearly see what’s happening is wrong—illegal and unconstitutional—and the actors who can do something about that just … aren’t.

Actors include not just Senator Schumer and Representative Jeffries, but I'd argue Tim Cook who has been bending into a pretzel to avoid taxes on iPhones. Tim Cook is set to retire soon. He should push Apple's weight around and push the Trump administration.

How you may ask? What would Steve Jobs say and do? Maybe taking out one page ads in Wall Street Journal or flooding the social media market with ads demanding tariffs to lowered. I will go further: leak Esptein's iCloud account, with all the text messages from him. If corporate power is largest it hasn't been since the second gilded age, then let's encourage Mr. Cook to join the rebellion.

What can be said when facing such an extreme political climate? What is the point of laws when the President can just not follow them and the Republican Congress doesn’t do anything about it. We've blown passed constitutional crisis. We are instead in a constitutional nadir, flatlining as we argue extending ACA healthcare subsidies.

"Want to know the future?", the man stops Arnold Schwarzenegger's character on his way to Last Resorts.

"What about the past?", Schwarzenegger counters.

Can't help but to think we are currently battling for the past in 2025.

Look what you made the Onion do.

Anil Dash on Tim Cook selling out Steve Jobs:

Many people have the quisling impulse to insist that Apple had to kiss Trump’s ass. “They’ll be stuck with really high tariffs!" “They might lose government contracts!" This is foolishness, of course, because all of this will still happen.

You can't give an inch to these fascists. You can say they are not reasonable like you and me. Adam Serwer of the Atlantic did a recent piece that argues American elites have failed the country deeply. They have surrendered like little bitches.

The sheer number of American elites willing to acquiesce to the destruction of democratic institutions is demoralizing. But it’s worth noting that many ordinary people seem to be made of sterner stuff. ICE detainees such as the Palestinian-rights activist Mahmoud Khalil, for example, have continued to speak publicly about the administration’s abuses.

Most certainly, Jobs would of shown much more fight had he be alive now. He might even tell Tim Cook to go fuck off if he tried to gesture sympathies to shareholders value. I can imagine Jobs pointing to Meta's campus, and saying to Cook, "if you care about money so much, go work for a cigarette company."

Anil Dash again with the clarity of the moment:

There's no point in having fuck-you money in the bank if you never say "fuck you"! ... Here is an idea: Apple could, rather than creating golden bribes for child sexual predators, actually send a message to its users explaining that it would like to continue providing value to its customers, and ask those customers for help making that case to their elected officials.

The message is simple. Shut down the consolidation of power and end the funding of an autocrat takeover. There is no second chance after this round of government funding. If Senator Schumer finds his spine in time, we have a chance to save our country. If he doesn't, may God have mercy on our Republic.

"I want to be very clear. Donald Trump is corrupting the government," warns Ezra Klein. Schumer heed this alarm.

What a generational political talent. This political ad does more in conveying his message (we are doing very well in raising money that we met the cap) and his call to action (give us your time instead) than the Trump campaign could ever muster.

Democrats of the last war are lost with a finger up their nose. But Zohran Mamdani aint.

Eva Roytburg reports for Fortune, the astonishing leaps and bounds of the Chinese in clean energy abundance:

“Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs.

For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could severely choke the industry’s growth.

In China, Ma continued, it’s considered a “solved problem.”

AI bubble may pop as a result of running into a wall head first. Asking a chatbot for a simple search might not be clear at first to the level of electrical demand, but a hard limit on scaling AI is feeding electrons to the GPUs in data centers and cooling them with air conditioned rooms. This requires a lot electricity. We are still coasting on 80 year old infrastructure from last century and we gutted the next generation in clean energy production. The grid is just as old, and we have not passed permit reform to make it easier to build transmission lines across states.

Compared to the infinite source of power of the sun and the boundless force of the wind, it seems pretty dumb to pump oil, and dig coal out of mines given how capital intensive. The years it takes to survey, permit, extract, refine, and sell fossil fuels is extensive, requiring billions of dollars. Meanwhile solar and wind on a KwH per dollar basis, it's cheaper to produce a solar farm than to extract coal.

The Chinese Century started in 2025. We gave up when Trump passed his big bad bill.