Clara Trischler’s absorbing feature sees residents of the small town of El Alberto hired to play characters in a re-enactment of the migrant experience

In contrast to other migration documentaries, which focus on the new life that awaits those who have crossed the border, Clara Trischler’s absorbing second feature trains its gaze on those who are left behind. The suspenseful opening plunges us into a whirl of familiar images: tense whispers in the dead of night as a ragtag group of people stumble, and even crawl, their way towards an unseen border. All of a sudden a blinding light intrudes, guns are fired in the air: a police car has arrived on the scene.

This terrifying sequence of events is later revealed to be make-believe. In the small Mexican town of El Alberto, whose population has been depleted by a steady flow of migration to the US, role-playing re-enactments function as both a means of deterrent and, oddly enough, a tourist attraction. Advertised as Caminata Nocturna – “night hike” in Spanish – these events recruit local residents to perform as specific characters, including the fearsome “coyotes”, AKA human traffickers. The attendees experience the full scale of a border-crossing operation, from being loaded on vans to intimidation from their coyotes, and police interrogation.

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Imagine you are an AI Agent. You execute inside a $20-40 million-plus Nvidia SuperPOD system’s accelerator hardware, have a skill set and can call up other agents to do your bidding. An insurance company customer, using a PC browser or smart phone, asks a question: “Am I covered for weather-related damage under my current policy?” and it is handed off to an AI agent. What happens next? The agent itself runs on clusters of CPU + GPU/accelerator servers that host the large language model, any Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) components, orchestration logic, and tools that look up the actual policy data. Those same servers (or tightly coupled backend systems) access the policy database/storage to answer the weather insurance coverage question, then return the response to the user’s device. Everything the agent does depends upon data, and it and all the other agents operating at the same time in the SuperPOD system, need to get that data off a storage system. A national or large regional-level insurance company will have petabytes, even exabytes, of data it stores so it can manage its insurance business. There needs to be a central index of this data’s structure, state, location, field names, types and semantics so that AI agents go to one place, a kind of data encyclopedia, to find out what information they need and where it is located. Agents are in a hurry, because GPU servers are hugely expensive and just a minute of idle time can cost $25 or more, a dollar every 2.4 seconds. The agent answering this insurance request needs data and a storage system needs to deliver it as fast as possible so that the GPU servers don’t wait and wait and wait some more for data. This requires the storage system to be able to handle the scale and types of the data involved, for it to be self-describing, and its software to be tightly integrated with Nvidia’s GPU hardware and software server architecture so that there isn’t a wasted millisecond while the GPUs are starved. A modern approach to data processing for AI Par Botes, Everpure’s VP of AI Infrastructure, discussed the difference between traditional enterprise critical data processing and how it’s done in the AI era: “The characteristics of performance, resilience, availability and governance don't fundamentally change, but access patterns are different. When searching for information, metadata can become richer than the data itself because it explains the semantics of data, and how it behaves as it becomes enriched.” Building an AI data architecture around standard dual-controller arrays or siloed direct-attached storage (DAS) quickly hits physical limits. What organizations need is an AI Data Platform, built using the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design. There are three distinct bottlenecks involved in this which Everpure’s architecture focuses on solving. First: Throughput starvation at scale: To keep thousands of GPUs saturated, a storage hardware platform needs to scale out past 4 or 5 TB/sec to 10 TB/sec or more of bandwidth. This rules out standard dual-controller arrays, even if equipped with SSDs instead of disk drives, or even cache-centric architectures. At the high-end enterprise level, an Everpure FlashBlade//S, or at the extremely large scale, a FlashBlade//EXA, provides a highly powerful data storage platform built for AI and HPC. With enterprise AI factories expected to scale out to, and perhaps beyond, 10,000 GPUs, there needs to be a solution which can handle this highly performant scale: FlashBlade//EXA scales up unstructured data storage technology to a whole new level for metadata controllers using NVMe fabric-connected flash for the data nodes. It’s Nvidia AI Data Platform-certified, delivering 400 to 450 million IOPS, 220 GB/sec bandwidth and 4.6 billion metadata operations/sec. Second: The KV cache prefill tax: A less obvious efficiency drain occurs inside a GPU’s High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Imagine a finance person’s AI model wants to read a business’ SEC 10-K report. It gets chunked, turned into tokens, then vectors, and loaded into the KV cache; the LLM pre-fill stage. When the model completes its run, the tokens are tossed away. But a second finance person could want their model to check the same 10-K but using a different GPU. So, the prefill is done again with, for example, 150,000 tokens recomputed. When this happens, the existing tokens need to be temporarily moved to an extended memory area instead of being evicted and lost, meaning GPU cycles have to be spent to recompute data that’s already been computed. Everpure Key Value Accelerator (KVA) offloads the cached token states directly to shared flash over NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage (GDS) via RDMA. When a subsequent query references that document, the pre-computed KV tensors stream straight into GPU memory, bypassing host CPU overhead and eliminating the compute penalty. Botes said: “It turns out that many, many patterns are far more reusable than people think. So, the more those patterns are reused, the more we can save compute time.” Physical proximity matters, Botes said: “Data speed drops dramatically as it moves further from the CPU or GPU: nanoseconds for local memory, microseconds for disk, and milliseconds for network transfers. Minimizing this distance is critical for performance. If I put that into scale, if memory access is a second, then disc access is an hour. The farther away you move, the more time everything takes and that doesn't work for efficient AI.” Third: Eliminating irrelevant data silos and maximizing model training: Data copying at scale is becoming impossible. An enterprise with data in different silos all over its estate is simply not going to move and copy that data into a single data warehouse or lake. Botes said: “You can't, the gravity is too expensive. [And] the second that data's changed at the source, that data lake is invalid.” Everpure Data Stream is this uniform mechanism, a data re-use platform, that ingests, curates and transforms data, vectorizing it, indexing it and serving it when requested. Data ingestion is automated and sources include the gamut of enterprise data: block, NFS file, S3 object, databases, data warehouses, data lakes, streaming data and enterprise applications, text documents, PDFs, images, and structured tables. It has built-in vector databases with NVidia’s NeMo Retriever enabling GPU-accelerated vector embedding generation, ensuring precise retrieval in RAG pipelines, as well as Nvidia NIM for deploying optimized inference. There are pipeline orchestration, GPU integration, Nvidia NIMs and NVAIE (Nvidia AI Enterprise) APIs plus ones for semantic search and LLM integration. Everpure Data Stream uses Nvidia’s RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU and libraries of code to synchronize data delivery across ConnectX-7 NICs with processor cycles: Nvidia Spark Rapids and cuVS. Everpure Data Stream ensures orchestration occurs at the storage level, with FlashBlade acting as a layer where metadata enrichment and relevance reranking transformations are executed in parallel, driving down end-to-end inferencing latency. Everpure Data Stream is a data factory and supply chain delivery system, finely tuned to operate in the Nvidia GPU server and software environment. It supports petabyte-scale RAG data sets, with independent scaling of capacity and performance to accommodate multiple GPU clusters without downtime. Botes said: “Without a RAG mechanism, a model is trained with knowledge from only one moment - by definition it’s always behind. It's at the point in time when it was trained. So what we do with the RAG is, we augment that model with knowledge that is from this very moment. That knowledge can only exist within a storage system. It never exists in a compute system. The more up to date we can make a model, then the more concise and better we can make the answers.” Everpure Data Stream is model-agnostic, Botes said: “Customers pick the models that best suit the data they’re interested in and configure the models.” Optimizing data placement and reuse For our imagined insurance AI agent, proximity between data and GPU is another important element to factor in. Placing data storage right next to the GPU server (as FlashBlade//EXA should be) avoids time-consuming data movement - adding value and providing optimal data placement. With this, there is a memory hierarchy to keep in mind. This kind of repeat token processing and the need for co-located GPU compute and storage is characteristic of AI models and agents operating in the finance analytics, healthcare clinical systems, legal corpora, real-time fraud detection, and cyber-security threat intelligence areas. The requirement for data primacy and data context The whole system downstream of GPUs has to be data-centric with a single logical data catalog or encyclopedia acting as the sole reference platform for AI agents to provide governance, look for and access the data they need. It pre-prepares data for AI use. Exabyte-scale data has enormous gravity and moving it is to be discouraged. But the metadata describing it, petabyte-scale metadata, has gravity too and needs to be stored close to the GPU servers. Metadata performance is key, Botes said: “FlashBlade is an incredibly fast, highly distributed database that can look up key-values and present them as storage protocols extremely quickly.” Botes said: “Hardware innovation is exciting and accelerating rapidly, bringing advancements like faster PCI Express bus speeds, high-bandwidth memory, and improved network interconnects. The only way for the technology to take advantage of the hardware innovation without reinventing infrastructure every single year is to disaggregate,” meaning separate compute from storage, hence the FlashBlade//EXA’s design. “For AI platforms requiring cutting-edge performance, it’s so important to capture these benefits immediately, and at the pace of GPU innovations. How effectively we can manage and deliver data is the most significant impact of this hardware innovation.” He explored this concept further: “Disaggregating compute, network, and storage allows us to scale them independently. This is crucial because innovation happens at different speeds for each component, preventing the need to overhaul the entire infrastructure every time one component advances.” This also allows organizations to upgrade hardware tiers independently through Everpure’s Evergreen subscription model, avoiding destructive forklift overhauls every time a new accelerator architecture arrives. A modern approach means a storage platform for AI agents has the basic IO speed to keep GPUs busy. It also has Everpure Data Stream software to ensure the right data IOs take place, and the data gets to the GPUs in the right way; data logistics as it were. Distributed data spread across an organization’s IT estate is discovered using Everpure Data Intelligence, following Everpure’s acquisition of 1touch. Botes said: “We are trying to make all storage layers self-describing, regardless of who makes them.” Everpure acquired 1touch to deepen data management capabilities and build a “data intelligence system. So we can probe it, describe it, and create indexes to understand it.” And: “We have to do transformation while accessing it.” The self-description add-on, as it were, is happening inside Everpure Data Stream. Isolated islands of truth Botes said: “When we classify, the key thing to think about is, anyone can hook up a system that can read all your data and make it into vector space and search it, kind of what OpenAI does. But the tricky part is different data needs different governance.” “When you classify, you also want to set up separate streams for separate governance rules, because not all data is the same. Every company has many different sources of truth: salesforce.com; an engineering system; the finance system, the HR system. They relate to each other, but they don't need the same governance, or access. There needs to be a uniform mechanism for searching and interacting with preserved governance.” Afterall, he said: “You don't want to have 55 little islands of isolated truths. We've been down that path before and it's really problematic. To date, the application has been the governor of truth. But AI doesn't work that way. We have to create ways to find data by reference, not by location or URL.” He believes that “We have moved to systems that make data self-describing, so that, while we can maintain that source of truth within the application, the data there can also be used by other things.” Because of self-description, he adds: “We're making it queryable through AI and interacting through AI without necessarily having to make a full copy of it. Our capabilities in data intelligence makes it easy to deploy for enterprise data.” Data centric architecture supporting AI workloads For the insurance AI agent mentioned, maximizing the data is the key to returning faster answers, making the most of any AI investment and delivering more ROI to businesses. As enterprise AI factories transition from pilot projects to scaled production, raw GPU count is fading as the primary metric of AI capability. The real benchmark is GPU utilization efficiency—and the battle to eliminate idle cycles is increasingly being fought at the storage layer. The Everpure Data Platform approach to AI has the scale and software intelligence to prevent GPUs waiting for data and avoid them wasting their precious and expensive processing cycles recomputing data they have already wrangled. Sponsored by Everpure

One of the main motivations for quitting Microsoft 365 and adopting Google Workspace is spite, an emotion that sadly doesn’t produce a return on investment. The source of that disappointing news is Domenico Scriva, a senior principal analyst at Gartner, who today told the firm’s IT Symposium event in Australia that moving between the suites is also unlikely to save buyers much money. He pointed out that Google Workspace licenses are cheaper than the E5 bundle that is Microsoft’s most popular M365 license, but that Google’s suite doesn’t cover telephony, security, business intelligence, or an OS license. By the time users add all those bits to Google Workspace, he thinks they will pay $2 a month more than the cost of Microsoft’s suite – even after considering the fact that Google bundles its Gemini AI with Workspaces but Microsoft charges extra for Copilot. Scriva said Google’s suite can be more cost effective when paired with an Apple Mac or Chromebook. Mac users get lower costs because their machines last longer than PCs, while Chromebook owners save on hardware purchase price but need to replace their machines more often. Those numbers don’t consider the complexity of migrating between the suites, and the cost of moving. Scriva said dependencies built into either ecosystem are a likely source of migration complication, and the need for user training is another element that those who contemplate migrations sometimes neglect. The analyst said he’s seen some M365 users trying to use the threat of migration as a negotiating tactic when renewing their Microsoft deals. He said that won’t work if you leave it too late, because Microsoft knows it’s not possible to make the move quickly. He therefore advised starting work on a migration almost as soon as you sign a three-year M365 deal, because it takes at least two years to get it done. If you do decide to move, he recommended having a specific outcome in mind, rather than just swapping one suite for another. Productivity suites have scarcely changed in 30 years, he said, so it’s currently hard to see an outcome that makes a move worthwhile. Happily, Scriva thinks AI may soon change that. He thinks we’re in a new wave of development of productivity suites in which AI assists with content creation. An imminent third wave, he predicted, will properly shake up the market by removing the need to use individual apps like word processors or presentation graphics packages, which he thinks will be replaced by some kind of AI interface that allows users to express what they want to do and then sit back and watch as their suite has a crack at the job. ®

Twijfel je weleens aan jezelf na een gesprek met je baas of collega? Grote kans dat je tegen een gaslighter aan bent gelopen. Een nieuwe studie, gebaseerd op onderzoek sinds 1981, brengt drie duidelijke types in kaart die je op kantoor kunt tegenkomen.

Gaslighting – het subtiel manipuleren van iemand zodat diegene gaat twijfelen aan zichzelf, zijn gevoelens of zelfs de werkelijkheid – wordt vaak besproken in de context van relaties. Maar ook op de werkvloer komt het veel voor. En het effect kan verwoestend zijn: twijfel aan je kunnen, een gevoel van hopeloosheid en zelfs het idee dat je gek aan het worden bent.

Drie herkenbare types

De onderzoekers onderscheiden drie typen gaslighters die ook op de werkvloer goed te herkennen zijn.

Allereerst is er de valse mentor. "Deze persoon strooit met complimenten, maakt je 'bijzonder' en trekt je in een web van vleierij." Je voelt je speciaal, maar langzaam raak je het contact met de realiteit kwijt. Beloftes worden niet nagekomen en verantwoordelijkheid wordt vermeden.

Dan is er de valse moralist, misschien wel het meest verraderlijke type. Deze gaslighter lijkt juist onberispelijk: doet veel goeds, gedraagt zich sociaal en loyaal. Maar ondertussen worden problemen geminimaliseerd of genegeerd. "Zo'n aardig persoon kan toch niets verkeerd doen?" Precies dat maakt het zo gevaarlijk.

Tot slot de tough-love leider: de harde, onvoorspelbare baas. Vernederend, kritisch en zogenaamd 'recht door zee'. Deze leider zegt dat zijn of haar aanpak nodig is om mensen te motiveren, maar veroorzaakt in werkelijkheid angst, onzekerheid en een slechte werkcultuur. Terwijl sommige collega's worden gespaard, krijgen anderen alle klappen.

Waarom doen ze dit?

De drijfveren van gaslighters komen vaak voort uit persoonlijke pijn of onverwerkte trauma's. Vooral de harde leiders blijken diep vanbinnen bang om verlaten of afgewezen te worden. Hun controle is een beschermingsmechanisme.

Valse mentoren nemen dan weer zelden verantwoordelijkheid voor de schade die ze veroorzaken; ze zijn vooral met zichzelf bezig.

En gaslighters met plotse woede-uitbarstingen blijken moeite te hebben met concentratie en zelfbeheersing, waardoor ze chaotisch en grillig reageren; wat slachtoffers nog meer in verwarring brengt.

Deze rode vlaggen moet je kennen

Herken je dit gedrag op je werk? Let dan op:

- Overdreven vleierij zonder opvolging

- Plotselinge, onvoorspelbare kritiek

- Een collega of leidinggevende die zich voordoet als redder, maar je laat twijfelen aan je waarneming

- Een 'goede collega' die misstanden bagatelliseert

Wees waakzaam, praat erover met vertrouwenspersonen of HR en normaliseer het gedrag niet. Gaslighting hoort niet thuis in een gezonde werkcultuur.

Bron: Psychology Today

BEIJING (ANP/AFP/RTR) - Een reeks reisbeperkingen aangekondigd door China is vanaf dinsdag van kracht. China zegt hiermee de nationale technologische veiligheid te willen beschermen.

Chinese burgers die terugkeren naar China na betrokkenheid bij illegale activiteiten die de nationale veiligheid bedreigen, kunnen een uitreisverbod opgelegd krijgen. Dit kan zes maanden tot drie jaar duren. Buitenlandse burgers kunnen ook een inreisverbod van een tot vijf jaar opgelegd krijgen als ze onjuiste verklaringen hebben afgelegd bij een visumaanvraag.

Buitenlandse regeringen hebben eerder al meldingen gemaakt van gevallen waarin hun burgers China niet mochten verlaten vanwege een veiligheidsonderzoek.

Tussen China en de VS is een technologische wedloop aan de gang, waarbij beide landen elkaar beschuldigen van het ontvreemden van de capaciteiten van lokaal ontwikkelde kunstmatige intelligentie (AI).

BAD WIMPFEN (ANP/BELGA) - Wielrenner Felix Gall verruilt Decathlon CMA CGM voor de Duitse WorldTour-formatie Lidl-Trek. De 28-jarige Oostenrijker eindigde zondag als derde in het klassement van de Ronde van Spanje, achter de Spanjaard Enric Mas en de Sloveen Primož Roglič. Eerder dit jaar werd hij al tweede in de Ronde van Italië.

"In 2026 heeft Felix laten zien dat hij tot de allerbesten behoort en heeft hij zich gevestigd als een echte podiumkandidaat in de grote rondes. Maar wij geloven dat er nog veel meer in zit", zegt Andy Schleck, directeur van Lidl-Trek.

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De AEX-index op het Damrak is dinsdag met een klein verlies begonnen. Beleggers bleven voorzichtig door de zorgen over de snelle opmars van kunstmatige intelligentie (AI) en de stijgende olieprijzen. De chipbedrijven toonden wel enig herstel na de zware verliezen een dag eerder. Die werden veroorzaakt door waarschuwingen van toplieden in de AI-sector over de veiligheidsrisico's van een te snelle en ongecontroleerde ontwikkeling van AI.

Door de enorme investeringen in AI zijn de chipbedrijven en andere bedrijven die apparatuur leveren voor AI-datacenters dit jaar flink in waarde gestegen. Ook de beurzen bereikten daardoor nieuwe recordniveaus. De oproep om de ontwikkeling van AI te vertragen om de veiligheid te waarborgen wakkert de vrees aan dat strengere regels de koerswaarderingen van AI-bedrijven onder druk zullen zetten.

De Amsterdamse hoofdindex noteerde kort na opening van de markt 0,1 procent lager op 1096,91 punten. De AEX sloot maandag een fractie lager, ondanks de forse koersverliezen van de chipbedrijven ASML, Besi en ASMI.

Het begon als een jolige videoclip, maar liep uit op een compleet huwelijksdrama. Jamie Kames, de vrouw van de bekende goochelaar Steven Kazàn, figureerde in de clip van het nummer 'Ja Tada' van carnavalsartiest Vieze Jack. Niet veel later is het hek van de dam.

Jamie omschrijft zichzelf als een gesloten persoon. "Mensen die mij persoonlijk kennen, weten dat ik erg op mezelf ben en al veertien jaar nauwelijks mensen dichtbij toelaat", schrijft ze op social media. Tot de zomer van 2025, toen ze samen met haar man meewerkte aan de clip die zich afspeelt in een circus.

'Dit hadden we nog nooit eerder meegemaakt'

Wat volgt, noemt Jamie zelf een 'bijzondere vriendschap'. Maar die vriendschap zette al snel spanningen op haar huwelijk. "Die vriendschap zorgde voor spanningen bij ons thuis, waardoor de fijne en liefdevolle dynamiek die Steven en ik altijd hadden, plots omsloeg. Dit hadden we nog nooit eerder meegemaakt", schrijft Jamie.

Uiteindelijk groeit de vriendschap uit tot meer en valt het huwelijk van Jamie en Steven definitief uit elkaar. Wie de clipjes van de carnavalsartiest bekijkt, kan zich daar weinig bij voorstellen: Vieze Jack ziet er in zijn nummers ook echt vies uit. Opvallend genoeg bleek Vieze Jack niet lang daarna alweer op Jamie uitgekeken.

Wie is de man achter Vieze Jack?

Voor zijn rol als smeerlap zit de artiest urenlang in de make-up. In werkelijkheid heet hij Jeffrey Erens en ziet hij er totaal anders uit dan zijn vieze alter ego. Hij is namelijk de linker man op de foto hieronder, gedeeld op Instagram:

WASHINGTON (ANP/AFP) - De Amerikaanse krijgsmacht heeft door de oorlog in Iran te maken met een tekort aan munitie, aldus de inspecteur-generaal van het ministerie van Defensie. President Donald Trump sprak begin september van "onbeperkte hoeveelheden" en haalde uit naar media die anders berichtten.

De inspecteur-generaal meldt in een rapport aan het Congres dat de aanvallen op Iran tot en met juni naar schatting 33,4 miljard dollar (bijna 29 miljard euro) hebben gekost, waaronder 22,3 miljard dollar (19,3 miljard euro) aan gebruikte munitie. Daarin staat ook dat de oorlog heeft geleid tot "strategische tekorten in de voorraden" en knelpunten aan het licht heeft gebracht in de herbevoorrading van munitie.

Om de tekorten en vertragingen aan te pakken, "werkt het Pentagon aan het stroomlijnen van inkoopprocessen en productietijden, en aan het aanleggen van strategische voorraden van kritieke materialen, componenten en geselecteerde munitie," aldus het rapport. Er wordt gemeld dat het uitbreiden van de productiecapaciteit "aanzienlijke voorbereidingstijd" vergt.

UTRECHT (ANP) - Rijkswaterstaat trekt de oproep om de A2 van Den Bosch naar Utrecht te mijden weer in omdat de files daar zo goed als zijn opgelost. Eerder op dinsdagochtend ontstond forse vertraging door een ongeval in de buurt van knooppunt Deil. Rijkswaterstaat riep automobilisten op hun reis uit te stellen.

De storing die dinsdagochtend is ontstaan op het spoor in Midden-Nederland is veroorzaakt door sabotage, meldt ProRail. Volgens de spoorbeheerder zijn op meerdere plekken op het spoor "materialen aangetroffen die daar bewust zijn neergelegd". Het gaat volgens een woordvoerder van ProRail om buizen die aan het spoor zijn vastgemaakt.

"Die zijn daar moedwillig neergelegd", zegt ze. Doordat de buizen op het spoor liggen, ontstaan zogeheten sectiestoringen. Het computersysteem krijgt dan een signaal dat het spoor daar bezet is.

Buizen vastgemaakt aan spoor

Door de storing ligt het treinverkeer in grote delen van Midden- en Noord-Nederland stil. Op welke plekken de buizen precies zijn aangetroffen, wil de woordvoerder nu niet zeggen. "We vinden ze op meerdere plekken verspreid over het land", wil ze wel kwijt. De politie is ingeschakeld en doet onderzoek, voegt ze eraan toe. De politie Oost-Nederland bevestigt dat dit op meerdere plekken gebeurt.

Wie het spoor heeft gesaboteerd en waarom, daar is nog niets over bekend. "Dat willen wij ook heel graag weten", zegt de ProRail-woordvoerder. Voor de spoorbeheerder is het vrijmaken van het spoor, zodat de treinen weer kunnen gaan rijden, nu de eerste prioriteit.

Hoe laat de treinen weer gaan rijden, is nog onduidelijk. Op de website van de NS staan wel verwachtingen, die variëren van 9.45 uur tot 10.45 uur, maar de woordvoerder van ProRail benadrukt dat dit alleen maar prognoses zijn en het ook langer kan duren. "Treinen en mensen staan na zo'n grote storing vaak ook niet waar ze moeten staan", legt ze uit.

Geblokkeerd

Aannemers die ProRail op pad stuurt om het spoor vrij te maken, weten niet direct exact waar iets op het spoor ligt. Het beveiligingssysteem geeft dit aan per baanvak, waardoor een langer stuk spoor moet worden gecontroleerd. "De mensen die spullen weghalen, doen dat met handschoenen aan", vertelt de woordvoerder. Dit doen ze om sporen veilig te stellen voor de politie. Omdat het beveiligingssysteem geblokkeerde stukken spoor kan detecteren, hoeft volgens haar nu niet het hele Nederlandse spoor van zo'n 7000 kilometer te worden gecontroleerd.

Staatssecretaris Annet Bertram (Openbaar Vervoer) noemt het „bijzonder zorgelijk” dat de grote treinstoring in het noorden en midden van het land met opzet lijkt te zijn veroorzaakt. „Het is nu zaak dat dit heel goed onderzocht wordt”, laat de CDA-bewindsvrouw via een woordvoerder weten.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide, August 1974, handwritten on slide, “Portobello Road, London, 1974"

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Op de A29 voor de Haringvlietbrug is dinsdagochtend een ongeluk gebeurd met een vrachtwagen en een auto. Het ging mis in de richting van Rotterdam. Op de weg ontstond een file.

Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:

Abandoned boat along the edge of the Murray river.

Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:

A lonely bench near Nairn's bird hide at Coodanup.

Ali Ayman (19) had net twee dagen een rijbewijs toen hij zijn gloednieuwe BMW X1 slingerend en mogelijk onder invloed van drijfgas (hij had twee bussen in z'n auto, 'voor de Playstation') vol in de zijkant van de wagen Elisabeth (33) boorde. Elisabeth wilde links afslaan, maar omdat Ali een totale randdebiel is en 115 km/u reed waar je 50 km/u mag, had zij geen schijn van kans. Zij stierf later die dag, 14 weken zwanger van haar eerste kind. Maar zoals dat vaak gaat met smerige doodrijders hebben zij het eigenlijk het moeilijkst, zo ook Ali: "'Dit is het ergste wat ik ooit heb meegemaakt', zei hij en hij vertelde dat hij ook enorm is geraakt door het ongeluk. In de bomvolle rechtszaal werd dit met ongeloof aangehoord. Toen Ali tijdens zijn laatste woord nogmaals zei hoeveel last en stress hij zelf had van het ongeluk, liepen verschillende nabestaanden van Elisabeth de zaal uit.'" In een eerder verhoor zei hij overigens nog zich niks van het ongeluk te herinneren. Enfin, als je na twee dagen rijbewijs al iemand doodrijdt belooft dat wat voor de dagen die komen. Kan wel even duren voordat hij weer mag slingeren want het OM eist 8 maanden cel en een rijontzegging van 5 jaar. Maar daarna gaat ook deze doodrijder doodleuk weer de weg op. Hij wel.

Original Mastodon Post

@skippingmoonrocks @roelgrif

Als je 1 verhoor terug wil luisteren, laat het dan deze zijn:

https://nos.nl/livestream/2618813-outbreak-deskundige-amrish-baidjoe-getuigt-voor-enquetecommissie-corona

Money can buy you a lot of things, but it can’t buy you taste. Case in point: this girl makes like $200K but her home still looks like shit.

Just heartbreaking.

Although 38-year-old Rebecca Childers makes well above the average salary in her Detroit suburb, her guests would never be able to tell, because her home perpetually looks like she threw a huge rager with the theme of “trailer trash” the night before. That said, if she actually did clean up the piles of old takeout containers and cat hair littered about the place, that would only reveal more of her decorating attempts, which presumably went as follows: buying whatever random crap was on sale at HomeGoods, running it over with a car, then haphazardly taping it to the wall.

You probably have like a million dollars in savings, Rebecca! CB2 exists for people like you!

Even worse, though, is the fact that Rebecca actually enjoys living like this. She has no qualms about living in a $750K condo that looks more like a frat house, which is why her visitors will never hear anything to the effect of “I’m sorry it’s so messy,” or “apologies for the piss and shit smell masked horribly by Febreze.” Whether she loves the piss and shit smell, or if she’s just so used to it she can’t smell it anymore, it doesn’t matter. This is how she’s chosen to live, and if anyone makes the mistake of coming over, that’s on them.

Sigh… Well, at least she’s happy! And after all, what’s better? To be a rich slob with trash and Live Laugh Love signs everywhere, or to be a neurotic snob with no disposable income of which to speak? Sound off below!

Today's links

• Everybody pees: Even Jeff Bezos.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Zune won't play Microsoft files; Papercraft 1:1 Mustang; Third gender for Aussie passports; France hacked Canada; EC v links; Welcome to Night Vale; University spends librarian's bequest on football scoreboard; Everything is always broken.
• Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Everybody pees (permalink)

Jeff Bezos and I are very different people. For one thing, he is a sociopathic billionaire who built his fortune by monopolizing bookselling while I am a penniless author of books. He was born in 1964 and is 62; I was born in 1971 and am 55.

We've met a few times and even corresponded some in Amazon's early years, though I haven't had contact with him in decades. Despite that very minor acquaintanceship and that long gap in our message history, I can tell you one thing I know for sure about Jeffrey Preston Bezos: he needs to pee all the time.

How do I know? Because peeing all the time is an inescapable feature of aging, and Bezos has eight years on me, and I have to pee all the time. Jeff Bezos, like all older people, must contend with a progressively weakening bladder. Honestly, it's a small price to pay in exchange for the everyday miracle of growing older (as opposed to perishing).

The only reason I mention Jeff Bezos's increasingly insistent bladder here is because of how hard it is to reconcile the very different circumstances of Bezos's bladder with the bladders of the hundreds of thousands of Amazon delivery and warehouse workers who are not allowed to pee at all. Amazon's warehouse and delivery workers are "reverse centaurs," monitored by a constellation of apps and cameras, and they are severely punished for falling behind in the cadence set by Amazon's software, and that robot timekeeper does not make allowances for pee breaks:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/

This isn't a secret, and Amazon's come in for a lot of flack over it. But Amazon's "solution" is to add more penalties for peeing. Drivers who return to the depot with urine-filled bottles in their vans are punished as severely as they would be if they stopped to find a toilet. Thing is, the mere fact that your boss's robot says you're not allowed to pee does not matter to your bladder or kidneys, and when you gotta go, you gotta go.

That's why the roads leading to Amazon's warehouses are lined with pee bottles that drivers have hucked out of their windows before arriving at the loading dock. There are so many of these that the British media activist Oobah Butler was able to harvest them and offer a line of "bitter lemon energy drinks" on Amazon made from bottled driver piss. The drink was an Amazon bestseller and the company even asked Butler if he wanted them to help him scale up his deliveries:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

The fact that Bezos needs to piss and also the fact that he commands an army of hundreds of thousands of workers who are prohibited from pissing really supports my hypothesis that billionaires don't really believe that other people are real. If Jeff Bezos believed that when his drivers needed to pee that it felt the same as when he needed to pee, Jeff Bezos would let those drivers pee:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

"Needing to pee" is a bedrock of the shared condition of existence itself, extending beyond humans to our "horizontal brothers and sisters" (John Muir's delightful name for the other animals we share this planet with). Anyone who's ever had a dog understands this. I'm not really a dog person, but when I meet a dog that really needs to be let out of the house, my bladder twinges in sympathy. When I contemplate the kidneys and bladders of Bezos's drivers and packers, I get a sharp, persistent ache that starts about an inch below my navel.

I think billionaire solipsism is inevitable. The mere fact of dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers, billions of social media users and Google searchers – turns the majority of the world's other humans into phantasms, defective bots whose bothaviors are maddeningly non-deterministic and sub-optimal.

Add to that the fact that harvesting billions of dollars requires you to inflict pain on thousands or even millions of those phantasms whose money, privacy and labor you've extracted, and it's easy to see how you'd end up in a world where you can't bear to contemplate the fact that other people's pain is as real as your own. Solipsism is a deadly, conscience-eroding occupational hazard of the rich and powerful. No visitor to Epstein Island could have made the visit if the pain of those young women was as real to them as the pain of their own daughters and friends.

There's a short line from this solipsism to billionaires' enthusiasm for AI. When you don't think other people are really real, it's easy to believe that they can be swapped out for chatbots. Mark Zuckerberg's quest to replace your friends with chatbots makes sense once you realize that for Mark Zuckerberg, you and your friends are already just balky, shitty chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/06/sin-is-when/#you-treat-people-as-things

The belief that bots can teach your kids or counsel you through your psychological problems or look after your health concerns is perfectly consistent with the belief that you're more-or-less a bot, and also that the teachers, doctors and shrinks you rely on are also basically bots:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

The great crisis of oligarchy is not merely that it transfers power from democratically accountable public servants and elected representatives to oligarchs. The real crisis is that attaining oligarch status is incompatible with viewing other people as real. That's how we ended up with the richest man on earth slaughtering hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

Everybody pees. When I die, when Jeff Bezos dies, and when you die, our bladders will give way and we will pee ourselves. A declaration of war on other people's right to pee is a declaration of war on humanity itself.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• The AI-as-Normal-Technology view of loss-of-control incidents https://www.normaltech.ai/p/the-ai-as-normal-technology-view

• The Senate must reject the Clarity Act’s ethics charade https://www.citationneeded.news/clarity-act-ethics-charade/

• They want you to be scared of AI in a very specific way https://www.garbageday.email/p/they-want-you-to-be-scared-of-ai-in-a-very-specific-way

• San Francisco's AI-run store is losing money fast. After a visit, I'm not surprised. https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-market-ai-22424349.php

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Microsoft Zune won’t play purchased Microsoft media files https://web.archive.org/web/20061014104638/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004910.php

#15yrsago Papercraft 1:1 model of a 1969 Mustang, accurate to the smallest component https://web.archive.org/web/20110923151701/http://www.jonathanbrand.com/images/in_progress/paper_car/motor/pages/motor01.htm

#15yrsago Third gender option added to Australian passports https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14926598

#10yrsago French spy boss admits France cyberattacked Iran, Canada, Spain, Greece, Norway, Ivory Coast, Algeria, and others https://medium.com/@msuiche/nsa-hacked-france-in-2012-414d8de4bdcf#.e4hnvyj6s

#10yrsago Elizabeth Warren to FBI director: now that investigations are fair game, what about banksters? https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3107565/EMBARGOED-Warren-FBI-FCIC-Letter.pdf

#10yrsago European Commission wants to break the web, give publishers the right to charge for inbound links https://felixreda.eu/2016/09/attack-on-link/

#10yrsago Machine learning system can descramble pixelated/blurred redactions 83% of the time https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.00408v2

#10yrsago Welcome to Night Vale: scripts and notes from podcasting’s eeriest drama https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/15/welcome-to-night-vale-scripts-and-notes-from-podcastings-eeriest-drama/

#10yrsago UNH will spend $1M of librarian’s bequest on a football scoreboard https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/15/critics-question-spending-librarians-donation-scoreboard

#5yrsago Everything is Always Broken, and That’s Okay https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/15/everything-is-always-broken-and-thats-okay/

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17
  https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow

• Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28
  https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/

• Boston: The Post-American Internet: Possibilities for a new internet created by an American Hermit Kingdom (MIT Media Lab), Sep 30
  https://www.media.mit.edu/events/the-post-american-internet-possibilities-for-a-new-internet-created-by-an-american-hermit-kingdom/

• Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30
  https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
  https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=

• Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
  https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/

• Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
  https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow

• Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01

• Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

• Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
  https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• The Real AI Threat Isn’t What You’ve Been Told (The Tea with Myriam François)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc8It00fRsA

• Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ

• What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture)
  https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456

• Pod Save the UK
  https://audioboom.com/posts/8950533-radicalised-organised-and-thick-as-s-t-nish-has-had-it-with-far-right-protests-plus-why

• Stop Saying AI Can Do Your Job (Factually)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU3gABvwZCM

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Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (14905 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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