Simply Outlaw Poverty

Scheduling Note

Hello, dear reader! Just a quick note that Stuff Keeps Happening will be gone for a couple of weeks. The next issue will be August 18th. In the meantime, I'm going to look at some clouds in the sky. Maybe a bird. See you then!

Stateside

Simply Outlaw Poverty and Hunger!

Being a devout, Christian nation with such pious leadership, our president has issued an executive order pushing to forcibly institutionalize homeless folks and people struggling with addiction and mental health crises, all while removing aid programs that have proven successful.

The order, titled "Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets," does quite a few things:

• Prioritizes funding to states and cities who target homeless camps
• Pulls money from "Housing First" approaches to homeless citizens
• Instead, pushes for sobriety requirements and otherwise institutionalization
• Directs Housing and Urban Development to collect information about homeless citizens and turn it over to the cops

The goal here is the age-old conservative approach of "criminalize being poor." They think using agents of the state to mass incarcerate vulnerable citizens instead of providing support, nutrition, and security will fix it.

Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.  Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens.  My Administration will take a new approach focused on protecting public safety.~ The White House

Unfortunately for the rest of us, that's not how anything works.

Housing First approaches are wildly successful at getting people to a healthier place in society. It is less costly to give homes to the homeless than it is to mass incarcerate them.

So what happens now? A few things, but this is still just an executive order. It's a direction to administrative staff. It carries meaningful impact, but it is not law. Still, it will empower cities who want to raid urban campsites and will immediately bring an end to most housing-first projects.

Instead of just shrugging my shoulders here, I want to shine a spotlight on just how easily this could be done differently, and how impactful that could be.

Baltimore, Maryland is known—sometimes internationally—as a "dangerous" and "crime-ridden" city. First things first: Baltimore is an amazing city. I have a wealth of experience with the city, and it holds a place in my heart. There's few cities who can hold a candle to the culture found in Baltimore, and community flourishes there. It's reputation is blown well out of proportion.

Still, it does struggle with gun violence and drug use. Recently, we saw a mass overdose in Baltimore from a "bad batch" of drugs.

But the current mayor—Brandon Scott—has been implementing social policies which have already shown incredible returns on investment, both in terms of people and funds.

Yet since 2022, with investments into youth programs, affordable housing initiatives, housing first initiatives, infrastructure spending and addiction treatment, Baltimore has seen dramatic drops in violent crime with recent homicide rates dropping to record lows. Even the Baltimore Police Department's assessment of the situation can be summarized to, "yo, this is going pretty well"

"Hot damn, where's the crime all gone?"
~ The Baltimore Police, probably

Estimates from researchers at Johns Hopkins school of Public Health estimate that for every dollar invested in these programs, Baltimore sees a return of $7 to $19. That sounds like a box I would like to continue putting dollars into, please.

Its painfully clear, and painfully cynical how our leadership talks about this stuff.

Epsdate

Why is this a recurring segment already?

We've still gotten nothing meaningful released from the current administration regarding the "Epstein Files."

Today's Epsdate™, marked "current" as of July 28th 2025 (and expected to be outdated by July 28th 2025) includes the following:

• A recent Gallup poll found that independent voters approval of Trump has plummeted, bringing his overall approval down to 37%
• Speaker of the House Mike Johnson called for an early recess to avoid a vote pushed by the Democrats regarding releasing the documents
• A subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena the Justice Department over the Epstein files
  • There is no timeline for anything happening here at time of writing

Among all that, you have Trump visiting his golf course in Scotland while congresspeople head back to their home districts and prep for what will undoubtably be another entertaining round of town halls.

Elsewhere

All Eyes on Gaza

The main thing I want to talk about for this section today is Gaza.

I know I've discussed this near-weekly for over a year, but it would be a disservice to my conscience to not specifically highlight what is happening right now.

Day after day, Israeli soldiers—aided by US private military contractors and munitions—open fire indiscriminately into crowds of starving Palestinians desperately seeking food. It just keeps happening.

Over.

And over.

Now, Israel has begun doing "tactical pauses," meaning short periods of presumably allowing more aid into the region as the world is clued into the widespread starvation the Palestinian people of Gaza are being subjected to.

Children are withering to nothing with reports of people starting to die of starvation, signaling imminent famine in the region. "Famine" is one of those words that has an institution somewhere which declares what is and is not categorized as "Famine," but largely it comes down to "enough people in a population dying of starvation."

All of this is happening because the United States—largely with the silence of its allies—has been propping up Israel on the world stage due to our vested interest in what is essentially our colony in the region. Our politicians fund the brutal annihilation of the population living in what is supposed to be the holy land of our leaders' own religion, all because of some wild second coming prophecy they are trying to enact.

The discussion is starting to change. Very, very slowly, more countries are at least saying, "hey, that seems like a lot, bro." France is planning to recognize the Palestinian state in the UN, for example.

It's not enough. It can never be enough. It will never be enough unless we see justice brought to every single person who has continued to gleefully endorse this campaign of genocide.

But until then, the best thing we can do is never let their suffering fall silent outside their borders. Share what is happening. Demand action from leadership. And of course, keep your head on straight while doing so. The intentional conflating of Israel and Judaism in public discourse has led to many ill-informed folks lumping all Jewish people into their hatred of Israel's government. Jews are not Israel, Israel does not represent Judaism, and Zionism is literally a fascist political ideology, not a religious alignment.

Free Palestine. No child should starve to death mere miles from opulence.

Science & Tech

Tea, Spilled

After a recent surge in popularity, the "Tea" app—which allows women to quietly communicate about dangerous men in their area—has suffered a major security breach, with thousands of user images leaked, including pictures of identification.

Tea came out in 2023 but recently became a massive point of online capital-D Discourse as the app verifies the identity of women before allowing them access to the network. Once it does that, the app is supposed to be a private place to help women stay safe by essentially crowdsourcing warnings about dudes in the dating scene.

Since it is 2025, this made Online Boys very mad, and so they started targeting the app and its users, resulting in a recent post to 4Chan by a user who claims who have hacked the app and downloaded thousands of images.

I say "hacked," but really it's just, "Tea had an unsecured file server full of images they otherwise thought were either deleted, secured, or forgotten about and someone found it."

It's less of a hack, and more like someone just found a big Google Drive folder full of images titled "DON'T LOOK HERE PLS."

According to the developers behind Tea, the files are from 2 years ago, and were "originally stored in compliance with law enforcement requirements," which is definitely a helpful thing. Don't worry y'all, that was secure at some point.

I've also seen discussion about the app having been a product of "vibe coding," though I haven't been able to confirm from a primary source aside from educated guesses from those who have looked into the app itself. That said, this mistake does indeed reek of rookie mistakes that happen quite often in "vibe coded" apps.

High Alchemy Spam

RuneScape players rejoice: we've finally discovered the key to casting High Alchemy IRL.

Kinda. Sorta—maybe? It's not peer reviewed. But still cool.

Now, I'm gonna be loud here because this matters: the stuff I'm discussing here is entirely theoretical and is only a pre-print paper submission, meaning it has not been proven nor peer reviewed. Lil' tip: if someone ever links you a paper or reference on "Arxiv.org", take it with a grain of salt. That is a server for not-yet-published papers. Okay. With that disclosure, let's pretend this is just really cool science shit.

A nuclear fusion startup in San Francisco has submitted a paper with a theoretical process to perform alchemy: the creation of gold from other material, usually lead. In this case, mercury.

While the paper seems somewhat sound and comes from authors with respectable credentials, it's also still just theory. We don't have nuclear fusion power, which is a prerequisite to this existing. So that's… a challenge.

But I did learn something: earlier this year, scientists at CERN noted that they had observed alchemy happening in their Large Hadron Collider. At least for a tiny, tiny fraction of a second. It wasn't really their goal, but particles traveling at such high speeds can cause some wacky stuff to happen, such as protons getting shifted around by near-misses with other atoms, causing temporary elemental shifts (which is a very, very rad sequence of words).

Gaming

A Fitting Farewell

Ozzy Osbourne died this past week, followed by the death of exactly no other notable figure of a similar era. As a fun little token of respect, game publisher Double Fine kicked off a 100% off sale for their 2009 Jack Black-fueled fever dream of a video game Brutal Legend, which also featured Ozzy Osbourne.

But uh, don't look away from here to go get that free game, because the sale has ended already. The offer only lasted 666 minutes, which I'm told is the number of the beast, which is weird because my dog cannot count. Not sure he even knows what a number is.

Just… One… More… Patch…

I've been made into a liar. A swindler. A confidence man. A complete and utter fraud. I come to you know on my (virtual) knees, (virtual) beanie in hand, begging your forgiveness.

Hades 2 will have at least one more patch before their 1.0 launch.

I KNOW, I KNOW, it was just weeks ago that I got up here on my Big Boy Platform and told you all with my whole chest that Hades 2 had its final pre-launch update. But since then, despite the devs having originally said that was it, they've now said THIS is it, trust, for realsies.

Anyway, please cook. I'm fine waiting. Haven't finished a 50+ heat run yet in Hades I and I'm tryina.

Gaming's Prude Era

Gaming is entering it's prude era. Or, returning to it. Or, was kinda always there but puritan culture hurts us all.

There's been a lot of outrage from consumers after popular gaming platforms and storefronts Steam and Itch both removed (or "delisted/deindexed" in Itch's case) hundreds of adult-themed games from their platforms, citing that they must adhere to the rules of the payment processors they work with (think Visa/MasterCard/banking infrastructure)

I actually have a unique bit of insight on this'n, being both an indie game developer and having worked for years at a major financial technology company. I can say for sure that these decisions very much suck for everyone downstream of the large payment providers. People often get upset with Stripe about the limitations on what they can process payments for, but that policy is the policy of the actual backing banks, not the middlemen in front of them.

Now, two things:

1. Stripe has plenty of reasons to be criticized other than restrictive business categories
2. Payment processing companies shouldn't have to exist—it's absurd that we don't have streamlined payments infrastructure as a free service to elevate businesses, lower prices, and reduce predatory systems
   1. lol, that's not gonna happen

Unfortunately, a lot of anti-progressive interests are tied up with the money that powers the banks which provide the payment infrastructure. Their requirements flow downstream. While I wish we'd see companies like Steam, Itch, and even processors like Stripe lead efforts to get this all changed, I also understand that they'd very much be biting the hand that feeds them. Or, at least the hand that allows them to order some food.

Anyway, if you wanna make the biggest impact, call up Visa/Mastercard. Specifically, consider heading to the open letter from the "anti-pornification" think tank that directly petitioned payment processors to do this to get a list of the companies who caved as guidance.

Here's the Weather

More Stuff

• Paramount is finally buying Skydance Media after FCC approval once they finished rolling over for Trump. The dissenting FCC commissioner noted: "After months of cowardly capitulation to this Administration, Paramount finally got what it wanted. Unfortunately, it is the American public who will ultimately pay the price for its actions"
• AI Startup "Humanly" offers AI-generated live video interviews, but also they say they aren't trying to replace normal interviews, so I'm not sure what the point of this is aside from selling more AI stuff
• FEMA in the US is starting a "detention" fund for states to use FEMA funds to build concentration camps. For non-US folks, FEMA is supposed to be disaster relief.
• Beta versions of Apple's new OS for their main products gives us a look at Apple's new "liquid glass" UI and its… eh.
• New research shows that AI assistive tools actually made software developers in a study 19% slower at their job, despite the developers rating themselves as about 20% faster with the tools
• A more than 150-year-old company in the UK was destroyed by ransomware last year. Investigations show it started from a single weak employee password.