Werd I/O

[Jason Snell at Six Colors]

"In the most recent financial quarter, Apple generated $24.4 billion in revenue from Services. The Mac, iPad, and wearables categories together generated just $22.3 billion. Only the iPhone is more important to Apple’s top line than Services."

This is an interesting piece about how Apple's services revenue is set to overtake its hardware business.

Over on his blog Pixel Envy, Nick Heer worries:

"It would be disappointing if Apple sees its hardware products increasingly as vehicles for recurring revenue."

I'd go further. The beauty of Apple's product line is that they're comparatively well-made products that push the boundaries of user experience, bringing technology breakthroughs to a creative audience: as Jobs put it, "bicycles for the mind". Customers (including me) accept higher prices because the products are exceptional, but that depends on a product line that is complete.

If the product offering is a higher-priced hardware device and premium monthly services on top of it, the investment starts to have diminishing returns. It's a loss of focus on what made Apple great, and why people keep coming back to it. It's greed, essentially: continuing to push the Apple user base further and further, assuming the breaking point is very far out.

That puts them at risk from being disrupted by someone else. Windows ain't it, but at some point someone is going to come in with a really great set of hardware on an alternative stack. The question won't be whether it beats Apple as-is, but simply whether it's good enough at a lower price point. And then that company will grow their offerings, until before you know it, Apple has serious competition. It's disruption 101, and the further Apple pushes out its expense and friction, the more susceptible it becomes.

#Technology

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[Nieman Journalism Lab]

"The number of digital news startup launches has been slowing since 2022 in Europe, Latin America, and North America, according to the new Global Project Oasis report. Global Project Oasis, a research project funded by the Google News Initiative that maps digital-native news startups globally, cited economic challenges, slow growth, and political conflicts as potential reasons for the drop."

This report is in-depth and fascinating. It seems obvious to me that having more news sources with specific focuses is a really good thing, but also that ensuring that they are sustainable is crucial. Many journalistic outlets were created by journalists with business models as almost an afterthought, so as certain kinds of funding dried up they became less viable.

One thing that I really wish was present in this report: platform. What was Substack's influence here? Or Ghost's? Are these WordPress shops? How many of them were aided by Automattic's Newspack, for example? These details could also be revealing.

We need journalism that keeps us more informed, and it's not a secret that many of our incumbent outlets are not doing the job. A healthy news startup ecosystem is one way we can get to a more informed voting population and stronger democracies in our local communities, nationally, and globally.

#Media

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[Molly White]

"With $45.5 million in corporate contributions, American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is the largest donor to Fairshake: a newly-minted super PAC focused solely on installing political candidates who will be friendly to the cryptocurrency industry, and ousting those with a history of pushing for stronger regulations and consumer protections when it comes to an industry that has long been a regulatory “Wild West”."

"[Coinbase's] $25 million contribution, however, appears to be in violation of federal campaign finance laws that prohibit contributions from current or prospective federal government contractors. This would be by far the largest known illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor."

Molly points out that there's a possibility here that Coinbase is using a loophole that had previously been exploited by Chevron. But it's certainly not clear that this is the case.

It's also worth calling out what "candidates who will be friendly to the cryptocurrency industry" means in practice this election cycle. It's far more likely that Trump-aligned candidates will fall into this camp.

#Democracy

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[Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica]

The majority of Donald Trump's net worth is wrapped up in Truth Social's parent company Trump Media & Technology Group. If he's elected, its deals and ownership structure will present conflicts of interests - illustrated by this ProPublica investigation into its streaming TV deal:

"The deal announced by Trump Media involves a series of largely unknown small players. Trump Media’s disclosures about the deal describe a nesting doll of companies that leave many questions unanswered about its new business partners."

"The sellers include a pair of Louisiana companies: [major Republican donor James E.] Davison’s JedTec LLC along with another called WorldConnect IPTV Solutions."

JedTec's issues are relatively straightforward. For me, the bigger mystery surrounds WorldConnect IPTV, which seems to be acting as a wrapper around a UK streaming company called Perception Group. In turn, Perception's servers seem to be colocated with Hurricane Electric, a backbone provider based in Fremont.

Perception seems like a bit of a mystery operation in itself: there's very little information on its website that really illuminates if there's any new technology here at all. WorldConnect, meanwhile, seems to have spent many of its early years helping right-wing Christian TV stations reach audiences across the UK's Freeview over-the-air digital TV service and the internet at large.

It's all super-strange. There's definitely more to discover.

#Democracy

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[Kylie Robison at The Verge]

"Perplexity’s “Publishers’ Program” has recruited its first batch of partners, including prominent names like Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and Automattic (with WordPress.com participating but not Tumblr). Under this program, when Perplexity features content from these publishers in response to user queries, the publishers will receive a share of the ad revenue."

Now we're talking. This was inevitable.

It also opens the floodgates: there's a world where any publisher gets a direct revenue share for being a source, if they sign up and license their content. This seems like a solid improvement.

Which brings me to Automattic's involvement. As Matt Mullenweg says in the piece:

"It’s a much better revenue split than Google, which is zero."

Automattic will actually be sharing the revenue with customers of its hosted WordPress product. I'm not sure if that includes WordPress VIP, its premium product for publishers. Whether free hosted WordPress publishers who are used as sources by Perpexity see any kind of revenue share is also a mystery, which might put some foreign publishers in a bad place in particular.

Still, in general, although there will certainly be kinks to work out, this sets a really good precedent. More, please.

#AI

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[Bron Maher at PressGazette]

"Mail Online, The Independent and the websites of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express have begun requiring readers to pay for access if they do not consent to third-party cookies."

I believe this would have been illegal were the UK still a part of the EU. Meta is in trouble for a similar sort of scheme. Here, though, in a UK free from EU constraints, there are no such issues.

It's a terrible approach, both in terms of user privacy, and in terms of the newsrooms' own business models: the people most likely to pay to remove ads are also the wealthier people ad buyers want to reach. So not only does this create bad feeling with the reader-base as a whole, but it reduces the value of the ads. It's lose-lose. (Also: who is actually paying for the Daily Express online?)

The irony, as always, is that contextual ads which adjust themselves to the content of articles are more lucrative than targeted ads that rely on reader surveillance. The business model reason to track users is overstated. But here it is again.

#Media

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[Shiraz Shaikh on Global Network on Extremism & Technology]

"Video games and their associated platforms are vastly becoming hubs of radicalisation, extremism and recruitment by far-right extremist organisations. The development of bespoke games and modifications, often known as MODs, has given extremist organisations the ability to further spread their digital propaganda."

This is both depressing and inevitable: games are incredibly popular and share social media's ability to let people share with each other at scale. Unlike social media, some of the modes of communication directly have violent modes of expression.

Valve's apparent under-investment in trust and safety, and protections against extremism, are also partially inevitable. How do you police voice communication across disparate games? But there's more to it than that:

"In terms of the material and content available on these gaming platforms, there is evidence of far-right propaganda available in huge amounts. The materials include books, videos, documents, manifestos, memes and more. Even on other platforms apart from Steam, interviews of far-right leaders, such as Andrew Anglin, are available for users."

This seems easier to police, and should be. That this material is available says a lot about Valve's priorities.

#Technology

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[Kate Conger at the New York Times]

""Time and again, Ms. Yaccarino has faced similar situations, as Mr. Musk is always one whim away from undoing her work. Ms. Yaccarino’s task of repairing and remaking X’s business over the past year has been complicated by Mr. Musk’s seeming disregard for the advertising industry and his constant unraveling of her efforts."

This reads like damage control - she's possibly leaving, although if that happens it's not clear if she's jumping or she's being pushed.

I have little sympathy: she knew what she was getting into. And she'll do just fine. But the project of supporting Elon Musk's work has been one of supporting right-wing ideologies, antisemitic conspiracy theories, and reactionary politics. Nobody who aligns themselves with this gets a pass.

I thought this detail was interesting:

"The internal documents about X’s revenue show that Ms. Yaccarino hopes to net $8 million in political advertising this quarter. If she succeeds, it would represent a marked increase from the company’s political earnings when it was still Twitter — the company earned less than $3 million from political advertisers during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, the last cycle before it banned political advertising."

This is likely what Musk's Trump alignment is about: he wants to encourage that side of the aisle to advertise extensively on X. And likely, they'll bite. Nothing is as deeply-felt or as ideological as it appears; this is, however ham-fistedly, about money.

#Technology

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[Ian Sample in The Guardian]

"England’s former chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, has said there is no safe level of alcohol intake. A major study published in 2018 supported the view. It found that alcohol led to 2.8 million deaths in 2016 and was the leading risk factor for premature death and disability in 15- to 49-year-olds. Among the over 50s, about 27% of global cancer deaths in women and 19% in men were linked to their drinking habits."

This is important: older studies which suggested that there are some health benefits from light drinking are wrong, and the harms of alcohol have been understated. It's bad for you, end of story, and the alcohol industry has used similar techniques and arguments to the tobacco industry in order to cover that fact.

And the outcomes may be really bad:

"Last year, a major study of more than half a million Chinese men linked alcohol to more than 60 diseases, including liver cirrhosis, stroke, several gastrointestinal cancers, gout, cataracts and gastric ulcers."

It's disappointing news for people like me who enjoy a drink from time to time - but it's better to know than not. There's a real trade-off to those glasses of wine.

#Health

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[Carl Sullivan at Flipboard]

"Flipboard has worked with local papers and websites since its inception. Now, as part of the gradual federation of our platform, we’re bringing some of those publications to the fediverse."

Flipboard turns the fediverse on for a whopping 64 US-based local and regional publications. This is big news - if you'll pardon the pun - and an enormous step forward for bringing journalism onto the fediverse. I love how easy Flipboard has made it.

I also really like this approach:

"To learn more about what fedi folks actually want when it comes to local outlets, we simply asked them. They told us the specific publications they’d like to see, and voted in a poll on the region they were most interested in. (The Midwest, it turns out!)"

Asking people is always the best approach. And as I've learned, the fediverse is full of highly-engaged, well-informed people who are hungry for great journalism.

#Fediverse

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[David Ingram at NBC News]

"Vivian Jenna Wilson, the transgender daughter of Elon Musk, said Thursday in her first interview that he was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine."

Her full Threads thread is worth reading. She seems to have her head screwed on correctly and comes across as a far better person than the father she disowned.

On puberty blockers, she says:

“They save lives. Let’s not get that twisted. They definitely allowed me to thrive.”

That's really the kicker with Musk's current nonsense. Lives are at stake, and while his rhetoric might soothe whatever it is inside him that is hurt by his child disowning him for being a bigot, taking it to the national policy stage and endangering vulnerable communities is far from okay.

It's also a wild distraction when the valuations of his companies are at risk. Privately, investors and partners have to be up in arms: this is not what he needs to be concentrating on. In effect, one of the world's richest men is having such a public personality crisis that it's putting the well-being of both a very vulnerable group and his wealthy backers at risk.

#Equality

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[Samantha Cole at 404 Media]

"A highly-praised AI video generation tool made by multi-billion dollar company Runway was secretly trained by scraping thousands of videos from popular YouTube creators and brands, as well as pirated films."

404 Media has linked to the spreadsheet itself, which seems to be a pretty clear list of YouTube channels and individual videos.

Google is clear that this violates YouTube's rules. The team at Runway also by necessity downloaded the videos first using a third-party tool, which itself is a violation of the rules.

This is just a video version of the kinds of copyright and terms violations we've already seen copious amounts of in static media. But Google might be a stauncher defender of its rules than most - although not necessarily for principled reasons, because it, too, is in the business of training AI models on web data, and likely on YouTube content.

#AI

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[Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge]

"Last week, the founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz declared their allegiance to Donald Trump in their customary fashion: talking about money on a podcast.

“Sorry, Mom,” Ben Horowitz says in an episode of The Ben & Marc Show. “I know you’re going to be mad at me for this. But, like, we have to do it.”"

No, you don't.

As I've discussed before, investors like Andreessen and Horowitz are putting concerns about crypto regulation and taxation of unrealized gains over a host of social issues that include mass deportations, an increase in death sentences, military police in our cities, and potential ends to contraception and no-fault divorce. It's myopic, selfish, and stupid.

It looks even more so in a world where Trump is reportedly already regretting appointing JD Vance as his Vice Presidential candidate and where Musk has reneged on his $45M a month pledge to a Trump PAC. They come out looking awful.

The progressive thing to do would be to starve their firm: founders who care about those issues should pledge not to let a16z into their rounds, and other VCs should refuse to join rounds where a16z is present. This is likely too much activism for Silicon Valley, but it would send the strong signal that's needed here.

The desire for profit must never trump our duty of care to society's most vulnerable. Agreeing with this statement should be a no-brainer - but we're quickly learning how many would much rather put themselves first.

#Technology

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[Anthony Robledo at USA Today]

"Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his estranged transgender daughter was "killed" by the "woke mind virus" after he was tricked into agreeing to gender-affirming care procedures."

The thing is, his daughter Vivian is perfectly happy with the decision. The thing that's causing Musk pain is not her decision to transition; it's that she's cut him off and no longer speaks to him. Interviews like this illustrate why.

That so many of his decisions are governed by this absolute loser energy says a lot. Just calm down, call your daughter, and reconcile.

As USA Today points out:

"Gender-affirming care is a valid, science-backed method of medicine that saves lives for people who require care while navigating their gender identity. Gender-affirming care can range from talk or hormone therapy to surgical intervention."

It's not done flippantly; a huge amount of care and attention is undertaken, particularly for minors. This backlash is pure conservative hokum: it does not have any scientific or factual basis. It just makes some small-minded, old-fashioned people feel uncomfortable.

#Democracy

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[Christine Hall at FOSS Force]

"The Apache Software Foundation is making changes in an attempt to right a wrong it unintentionally created when it adopted its name 25-years ago."

This is an unnecessarily awkward article (why describe the existing logo as cool in this context?!) to describe a simple premise: the Apache Software Foundation is slowly, finally, moving away from its appropriation of the Apache name and its racist use of faux Native American imagery.

For a while, it's preferred to refer to itself as ASF, and now it's going to have a much-needed logo change. That's fine, but it needs to go much further. It's past time to just rip off the Band Aid.

Still, this is far better than the obstinate response we've seen in the past to requests for change. A new logo, slight as it is, is hopefully an iteration in the right direction.

#Technology

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[Kayleigh Barber and Seb Joseph at Digiday]

"After much back and forth, Google has decided to keep third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. Turns out all the fuss over the years wasn’t in vain after all; the ad industry’s cries have finally been heard."

Advertisers are rejoicing. In other words: this is bad.

It's possible that Chrome's "new experience" that lets users make an "informed choice" across their web browsing is really good. Sincerely, though, I doubt it. Moving this to the realm of power user preferences rather than a blanket policy for everyone means that very few people are likely to use it.

The result is going to be a continued trend of tracking users across the web. The people who really, really care will do the work to use the interface; everyone else (including people who care about privacy!) won't have the time.

All this to help save the advertising industry. Which, forgive me, doesn't feel like an important goal to me.

Case in point: Chrome's Privacy Sandbox isn't actually going away, and this is what Digiday has to say about it:

"This could be a blessing in disguise, especially if Google’s plan gets Chrome users to opt out of third-party cookies. Since it’s all about giving people a choice, if a bunch of users decide cookies aren’t for them, the APIs in the sandbox might actually work for targeting them without cookies."

A "blessing in disguise" for advertisers does not read as an actual blessing to me.

#Technology

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[Gerben Wierda at R&A IT Strategy & Architecture]

"ChatGPT doesn’t summarise. When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text. And there is a fundamental difference between the two."

The distinction is indeed important: it's akin to making an easy reader version, albeit one with the odd error here and there.

This is particularly important for newsrooms and product teams that are looking at AI to generate takeaways from articles. There's a huge chance that it'll miss the main, most pertinent points, and simply shorten the text in the way it sees fit.

#AI

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[Matt Stoller]

"So what does Vance think? He is in agreement with the views of a rising set of younger conservatives, populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass, who assert that libertarianism is a cover for private rule, most explicitly in Ahmari’s book Tyranny, Inc. It is flourishing of the family that animates this new group, not worship of the market. At Remedy Fest, Vance was explicit in his agreement with this notion, saying “I don't really care if the entity that is most threatening to that vision is a private entity or a public entity, we have to be worried about it.”"

An interesting analysis of JD Vance's economic ideas - at least as described here, I'm actually not in disagreement. The free market is cover for private rule. Lina Khan is doing a great job.

I'm less impressed with his backers Andreessen and Horowitz's ideas, which are tied up with military might and a self-interested misunderstanding of what happened in relation to the downfall of the USSR. The idea that Elizabeth Warren "hates capitalism" is nonsense. It's a very thin defense drawn from their particular mode of capitalism coming under threat of regulation.

The trouble is, as I've described, all the social policies that go along with it. Sure, try and influence both political parties to be beneficial to your businesses all you want. But if you throw mass deportations, military policing of our cities, and fascist reconstructions of government in the mix, you'd better be ready for the repercussions.

#Democracy

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[Om Malik]

"Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy."

This move says a lot about modern Apple, but more than that, it likely says a lot about the performance of Apple News.

For many news publishers Apple News pageviews are a multiple of the reads on their own websites: it's a serious source of traffic and impact. The fact that Apple is finding itself having to make changes to how it makes revenue on the platform means that the mechanism itself may be under threat.

It's never a good idea to put your trust in a third party: every publisher needs to own their relationships with their communities. The pull of Apple News has been irresistible, and Apple has seemed more trustworthy than most. This may have been a false promise, and publishers should take note.

#Technology

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[Richard J. Tofel]

"I think some of those choosing these new business leaders themselves forgot about the special nature of the news business. It won’t be enough, for instance, at least in most cases, for someone who aspires to run a news organization to recognize the importance of the role of the press in democratic governance—although that ought to be essential."

"[...] More subtly, a CEO without news experience may not grasp how large of an asset is newsroom morale, or how much sapping it may cost an enterprise. Such issues can become particularly tricky in a unionized environment— especially one in which there are no profits over which to haggle, either because the organization is a nonprofit, or because it is no longer profitable."

Dick Tofel was the founding general manager of ProPublica, and generally knows a thing or two about the news business.

There's a line to walk here: there's certainly risk, as Tofel describes, of picking a news CEO who is not familiar with the news business. At the same time, as I've previously lamented, the industry needs an injection of new, outside ideas. It's certainly true that the CEO must deeply understand how news works, but they also can't be to afraid to change some of those dynamics - as long as they're cognizant of the position and responsibility that journalism holds in a democracy.

Any CEO needs to be very aware of organizational culture and morale. Many news CEOs are hyper-focused on their journalism (which is good!) at the expense of thinking too deeply about culture (which is bad). Hopefully any good incoming CEO would be an expert at building culture, although most of us know that this often isn't the case.

It's complicated, in other words. But journalism is at least as important as it's ever been, and getting news leadership right is crucial.

#Media

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[Robin Berjon]

This is somewhere between a call to action and a wake-up call:

"If you wish to be moral, you have to also pay attention to whether what you're doing actually works. And the best way to do that is to set up a forcing function for it: that's what checks and balances do."

"[...] Imagination isn't just a trite word to make your heart glow in pulp-class young-adult dystopia — imagination is the ability to depict justice, to see what we ought to aspire to. It is not a gift but rather a skill to hone."

There is an inherent question here about how you can create binding systems that enforce ethical standards - but also, how you can determine which ethical standards actually lead to the outcomes you want to establish.

I think there's a lot here that can be addressed through more distributed equity. As Robin says, "anywhere a powerful entity operates it is at risk of unethical behavior and therefore must be held in check by a control mechanism". One system of control - insufficient in itself but I think still necessary - is to ensure that power is spread among more people who are more connected to the effects of that power.

Distributing equity literally means handing over the means of production not just to workers but to those impacted by the work, reconnecting the decisions to their consequences. I don't know that you can have ethical tech that is motivated by centralized power. As Robin implies: so far, it hasn't worked.

#Technology

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[Plausible Analytics]

"We’re real people who have rent to pay and mouths to feed. We make $300 per month from donations from our self-hosted users. It would take us more than ten years of donations to pay one month of salary for our small team. If we cannot capture the economic value of our work, the project will become unsustainable and die."

It's more than a little painful to see new open source businesses re-learn what I and other open source founders have learned over time.

I'm fully in support of Plausible moving to AGPL and introducing a Contributor License Agreement, but I don't believe this will be enough. Indeed, Plausible is moving to "open core" and privatizing some of the more lucrative features:

"We’re also keeping some of the newly released business and enterprise features (funnels and ecommerce revenue metrics at the time of being) exclusive to the business plan subscribers on our Plausible Analytics managed hosting."

What's particularly interesting to me is that they're maintaining source availability for these features - it's just that they're not going to be released under an open source license.

Open source purists might complain, but I believe it's better for the project to exist at all and use licensing that allows for sustainability rather than to maintain open source purity and find that the developers can't sustain themselves. I'd love for these things to be compatible, but so far, I don't believe that they are.

#Technology

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[Helene Smith at The Guardian]

"Barely six months into the job, the mayor of Athens’s top priority is simple: ensuring that the people of Greece’s capital – mainland Europe’s hottest metropolis – survive the summer. After a June that was the hottest on record, the city has already witnessed record-breaking temperatures and wildfires."

We're deeply into the climate crisis at this point; a major city having to make major changes in order to "survive the summer" is just another example.

When you get into the detail, it's terrifying - particularly considering that we're still only at the foothills of where the crisis will lead us:

“It’s not a matter of lifestyle, or improving the quality of life; it’s about survival when 23% of the green lung around Athens has in recent years been destroyed by fires. It’s vital we have more trees, more air-conditioned community centres and more water stations on our streets and squares.”

Over time, we're going to see mass migrations and real, sustained changes to the way people live. We're also going to see a great deal of suffering. These are things we've been warned about for many decades, but the stories are transitioning from projections from climate experts to being the news headlines.

The onus is on the international community to respond to the crisis with robust energy, but we've been waiting for decades for this to really happen. Instead we get carbon trading schemes and economic deals that don't cut to the core of the problem.

There's an individual responsibility, too. These days that responsibility goes beyond making sensible choices about our own energy use (although most of us don't) and extends to voting, taking to the streets, and making it clear to our leaders that continued inaction is not acceptable.

If there isn't change, wars will be fought over this. In a certain light, they already are.

#Climate

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[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]

"Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. Now, it has made good on that promise — with its own newsletter as a start."

I'm certain that this is a large part of the future of how information will be disseminated on the internet - and how publishers will run subscription programs. Subscribers who use the fediverse see the benefit of rich content that they can reshare and comment on; publishers get to understand a lot more about their subscribers than they would from the web or email newsletters.

Ghost's reader will certainly be augmented by other, standalone readers that work a bit like Apple News. Its fediverse publishing capabilities will be followed by other content management systems. Notably, Automattic has been working on fediverse integration, for example, and Flipboard has been doing amazing work in this area.

I'm also convinced there's room for another fediverse-compatible social network that handles both long and short-form content in a similar way to Substack's articles and Notes. If someone else doesn't build that, I will.

#Fediverse

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[Alec MacGillis at ProPublica]

"Voucher advocates, backed by a handful of billionaire funders, are on the march to bring more red and purple states into the fold for “school choice,” their preferred terminology for vouchers. And again and again, they are running up against rural Republicans like Warner, who are joining forces with Democratic lawmakers in a rare bipartisan alliance. That is, it’s the reddest regions of these red and purple states that are putting up some of the strongest resistance to the conservative assault on public schools."

This is heartening to see: a bipartisan push against the school voucher system. Public schools are important social infrastructure that deserve significantly more investment rather than having funds siphoned away to support exclusive institutions. A free market for schools is not the way - and clearly, the communities who would be most affected by a voucher system see this too.

This also feels like one of those rare moments where some Republicans are actively practicing old-school conservatism: the kind that isn't drawn from The Handmaid's Tale. That's nice to see, and I'd love to see more of it.

"[Republican Representative] Greene believes vouchers will harm his district. It has a couple of small private schools in it or just outside it — with student bodies that are starkly more white than the district’s public schools — but the majority of his constituents rely on the public schools, and he worries that vouchers will leave less money for them."

Exactly. Not to mention a worse education.

#Education

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