Cartwright described for Rolling Stone a years-long struggle to keep kids safe at school. “Munitions and tear gas — we aren’t new to this,” she says. “We’d been next to the ICE building the whole time.” She emphasized that the school has coexisted “harmoniously with the protesters,” but adds: “Our issue is the chemical weapons being used against them that were impacting our space.”

But as the intensity of the conflict rose, it soon became clear that the school would have to make a dramatic change. “We were getting nightly reports that green gas was enveloping our garden — our edible garden — and all of the different chemicals were impacting our soil.” Cottonwood faced the costly prospect of constant testing and remediation, or being unable to use its outdoor spaces. When the bottom dropped out of enrollment, the school chose to relocate to a recently vacant middle-school campus where Cottonwood could take over the lease.

On a sweltering August afternoon at Red Emma’s, the anarchist bookstore, cafe, and community organizing space in Baltimore’s Waverly neighborhood, something that would have seemed impossible two decades ago was underway: the first-ever national convening of worker cooperative restaurants. Over two days, 100 worker-owners from more than 30 cafes, pizzerias, bars, breweries, and coffee shops from across the country had descended on Baltimore for an intensive program.

“Corporate restaurants are pretty good at scaling up through collective power,” said John Duda, Red Emma’s co-founder and conference organizer. “What would it look like if the nascent cooperative ecosystems in foodservice could do likewise, with a goal of building community wealth, instead of maximizing corporate profits?”

The gathering represented a remarkable evolution for both Red Emma’s and the broader cooperative movement. Named for the famed anarchist organizer Emma Goldman, Red Emma’s began in 2004 as a scrappy collective operating out of a Mount Vernon basement storefront. Today, it employs 13 worker-owners in their sprawling “forever home” complete with a bookstore, restaurant, and bar — a transformation that helped catalyze Baltimore’s emergence as an unlikely hub for economic democracy, while upholding its radical roots. The space features a Free School serving as an educational and organizing hub, regular book talks with progressive authors, and walls and windows adorned with posters expressing solidarity with immigrants and Palestine.

The timing of this growth is particularly significant during the second Trump administration. While the White House has championed shredding the social safety net to fund tax breaks to billionaires and mass deportations, worker cooperatives offer a fundamentally different vision that puts power directly in the hands of workers and treats immigrant labor with dignity and as an asset rather than a threat.

At a time of skyrocketing inequality, worker cooperatives show it’s possible to create a successful business model not fueled by greed and exploitation. Corporate CEOs make 344 times as much as a typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. For coops, the ratio between the highest and lowest paid worker is 1.45 to 1, according to a 2023 report by the United Federation of Worker Cooperatives.

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/34581821

paywall bypass: archive.is/whVMI

the study the article is about: thelancet.com/journals/langas/…

article text:

AI Eroded Doctors’ Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study

By Harry Black

August 12, 2025 at 10:30 PM UTC

Artificial intelligence, touted for its potential to transform medicine, led to some doctors losing skills after just a few months in a new study.

AI helped health professionals to better detect pre-cancerous growths in the colon, but when the assistance was removed, their ability to find tumors dropped by about 20% compared with rates before the tool was ever introduced, according to findings published Wednesday.

Health-care systems around the world are embracing AI with a view to boosting patient outcomes and productivity. Just this year, the UK government announced £11 million ($14.8 million) in funding for a new trial to test how AI can help catch breast cancer earlier.

The AI in the study probably prompted doctors to become over-reliant on its recommendations, “leading to clinicians becoming less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance,” the scientists said in the paper.

They surveyed four endoscopy centers in Poland and compared detection success rates three months before AI implementation and three months after. Some colonoscopies were performed with AI and some without, at random. The results were published in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology journal.

Yuichi Mori, a researcher at the University of Oslo and one of the scientists involved, predicted that the effects of de-skilling will “probably be higher” as AI becomes more powerful.

What’s more, the 19 doctors in the study were highly experienced, having performed more than 2,000 colonoscopies each. The effect on trainees or novices might be starker, said Omer Ahmad, a consultant gastroenterologist at University College Hospital London.

“Although AI continues to offer great promise to enhance clinical outcomes, we must also safeguard against the quiet erosion of fundamental skills required for high-quality endoscopy,” Ahmad, who wasn’t involved in the research, wrote a comment alongside the article.

A study conducted by MIT this year raised similar concerns after finding that using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write essays led to less brain engagement and cognitive activity.