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Good morning. Let's start with the part where Billy Graham now knows whether or not his campaign to hurt gay people and non-Christians was well-received or not, joining the Dead Pool at 99 years of age.
McDonalds saw a smart idea when a franchisee flipped the arches into a W-shape to celebrate International Women's Day, and decided to go with it. The problem is that more than enough people saw the action as a cheap PR stunt and called on McDonalds corporate to engage in real changes that would help their workers.
To be able to appreciate stories that have women and are driven by women, you must first unlearn what you have learned about media that contains women. The impulse to classify a thing with women dismissively and look no further is strong and has been reinforced at every turn. That impulse must be resisted before the art can be appreciated - you have to admit that it might be good before you can see that it is. (Or isn't. Not everything is a winner.)
It is a greater kindness to hold men to the high standards you want them to be than to be soft on them or to believe the lie that they can't emotionally handle it. This includes other men, and might have to involve them quite a bit more, so that women do not have to fear for physical violence from men when they attempt to hold them to high standards.
You can be a fan of problematic things, but that requires acknowledging that there are problems, not trying to gloss over them, understanding that other people can see things in different or more problematic ways thatn you...the sort of thing that transforms you from an unthinking fan to one that understands things much better and still likes the property being watched.
Censorship these days is not about banning the idea or the object, but burying it under outrage and seeming social disapproval. And the way in which the theoretically private can become the incredibly public with the attendant hordes is a difficulty, because we do not remember that the social rules about not interjecting yourself into a conversation in a public space cannot be brought to bear nearly as effectively.
We may just have to say We Don't Do That Here.
Only very specific categories of criticism deserve comparisons to acts of violence and death, and we will all do better by restricting the space in which those comparisons are used to only relevant examples. Criticism is not usually an inherently violent act. If ideological purity becomes more important than reasonable discourse, then a lot of legitimate criticism starts being categorized as bullying or violence.
Not every person sees conversation the same way - some people expect silence as an indicator of listening, others expect people to talk with them while they hold the floor. The silence and turn-taking model some people learned in school is one way of doing things, but that's not the only way of doing things. Think about "snaps" and the "amen" chorus as one of the ways that "interleaving" conversations can happen, or people who all talk at once and yet manage to keep their conversations completely straight and wonder how you can't.
Media representation of the autism spectrum needs to get a lot better by getting more diverse, so that autism is not relegated to white cis male savants on screen and a much fuller spectrum of possibility in the head-canons.
Puerto Rico is still a disaster area, and the response to it has been inadequate, and there will likely be a high death count because of that inadequacy.
Fixing foster care and adoption requires working through a lot of systemic problems meant to give infertile rich white people children, rather than letting children adapt and thrive in the environments that would be best suited to them, with parents that would be able to raise them, given enough support. Because adoption requires the best of fully-consenting and cognizant parents, not the "leftovers" after everyone else has had a go at it.
The idea that corporations are artificial persons, entitled to the same rights under the law as actual persons, is based in lies, trickery, deceit, and ethics violations. All of which are now legal precedent. Taking a look at their creation and the case decided, I think it would be a good idea for a subsequent Court, when given the opportunity, to toss out that line as bad law. Failing that, it would be an even better idea for Congress to pass a law that explicitly states in no way are corporations people entitled to constitutional rights.
Because corporations will do things like buy perfectly good businesses, saddle them with debts, take their own cuts off the top and then leave the company to struggle and then die under all the debt it didn't need.
Spending a year inside the groups that constitute white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and those that belive in the inherent inferiority of anyone not white is terrifying. Both for the person going in and gathering the data, and for the rest of us who get to see what white supremacists are like when they think they're among like-thinkers. I'm not sure that the people proclaiming that we need to arrest rudeness by not giving in to it are on the same scale of poor behavior as this.
Poverty in the United States should be something that has a priority on being fixed, but instead the current government finds new ways to take money from the poorest and give it to the richest. Those poorest can't afford the basics of anything on their current working salaries as it is. And while legislators declare their belief that any poor person taking federal assistance programs is lazy and should have their benefits taken away, if they actually cared about ending poverty, they'd help people make good decisions when they're not being crushed by the cognitive load of poverty. And they would stop making it easier for banks to rip off minority customers.
Being White and wanting to be an ally means that you have some responsibilities to your black friends, many of them involving using your superior societal privilege to insist on change. Another thing that you can do to help others is not support parents looking to make large amounts of money by telling exploitative memoirs about raising their autistic children, and in general, understanding and working to get rid of the things that make people with autism way more likely to die early.
A visual story of how changing the occupancy unit from bed to house caused all sorts of changes to people's ability to have a place to sleep, unsurprisingly pushing out the poorest of people from their beds.
Because you have to be rich to start with and be able to stay long-term somewhere, many of the people who could benefit the most from energy efficiency are the people least able to afford it, or they're renting from someone who doesn't particularly care if their utility bills are monstrous.
As it turns out, if you introduce something new into a body that's not used to it, there can be terrible consequences. The article wants to say that it has to do with the oils in the peanut butter, but I suspect that this is at least potentially true for plenty of ideas, like adding or removing meat from a diet and so forth - there are adjustments that need to be made.
Matters in re: food and making links between food and problems of the body or mind in this upcoming paragraph set. The difficulty level of finding where all the sugars are in your food. Persons exploring to see if there is a link between a high-sugar diet and the onset of Alzheimer's.
Various forms of salt, various uses for vinegar, the likelihood that you don't need most supplements being hawked at you, and that includes fish oil, because further testing indicates a reported correlation between omega-3 fatty acids and less heart diseases may not be as correlated at all. Or there are coonfounding parts that weren't reported at the time. Yay, science.
The terminology and stigma associated with alcohol abuse may be getting in the way of stopping alcohol abuse.
A View From The Bridge, or how a doctor realized the correct cause of a terrifying health crisis and then ran into the wheels of government doing their damndest to take absolutely no responsibility for it. After reading that article, read this follow-up, Another View From The Bridge, where an additional horror is exposed - that what we think of as the psychiatric practice generally fails to even conceive of, much less ask, about very real things in a person's physical environment that might be contributing to their psychological issues.
We've seen a similar unwillingness to see in other places, too. The deaths that can be attributed to HIV/AIDS, and the lives cut short by those who chose not to see what was happening.
The when we do things may have effects on whether it gets done or not, and also we need to take more breaks and make them actual breaks. A piece about how realistic and achievable expectations are the bset things for happiness. The tricky part is figuring out, for yourself, what's reasonable and achievable - I don't know how many of us have had good examples of that while we were formatively small. Roadmapping your change, and doing the planning that comes with it, can help make the change work, even though the change itself is not likely to be instantaneous. (Which makes disappointment a thing that has to be managed.)
The origins of Proto-Indo-European as a language are getting clearer, even as the events that precipatated the spread of the language are not.
A dog given over to a shelter after the person found her disposition ill-suited to their own, the process of making nearly a million ceramic poppies to remember the casualties from the first Great War, frightening figures in Iceland, made mostly from the magnetic tape in VHS cassettes, pictures of adorable cats being adorable, cute pictures of animals in shelters, a bookshelf that can be climbed and that will not spill its contents in case of an earthquake, the use of pins to make edits to a manuscript, and very elegant dress designs.
A photograph of Mars, taken by a rover. A picture of a supernova just starting, taken by an astronomer.
In technology, with their inhibitions lowered, people are more willing to make financial decisions. Which can often lead to interesting purchases. Or reading papers about attempting to recreate earlier ale-brewing techniques.
The United States government is considering whether to grant themselves the power to snoop and listen in to your communications and cloud-stored items without having to convince a judge that they have a reason to do it, under the presumption that foreigners and data in foreign places are not entitled to the privacy laws and protections of the country where the data is or the person being surveilled is from, and that data collected about United States citizens by foreign government can be freely shared, including back to the United States, without the rules and protections of the United States court system needing to apply. Letting your Congresscritter know about this attempt to evade the Constitution is a good idea.
A job that makes a person a machine is a job that should be performed by machines. Because human jobs allow humans to make judgment and exercise their expertise. Or, for that matter, actually take vacation when it's offered without having to worry they're going to be socially pressured into not doing it again by their peers or managers. We might note that the origin of the word robot indicated a slave, in the same way that the origin of the zombie is someone raised after death and still forced to work for someone eternally. Cyber-conversion doesn't work well for humans - automate the jobs that you want a robot to do, and make sure to make the people displaced by the robot have work that they will be able to do and be human at. A fully automated society should start seriously considering basic income, so that someone can pursue human things without having to take machine jobs.
Holy fork - the SEC has been investigating whether the Equifax executives engaged in insider trading, to the point where someone actually got charged with insider trading. This may be my cynicism showing, but I would have expected this Administration to be jealous, not prosecutorial.
Send your name on a memory card for a mission to the sun.
Geo-engineering is likely going to join our toolbox for avoiding runaway warming...but some of our best solutions are also lethal ones.
Facebook's algorithms to find targets for ads, the people around those targets that might also be successfully target, and a process that weights ad buying in favor of those who provide the best clickbait, make it very easy for a person with a commercial or ideological message to have their material spread to the farthest reaches of the Interwebs, often for cheap. This is the ease in which data can be exploited when aggregated sufficiently well. Even more potentially alarming, the technology exists that allows us to create extremely convincing false images, audio, and video clips, such that a propagandist can make something appear to have happened that definitely did not happen.
Facebook also uses its two-factor authentication as a vehicle to spam telephone numbers with update notifications.
Using payment applications is a vector of attack for pople who promise goods and then vanish, and, unsurprisingly, the banks shrug and say "but you authorized it, so we're not going to reimburse you for it."
We might be tantalizingly close to discovering both the light of the earliest stars of the universe and whether or not dark matter exists, but we might also be entirely wrong about it. And we need SCIENCE to figure it out test it and see if it holds up.
E-cigarettes have been under the auspices of the FDA for a while, which will hopefully make them into regulated products that have to carry the same warnings as other potentially addictive products, like smokable tobacco.
GitHub weathered a DDoS attack that utilized unprotected servers running memcached to make requests that were supposed to then provide a much bigger data wave to attack with. All without the use of a botnet or other potentially-traceable thing.
Facebook is offering a free VPN...so they can then spy on you with even greater fidelity.
You may be able to defeat "x articles per y" restrictions by browsing those sites and not giving them the ability to use cookies.
Aggregate data on the opinions of dwellers of the Internet regarding movies is almost certainly lots of men talking about things, which might sound familiar to not-men who have been trying to get their opinion on anything heard anywhere. Or not-men achieving great things and then being told by men that their place is not in achieving great things.
And finally, Don't pay for credit monitoring. It's ineffective, it's expensive, and it's terrible.
Last for tonight, the many additional ways a targeted burst of warm or hot air can be used outside of drying hair.
And a story of finding the flow that defines you.
McDonalds saw a smart idea when a franchisee flipped the arches into a W-shape to celebrate International Women's Day, and decided to go with it. The problem is that more than enough people saw the action as a cheap PR stunt and called on McDonalds corporate to engage in real changes that would help their workers.
To be able to appreciate stories that have women and are driven by women, you must first unlearn what you have learned about media that contains women. The impulse to classify a thing with women dismissively and look no further is strong and has been reinforced at every turn. That impulse must be resisted before the art can be appreciated - you have to admit that it might be good before you can see that it is. (Or isn't. Not everything is a winner.)
It is a greater kindness to hold men to the high standards you want them to be than to be soft on them or to believe the lie that they can't emotionally handle it. This includes other men, and might have to involve them quite a bit more, so that women do not have to fear for physical violence from men when they attempt to hold them to high standards.
You can be a fan of problematic things, but that requires acknowledging that there are problems, not trying to gloss over them, understanding that other people can see things in different or more problematic ways thatn you...the sort of thing that transforms you from an unthinking fan to one that understands things much better and still likes the property being watched.
Censorship these days is not about banning the idea or the object, but burying it under outrage and seeming social disapproval. And the way in which the theoretically private can become the incredibly public with the attendant hordes is a difficulty, because we do not remember that the social rules about not interjecting yourself into a conversation in a public space cannot be brought to bear nearly as effectively.
We may just have to say We Don't Do That Here.
Only very specific categories of criticism deserve comparisons to acts of violence and death, and we will all do better by restricting the space in which those comparisons are used to only relevant examples. Criticism is not usually an inherently violent act. If ideological purity becomes more important than reasonable discourse, then a lot of legitimate criticism starts being categorized as bullying or violence.
Not every person sees conversation the same way - some people expect silence as an indicator of listening, others expect people to talk with them while they hold the floor. The silence and turn-taking model some people learned in school is one way of doing things, but that's not the only way of doing things. Think about "snaps" and the "amen" chorus as one of the ways that "interleaving" conversations can happen, or people who all talk at once and yet manage to keep their conversations completely straight and wonder how you can't.
Media representation of the autism spectrum needs to get a lot better by getting more diverse, so that autism is not relegated to white cis male savants on screen and a much fuller spectrum of possibility in the head-canons.
Puerto Rico is still a disaster area, and the response to it has been inadequate, and there will likely be a high death count because of that inadequacy.
Fixing foster care and adoption requires working through a lot of systemic problems meant to give infertile rich white people children, rather than letting children adapt and thrive in the environments that would be best suited to them, with parents that would be able to raise them, given enough support. Because adoption requires the best of fully-consenting and cognizant parents, not the "leftovers" after everyone else has had a go at it.
The idea that corporations are artificial persons, entitled to the same rights under the law as actual persons, is based in lies, trickery, deceit, and ethics violations. All of which are now legal precedent. Taking a look at their creation and the case decided, I think it would be a good idea for a subsequent Court, when given the opportunity, to toss out that line as bad law. Failing that, it would be an even better idea for Congress to pass a law that explicitly states in no way are corporations people entitled to constitutional rights.
Because corporations will do things like buy perfectly good businesses, saddle them with debts, take their own cuts off the top and then leave the company to struggle and then die under all the debt it didn't need.
Spending a year inside the groups that constitute white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and those that belive in the inherent inferiority of anyone not white is terrifying. Both for the person going in and gathering the data, and for the rest of us who get to see what white supremacists are like when they think they're among like-thinkers. I'm not sure that the people proclaiming that we need to arrest rudeness by not giving in to it are on the same scale of poor behavior as this.
Poverty in the United States should be something that has a priority on being fixed, but instead the current government finds new ways to take money from the poorest and give it to the richest. Those poorest can't afford the basics of anything on their current working salaries as it is. And while legislators declare their belief that any poor person taking federal assistance programs is lazy and should have their benefits taken away, if they actually cared about ending poverty, they'd help people make good decisions when they're not being crushed by the cognitive load of poverty. And they would stop making it easier for banks to rip off minority customers.
Being White and wanting to be an ally means that you have some responsibilities to your black friends, many of them involving using your superior societal privilege to insist on change. Another thing that you can do to help others is not support parents looking to make large amounts of money by telling exploitative memoirs about raising their autistic children, and in general, understanding and working to get rid of the things that make people with autism way more likely to die early.
A visual story of how changing the occupancy unit from bed to house caused all sorts of changes to people's ability to have a place to sleep, unsurprisingly pushing out the poorest of people from their beds.
Because you have to be rich to start with and be able to stay long-term somewhere, many of the people who could benefit the most from energy efficiency are the people least able to afford it, or they're renting from someone who doesn't particularly care if their utility bills are monstrous.
As it turns out, if you introduce something new into a body that's not used to it, there can be terrible consequences. The article wants to say that it has to do with the oils in the peanut butter, but I suspect that this is at least potentially true for plenty of ideas, like adding or removing meat from a diet and so forth - there are adjustments that need to be made.
Matters in re: food and making links between food and problems of the body or mind in this upcoming paragraph set. The difficulty level of finding where all the sugars are in your food. Persons exploring to see if there is a link between a high-sugar diet and the onset of Alzheimer's.
Various forms of salt, various uses for vinegar, the likelihood that you don't need most supplements being hawked at you, and that includes fish oil, because further testing indicates a reported correlation between omega-3 fatty acids and less heart diseases may not be as correlated at all. Or there are coonfounding parts that weren't reported at the time. Yay, science.
The terminology and stigma associated with alcohol abuse may be getting in the way of stopping alcohol abuse.
A View From The Bridge, or how a doctor realized the correct cause of a terrifying health crisis and then ran into the wheels of government doing their damndest to take absolutely no responsibility for it. After reading that article, read this follow-up, Another View From The Bridge, where an additional horror is exposed - that what we think of as the psychiatric practice generally fails to even conceive of, much less ask, about very real things in a person's physical environment that might be contributing to their psychological issues.
We've seen a similar unwillingness to see in other places, too. The deaths that can be attributed to HIV/AIDS, and the lives cut short by those who chose not to see what was happening.
The when we do things may have effects on whether it gets done or not, and also we need to take more breaks and make them actual breaks. A piece about how realistic and achievable expectations are the bset things for happiness. The tricky part is figuring out, for yourself, what's reasonable and achievable - I don't know how many of us have had good examples of that while we were formatively small. Roadmapping your change, and doing the planning that comes with it, can help make the change work, even though the change itself is not likely to be instantaneous. (Which makes disappointment a thing that has to be managed.)
The origins of Proto-Indo-European as a language are getting clearer, even as the events that precipatated the spread of the language are not.
A dog given over to a shelter after the person found her disposition ill-suited to their own, the process of making nearly a million ceramic poppies to remember the casualties from the first Great War, frightening figures in Iceland, made mostly from the magnetic tape in VHS cassettes, pictures of adorable cats being adorable, cute pictures of animals in shelters, a bookshelf that can be climbed and that will not spill its contents in case of an earthquake, the use of pins to make edits to a manuscript, and very elegant dress designs.
A photograph of Mars, taken by a rover. A picture of a supernova just starting, taken by an astronomer.
In technology, with their inhibitions lowered, people are more willing to make financial decisions. Which can often lead to interesting purchases. Or reading papers about attempting to recreate earlier ale-brewing techniques.
The United States government is considering whether to grant themselves the power to snoop and listen in to your communications and cloud-stored items without having to convince a judge that they have a reason to do it, under the presumption that foreigners and data in foreign places are not entitled to the privacy laws and protections of the country where the data is or the person being surveilled is from, and that data collected about United States citizens by foreign government can be freely shared, including back to the United States, without the rules and protections of the United States court system needing to apply. Letting your Congresscritter know about this attempt to evade the Constitution is a good idea.
A job that makes a person a machine is a job that should be performed by machines. Because human jobs allow humans to make judgment and exercise their expertise. Or, for that matter, actually take vacation when it's offered without having to worry they're going to be socially pressured into not doing it again by their peers or managers. We might note that the origin of the word robot indicated a slave, in the same way that the origin of the zombie is someone raised after death and still forced to work for someone eternally. Cyber-conversion doesn't work well for humans - automate the jobs that you want a robot to do, and make sure to make the people displaced by the robot have work that they will be able to do and be human at. A fully automated society should start seriously considering basic income, so that someone can pursue human things without having to take machine jobs.
Holy fork - the SEC has been investigating whether the Equifax executives engaged in insider trading, to the point where someone actually got charged with insider trading. This may be my cynicism showing, but I would have expected this Administration to be jealous, not prosecutorial.
Send your name on a memory card for a mission to the sun.
Geo-engineering is likely going to join our toolbox for avoiding runaway warming...but some of our best solutions are also lethal ones.
Facebook's algorithms to find targets for ads, the people around those targets that might also be successfully target, and a process that weights ad buying in favor of those who provide the best clickbait, make it very easy for a person with a commercial or ideological message to have their material spread to the farthest reaches of the Interwebs, often for cheap. This is the ease in which data can be exploited when aggregated sufficiently well. Even more potentially alarming, the technology exists that allows us to create extremely convincing false images, audio, and video clips, such that a propagandist can make something appear to have happened that definitely did not happen.
Facebook also uses its two-factor authentication as a vehicle to spam telephone numbers with update notifications.
Using payment applications is a vector of attack for pople who promise goods and then vanish, and, unsurprisingly, the banks shrug and say "but you authorized it, so we're not going to reimburse you for it."
We might be tantalizingly close to discovering both the light of the earliest stars of the universe and whether or not dark matter exists, but we might also be entirely wrong about it. And we need SCIENCE to figure it out test it and see if it holds up.
E-cigarettes have been under the auspices of the FDA for a while, which will hopefully make them into regulated products that have to carry the same warnings as other potentially addictive products, like smokable tobacco.
GitHub weathered a DDoS attack that utilized unprotected servers running memcached to make requests that were supposed to then provide a much bigger data wave to attack with. All without the use of a botnet or other potentially-traceable thing.
Facebook is offering a free VPN...so they can then spy on you with even greater fidelity.
You may be able to defeat "x articles per y" restrictions by browsing those sites and not giving them the ability to use cookies.
Aggregate data on the opinions of dwellers of the Internet regarding movies is almost certainly lots of men talking about things, which might sound familiar to not-men who have been trying to get their opinion on anything heard anywhere. Or not-men achieving great things and then being told by men that their place is not in achieving great things.
And finally, Don't pay for credit monitoring. It's ineffective, it's expensive, and it's terrible.
Last for tonight, the many additional ways a targeted burst of warm or hot air can be used outside of drying hair.
And a story of finding the flow that defines you.
