It's been a month - late April 02023
May. 1st, 2023 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet us begin with The American Civil Liberties Union shop's collection of marijuana-friendly material, notable for being willing to come out swinging and cal the War on (Some) Drugs out for being bullshit.
Something of note, although it may only be of note if you happen to be viewing this page from within an IP range belonging to the Russian Federation - Dreamwidth is no longer blocked by the official censors of the Russian Federation, a move that should be treated as suspicious on the censors' part.
If you are a subscriber to a service that carries propaganda networks masquerading as news organizations, the fees you pay to your cable provider are in turn paid to propaganda networks, and one of them that just made a massive settlement hopes to recoup the cost by charging cable providers more money to carry them. You can make a request to Unfox My Cable Box or demand No FOX Fee for yourselves, and otherwise insist that your provider not pay the propaganda network to continue providing propaganda.
In other news, a propaganda network masquerading as a news organization fired their most popular conspiracy theorist after one of the higher-up executives finally decided he was too much of a liability.
Florida's legislature intends to allow Ron DeSantis to run for President without having to resign as the governor, which follows the tradition so far of the legislature changing the requirement to resign to run when it looks like someone might have to actually do it. Continuing in the vein of naked partisan politics, Florida's Surgeon General, a supporter of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for SARS-CoV-2, deliberately changed a report about the potential risks of mRNA vaccines to make them seem more dangerous than the consensus of the medical community, and then defended his decisions by claiming that the public has been subjected to biased data and Big Pharma and the federal government working together. (This position slots in nicely with his Governor's anti-vaccination stance.)
The House of Mouse has sued the state of Florida, citing a campaign of government retaliation against the company for their continued support of queer people to exist in the state of Florida. Given the campaign of government retaliation that Florida has waged against Disney, I think Disney's going to win this one. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone in Florida or in the United States is going to take the correct lesson from this: letting companies grow sufficiently large that they can brush aside the government, even when the government is trying hard to rein them in or hurt them, is a bad idea. As much fun as it will be to see Florida lose this fight, it will only make the DeSantis government believe they are right about "wokeness" and try harder to make everyone participate in the erasure of queerness and accurate history.
Several states of the United States are ramping up their campaigns against transgender persons, others continue to attack queerness in general, and still others intend to have a full war against women on top of all of these things. On an individual level, a podcaster went after no-fault divorce as a terrible thing, implying that it could be used as a vehicle for gold-digging. Mind you, he's undercut by the fact that he's an abusive dick, exactly the kind of man who no-fault divorce was created for, so his wife could escape him and have a chance at surviving on her own. There are more than a few people, and many of them in positions of power and influence, who are salivating at the possibility of returning to a situation where women's rights are only possible as extensions of their husbands, if they're allowed to have any at all.
The Texas Senate took a page from the forced birth movement and advanced legislation that would hold a medical provider liable for all costs related to any complications related to transition care for the rest of the patient's life, should that provider choose to give transition care, trying to get a position that says "Of course we're not banning trans people from existing, we're just making it impossible for them to find a doctor that will help them transition." Because all it takes is one plant who claims to want to transition but whose intention is to bankrupt a practice with their detransition costs and "complications" to ruin a practice's finances. Insurance providers will be unlikely, shall we say, to cover costs in relation to something so potentially ruinously expensive for them.
North Dakota joins the states forbidding people from using the bathroom of their gender identity, demanding that all bathrooms be single gender in college dormitories and correctional facilities and that permission has to be granted for a trans individual to use their correct bathroom. This follows on North Dakota declaring no transgender athlete can participate in sport according to their correct gender and doing their very best to erase the existence of trans people and unacknowledge the existence of sex. To the point of having criminal penalties for librarians who carry books on unapproved subjects or who put those books in the age sections that the writers intended them to go.
The decision to expel the Black legislators from Tennessee and nearly expel the white woman who acted in solidarity with them should clang alarm bells, even in the un-woke parts, about the hold that fascism already has over the country. The same kinds of justifications were used to bar the only transgender representative in the Montana House of Representatives from speaking or being present in the chamber after she correctly explained the likely consequences of decisions the body was weighing. Rather than expel her, though, they chose to silence her and her constituents by requiring her to vote remotely and preventing her from being present in the chamber. And similar nonexistent spectres were raised in a a conflict-of-interest allegation lodged against the Nebraska representative who has waged a campaign of filibustering all the business of the body to prevent them from passing restrictions on transgender people. The "conflict?" By having a trans child, the legislator apparently stood to benefit from public monies being used to pay for gender-affirming care for the child. Even though the specific public monies involve already can't be used to pay for gender-affirming care. (At least several of the legislators in Nebraska have roundly condemned the weaponization of the complaint.)
It is not doom and gloom everywhere, of course. Washington and Minnesota put laws in place saying they will not cooperate with states who seek to prosecute their citizens for obtaining health care that is legal in their states. Which has some wringing of hands about respect for the rule of law and the power of the courts, but given how much precedent the highest court in the land had to discard to achieve their preferred decision on Jackson Women's Health, there's always the counter-argument that the court is doing its own delegitimization just fine, thanks.
This backlash against the arc of justice has been in the works for a significant amount of time, and it continues apace as the party that refuses to give up their privileges entrenches themselves yet more in the desperate attempt to build something that will not be washed away. The long-term perspective suggests that they will lose, but in the interim, it's going to be dangerous and terrible for a lot of people who have to live through it. Stay safe out there and find your friends to help each other through.
Women have always used whatever was available to try and control pregnancies, and herbs and plants have been around for quite some time. The problem with many of the herbs used instead of the drugs is that they're the kinds of things that kill mother and baby equally easily, and it's very easy to overdose on them if a particular poison was more potent than usual. And yet, because forced birthers believe firmly in forced birth, if they have their way at banning safe and effective methods, then the herbs and their variances will once again be what is available and used.
What qualifies as exercise is a much wider field than what is marketed as exercise, and for people who are navigating brain minefields, getting to done is often more effective than doing something that's "exercise."
Childhood has always been viewed with some amount of suspicion by grownups who still believe firmly that children should not be allowed out in public until the can behave as small adults. Thus you end up with neighborhoods designed with hostility to children, pedestrians, and anything other than cars and busbybodies and police complaints and child welfare calls about children playing outside in their neighborhoods.
Scholastic made edits to the Goosebumps series without consulting the author, the author claims. Scholastic defends the changes in the same way the changes to Roald Dahl's works were: to keep them contemporary and avoid references that are now offensive. There is, of course, another option: retire books that are no longer what you want to print and start printing new books, of which there are hordes available. No book should be sold forever.
Sesame was declared a major allergen, with more stringent rules about cleaning to avoid cross-contamination with it. In response, several companies are now deliberately adding sesame to their products so they don't have to bother with the cleaning requirements. It's a perfect perverse incentive, because it'll be easier and cheaper to redesign the packaging and to add something that will make people have allergic reactions rather than develop and use procedures to avoid contamination with sesame ingredients.
People thought illiterate because they did not write in the colonizer's language had a robust system of writing, borrowing Arabic script for the languages of African nations.
People who thought they could simply cash in on the end of Ramadan with fashionable looks find themselves on the receiving end of backlash of obviously not understanding waht kind of fashion to market to observant Muslims.
Plenty of people are choosing to abstain from casual sexual contact, for a variety of factors, including the increased risks to women in retrogressive areas, to a dislike of casual sex, to an aggravation at the way that much of the sexual culture fixates on a specific idea of beauty. The article calls it "voluntary celibacy," which services well enough, but I feel like what is described there would be better served by "abstention."
Having been allocated a significant increase in funding, the IRS intends to turn the baleful eyes of the auditors toward those who make the most money and manage to pay so very, very little in taxes.
Expand your repertoire to include characters who are lovable rogues without also needing to be femme fatales or srs bzns girlbosses or secretly hypercompetent. Like, more Kenzis from Lost Girl. Talks smooth, gets herself into trouble more often than she gets out of it, but can come through with the weirdest things when needed, because, well, she knows where it's likely that the truck's going to hit a bump and stuff falls off it.
Staying on the topic, the grant of arms to Eowyn and why that's a BFD if you understand the Germanic tribes the kingdom is based on.
Clark Kent's disguise works extremely well because the people at the Planet assume he's undocumented and they don't actually care about that or intend to ever rat him out to CBP. Which is to say, yes, Superman is an immigrant story, and those who write and draw him with that in mind understand the character very well indeed.
The construction of maps is to get specific information across most effectively, and therefore, the best map for the job is the one that gets your point across most accurately.
The botanical art of Anne Pratt, the possibility that the U.S. still has a shot to make the Paris Climate Agreement's goals on time, a couple that decided to believe in living away from everyone who found out just how difficult that actually is.
In technology, another attempt to market a solution that's looking for a problem - a startup says if only people advertised their dating status, we would have better attempts to flirt and find compatible dating people, rather than the morass of dating apps and mixers. The article-writer is dismissive of the concept, even though there are good reasons why a person might appreciate having an explicit signal that someone is unattached, assuming they're all telling the truth. Reading further, though, I suspect this is another situation where the startup techbro has failed to understand "men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them" when it comes to dating and flirtation. A woman who wears a ring advertising being single is also advertising that she wants to be chatted up by…someone. How likely is it that the people who will take the signal of "available and looking" are the people she would actually like to chat with? And then what happens when, after she says she's not interested, he goes on a tirade about how she should be thrilled that a specimen of his caliber is talking to her and that she's going to die an old maid because she's too much of a stuck-up bitch to recognize that he's the best she'll ever have? Or that all she needs is to have a man, whether she wants one or not, and then she'll stop believing she's a lesbian? And also, we have all sorts of other methods for people to try and improve their likelihoods of finding compatible people, both online and in person, but it essentially requires you to actually admit to the interests that you have and are looking for in a partner. And then recognizing that if the thing you're looking for is something that's pretty toxic to most women, that you're willingly limiting your own pool of possible people, or you're saying that you want to put in the effort to bring someone into your fold, and likely protect them from your other, more toxic friends.
Even if there is a male contraceptive announced that is effective and reversible, significant work will have to be done to reframe society as one where men and women both take responsibility for using contraception, a prospect that seems dim at best, given how much the men don't want to give up their power or accept any responsibility about the use of their sexual organs.
A security vulnerability, possibly in Android itself, where supposedly-cropped photographs could have their missing data reconstructed. It sounds like it's limited to the first-party app for photo manipulation, Markup, on the Google Pixel line, so if you don't use that program, you may be okay. But Pixels are real popular phones, so. If you are concerned about whether some of your pictures might be vulnerable, there is a client-side checker you can navigate to and test your images against.
The discontinuation of the Chevy Bolt, a starter-level electric vehicle, is at best a mixed bag for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.
Wisconsin uses an algorithmic system to try and figure out which students are at high risk of not graduating. Generally, it fails at this task. And, because the criteria for what goes in isn't fully disclosed, it's resistant to being changed, tweaked, or possibly denounced for its failures. It tends to flag students of color as greater risks, which in turn can change how educators work with those students in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of way, but it also doesn't take into account that white students with at risk scores still continue to graduate at the same rates as those without while students of color, and especially Black students, tend not to graduate on time in general.
An analogy of language learning models to lossy compression methods that, frankly, does a great job of explaining why language learning models look slick and suck at being accurate (or are easily fooled into doing things they're not supposed to do any more.) Another explanation that showcases a lot of sophisticated analysis and predictions that make it clear the language learning model knows nothing about what it does, but is very good at predicting what comes next because of the the maths.
Last for tonight, Sci-ku, using the haiku format for scientific concepts and research summaries.
And also, Ken was deliberately designed to be a steady boyfriend and never a husband, so, yes, him being a himbo is intentional. Or, at least, that Barbie never intends on marrying Ken, ever.
And, because I can, an iceberg with a strong resemblance to male anatomy, photographed by someone from Dildo, in Conception Bay.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
Something of note, although it may only be of note if you happen to be viewing this page from within an IP range belonging to the Russian Federation - Dreamwidth is no longer blocked by the official censors of the Russian Federation, a move that should be treated as suspicious on the censors' part.
If you are a subscriber to a service that carries propaganda networks masquerading as news organizations, the fees you pay to your cable provider are in turn paid to propaganda networks, and one of them that just made a massive settlement hopes to recoup the cost by charging cable providers more money to carry them. You can make a request to Unfox My Cable Box or demand No FOX Fee for yourselves, and otherwise insist that your provider not pay the propaganda network to continue providing propaganda.
In other news, a propaganda network masquerading as a news organization fired their most popular conspiracy theorist after one of the higher-up executives finally decided he was too much of a liability.
Florida's legislature intends to allow Ron DeSantis to run for President without having to resign as the governor, which follows the tradition so far of the legislature changing the requirement to resign to run when it looks like someone might have to actually do it. Continuing in the vein of naked partisan politics, Florida's Surgeon General, a supporter of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for SARS-CoV-2, deliberately changed a report about the potential risks of mRNA vaccines to make them seem more dangerous than the consensus of the medical community, and then defended his decisions by claiming that the public has been subjected to biased data and Big Pharma and the federal government working together. (This position slots in nicely with his Governor's anti-vaccination stance.)
The House of Mouse has sued the state of Florida, citing a campaign of government retaliation against the company for their continued support of queer people to exist in the state of Florida. Given the campaign of government retaliation that Florida has waged against Disney, I think Disney's going to win this one. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone in Florida or in the United States is going to take the correct lesson from this: letting companies grow sufficiently large that they can brush aside the government, even when the government is trying hard to rein them in or hurt them, is a bad idea. As much fun as it will be to see Florida lose this fight, it will only make the DeSantis government believe they are right about "wokeness" and try harder to make everyone participate in the erasure of queerness and accurate history.
Several states of the United States are ramping up their campaigns against transgender persons, others continue to attack queerness in general, and still others intend to have a full war against women on top of all of these things. On an individual level, a podcaster went after no-fault divorce as a terrible thing, implying that it could be used as a vehicle for gold-digging. Mind you, he's undercut by the fact that he's an abusive dick, exactly the kind of man who no-fault divorce was created for, so his wife could escape him and have a chance at surviving on her own. There are more than a few people, and many of them in positions of power and influence, who are salivating at the possibility of returning to a situation where women's rights are only possible as extensions of their husbands, if they're allowed to have any at all.
The Texas Senate took a page from the forced birth movement and advanced legislation that would hold a medical provider liable for all costs related to any complications related to transition care for the rest of the patient's life, should that provider choose to give transition care, trying to get a position that says "Of course we're not banning trans people from existing, we're just making it impossible for them to find a doctor that will help them transition." Because all it takes is one plant who claims to want to transition but whose intention is to bankrupt a practice with their detransition costs and "complications" to ruin a practice's finances. Insurance providers will be unlikely, shall we say, to cover costs in relation to something so potentially ruinously expensive for them.
North Dakota joins the states forbidding people from using the bathroom of their gender identity, demanding that all bathrooms be single gender in college dormitories and correctional facilities and that permission has to be granted for a trans individual to use their correct bathroom. This follows on North Dakota declaring no transgender athlete can participate in sport according to their correct gender and doing their very best to erase the existence of trans people and unacknowledge the existence of sex. To the point of having criminal penalties for librarians who carry books on unapproved subjects or who put those books in the age sections that the writers intended them to go.
The decision to expel the Black legislators from Tennessee and nearly expel the white woman who acted in solidarity with them should clang alarm bells, even in the un-woke parts, about the hold that fascism already has over the country. The same kinds of justifications were used to bar the only transgender representative in the Montana House of Representatives from speaking or being present in the chamber after she correctly explained the likely consequences of decisions the body was weighing. Rather than expel her, though, they chose to silence her and her constituents by requiring her to vote remotely and preventing her from being present in the chamber. And similar nonexistent spectres were raised in a a conflict-of-interest allegation lodged against the Nebraska representative who has waged a campaign of filibustering all the business of the body to prevent them from passing restrictions on transgender people. The "conflict?" By having a trans child, the legislator apparently stood to benefit from public monies being used to pay for gender-affirming care for the child. Even though the specific public monies involve already can't be used to pay for gender-affirming care. (At least several of the legislators in Nebraska have roundly condemned the weaponization of the complaint.)
It is not doom and gloom everywhere, of course. Washington and Minnesota put laws in place saying they will not cooperate with states who seek to prosecute their citizens for obtaining health care that is legal in their states. Which has some wringing of hands about respect for the rule of law and the power of the courts, but given how much precedent the highest court in the land had to discard to achieve their preferred decision on Jackson Women's Health, there's always the counter-argument that the court is doing its own delegitimization just fine, thanks.
This backlash against the arc of justice has been in the works for a significant amount of time, and it continues apace as the party that refuses to give up their privileges entrenches themselves yet more in the desperate attempt to build something that will not be washed away. The long-term perspective suggests that they will lose, but in the interim, it's going to be dangerous and terrible for a lot of people who have to live through it. Stay safe out there and find your friends to help each other through.
Women have always used whatever was available to try and control pregnancies, and herbs and plants have been around for quite some time. The problem with many of the herbs used instead of the drugs is that they're the kinds of things that kill mother and baby equally easily, and it's very easy to overdose on them if a particular poison was more potent than usual. And yet, because forced birthers believe firmly in forced birth, if they have their way at banning safe and effective methods, then the herbs and their variances will once again be what is available and used.
What qualifies as exercise is a much wider field than what is marketed as exercise, and for people who are navigating brain minefields, getting to done is often more effective than doing something that's "exercise."
Childhood has always been viewed with some amount of suspicion by grownups who still believe firmly that children should not be allowed out in public until the can behave as small adults. Thus you end up with neighborhoods designed with hostility to children, pedestrians, and anything other than cars and busbybodies and police complaints and child welfare calls about children playing outside in their neighborhoods.
Scholastic made edits to the Goosebumps series without consulting the author, the author claims. Scholastic defends the changes in the same way the changes to Roald Dahl's works were: to keep them contemporary and avoid references that are now offensive. There is, of course, another option: retire books that are no longer what you want to print and start printing new books, of which there are hordes available. No book should be sold forever.
Sesame was declared a major allergen, with more stringent rules about cleaning to avoid cross-contamination with it. In response, several companies are now deliberately adding sesame to their products so they don't have to bother with the cleaning requirements. It's a perfect perverse incentive, because it'll be easier and cheaper to redesign the packaging and to add something that will make people have allergic reactions rather than develop and use procedures to avoid contamination with sesame ingredients.
People thought illiterate because they did not write in the colonizer's language had a robust system of writing, borrowing Arabic script for the languages of African nations.
People who thought they could simply cash in on the end of Ramadan with fashionable looks find themselves on the receiving end of backlash of obviously not understanding waht kind of fashion to market to observant Muslims.
Plenty of people are choosing to abstain from casual sexual contact, for a variety of factors, including the increased risks to women in retrogressive areas, to a dislike of casual sex, to an aggravation at the way that much of the sexual culture fixates on a specific idea of beauty. The article calls it "voluntary celibacy," which services well enough, but I feel like what is described there would be better served by "abstention."
Having been allocated a significant increase in funding, the IRS intends to turn the baleful eyes of the auditors toward those who make the most money and manage to pay so very, very little in taxes.
Expand your repertoire to include characters who are lovable rogues without also needing to be femme fatales or srs bzns girlbosses or secretly hypercompetent. Like, more Kenzis from Lost Girl. Talks smooth, gets herself into trouble more often than she gets out of it, but can come through with the weirdest things when needed, because, well, she knows where it's likely that the truck's going to hit a bump and stuff falls off it.
Staying on the topic, the grant of arms to Eowyn and why that's a BFD if you understand the Germanic tribes the kingdom is based on.
Clark Kent's disguise works extremely well because the people at the Planet assume he's undocumented and they don't actually care about that or intend to ever rat him out to CBP. Which is to say, yes, Superman is an immigrant story, and those who write and draw him with that in mind understand the character very well indeed.
The construction of maps is to get specific information across most effectively, and therefore, the best map for the job is the one that gets your point across most accurately.
The botanical art of Anne Pratt, the possibility that the U.S. still has a shot to make the Paris Climate Agreement's goals on time, a couple that decided to believe in living away from everyone who found out just how difficult that actually is.
In technology, another attempt to market a solution that's looking for a problem - a startup says if only people advertised their dating status, we would have better attempts to flirt and find compatible dating people, rather than the morass of dating apps and mixers. The article-writer is dismissive of the concept, even though there are good reasons why a person might appreciate having an explicit signal that someone is unattached, assuming they're all telling the truth. Reading further, though, I suspect this is another situation where the startup techbro has failed to understand "men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them" when it comes to dating and flirtation. A woman who wears a ring advertising being single is also advertising that she wants to be chatted up by…someone. How likely is it that the people who will take the signal of "available and looking" are the people she would actually like to chat with? And then what happens when, after she says she's not interested, he goes on a tirade about how she should be thrilled that a specimen of his caliber is talking to her and that she's going to die an old maid because she's too much of a stuck-up bitch to recognize that he's the best she'll ever have? Or that all she needs is to have a man, whether she wants one or not, and then she'll stop believing she's a lesbian? And also, we have all sorts of other methods for people to try and improve their likelihoods of finding compatible people, both online and in person, but it essentially requires you to actually admit to the interests that you have and are looking for in a partner. And then recognizing that if the thing you're looking for is something that's pretty toxic to most women, that you're willingly limiting your own pool of possible people, or you're saying that you want to put in the effort to bring someone into your fold, and likely protect them from your other, more toxic friends.
Even if there is a male contraceptive announced that is effective and reversible, significant work will have to be done to reframe society as one where men and women both take responsibility for using contraception, a prospect that seems dim at best, given how much the men don't want to give up their power or accept any responsibility about the use of their sexual organs.
A security vulnerability, possibly in Android itself, where supposedly-cropped photographs could have their missing data reconstructed. It sounds like it's limited to the first-party app for photo manipulation, Markup, on the Google Pixel line, so if you don't use that program, you may be okay. But Pixels are real popular phones, so. If you are concerned about whether some of your pictures might be vulnerable, there is a client-side checker you can navigate to and test your images against.
The discontinuation of the Chevy Bolt, a starter-level electric vehicle, is at best a mixed bag for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.
Wisconsin uses an algorithmic system to try and figure out which students are at high risk of not graduating. Generally, it fails at this task. And, because the criteria for what goes in isn't fully disclosed, it's resistant to being changed, tweaked, or possibly denounced for its failures. It tends to flag students of color as greater risks, which in turn can change how educators work with those students in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of way, but it also doesn't take into account that white students with at risk scores still continue to graduate at the same rates as those without while students of color, and especially Black students, tend not to graduate on time in general.
An analogy of language learning models to lossy compression methods that, frankly, does a great job of explaining why language learning models look slick and suck at being accurate (or are easily fooled into doing things they're not supposed to do any more.) Another explanation that showcases a lot of sophisticated analysis and predictions that make it clear the language learning model knows nothing about what it does, but is very good at predicting what comes next because of the the maths.
Last for tonight, Sci-ku, using the haiku format for scientific concepts and research summaries.
And also, Ken was deliberately designed to be a steady boyfriend and never a husband, so, yes, him being a himbo is intentional. Or, at least, that Barbie never intends on marrying Ken, ever.
And, because I can, an iceberg with a strong resemblance to male anatomy, photographed by someone from Dildo, in Conception Bay.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2023-05-01 08:03 pm (UTC)There's a post somewhere about how no-fault divorce actually lowered the murder rate for men. Obvious content warning. Also one for abuse, and the consequences thereof when it can no longer be borne.
I am spitting mad that people seem to think that encoding more abuse and making it even harder to get away from is a great way to... well, exist.
*
letting companies grow sufficiently large that they can brush aside the government, even when the government is trying hard to rein them in or hurt them, is a bad idea
I'm so conflicted.
On the one hand, the government should absolutely be able to set minimum wages, enforce pollution standards, and otherwise prevent overrun.
On the other hand, if the government can enforce that a large and powerful media company only create media or take actions that agree with its own biases, we have a problem.
I was reminded that Disney was one of the pioneering companies to extend benefits to the partners of gay employees in 1995, for instance.
If Florida were to try to tell Disney not to do that, Disney needs to be able to flout it.
This is a) fascinating b) terrifying and c) a truly useful case study, I think.
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Arabic script used to write other languages! How extremely cool is that!?
Now I'm wondering if the languages in question have anything to do with Arabic, otherwise. (Asking for a hanzi-using language.)
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The link about transition healthcare costs seems to be broken.
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I love this Eowyn post and indeed, would not have caught that. Thank you <3
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Technology still won't solve people problems; dating and the misbehaviors around it are the epitome of people problems.
To connect this and some of the earlier articles, neither legal nor technical solutions will solve people being awful to one another; but both can mitigate the worst bad behaviors, if properly applied.
...hm. This is something I probably ought to take to my own blog.
*
Sci-ku! I am delighted.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-01 08:43 pm (UTC)---
The ability of a corporation to flout a government's demands for censorship are generally rooted in the understanding, if not the law, at least in the United States, that the government is not allowed to demand that kind of censorship, and therefore unjust and illegal orders should not be followed. The government's demands for minimum wages, pollution controls, and workplace safety are much more comfortably in the domain of what the government has power to regulate. And, if we had uncorrupted legislatures, executives, and jurists, those conflicts would be hammered out in laws and lawsuits. It is a conflicting thing, yes, because I also want corporations to follow the rules about clean air and water and treating their employees with respect and safety while also resisting the clear attempts at censorship and revenge being enacted.
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It wasn't immediately clear from the piece, but Arabic would be a convenient script to use, given the presence of Arabic script in a significant number of African nations before either independence or colonization by Europeans. I have no idea whether the language in question have their own writing scripts or not.
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I have fixed the link. A stray number made the whole think go kerflooey.
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I also found the grant of arms to Eowyn fascinating and not something I would have recognized as significant immediately.
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I look forward to seeing your thoughts on the ways that technology and people can sand the rough edges off each other.
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Sci-ku is an interesting concept, and I appreciate it for the way that it requires creative thinking to stay within the restrictions of the format.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-02 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-02 02:51 pm (UTC)