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silveradeptLet's start with a quick recap and capstone of something that has gripped the Internet for the last two weeks: Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood. So, it apparently turns out that This is How You Lose The Time War is responsible for This Is How You Lose The Time War becoming the phenomenon that it did. The creator of a podcast called Hello From The Hallowoods got inspired by Time War and believed that there was space to do queer media from the success of Time War, which itself led to a situation where they guested on a different podcast (The Silt Verses) and recommended Time War to the listeners of Silt Verses. Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood listened to the Silt Verses, picked up the book on the recommendation of the guests, and then created the tweet that went wildly, extremely, cosplay-inspiring viral. Which boosted Time War to an immense degree of popularity, sales, and The Internet making memes.
And now, for the capstone, specifically: Time War made it to the NYT Bestseller list. (That's Amal.) Time War made it to the NYT Bestseller list. (That's Max.)
And also, people who find Bigolas Dickolas at convention are (properly) asking for signatures on their copies of Time War.
The One Right Word. Or, in this case, the One Right Tweet.
Sadly, there is no more Tina Turner, passed on at 83 years of age after a long battle with cancer. Fuck cancer forever.
There is good news in the world, regarding disease elimination, the greater safety of the world, and rights going forward, rather than backward, in the world. But it's not what gets focused on in a lot of media stories, so more of the usual to follow.
Corporations backed by the government of China have started calling in loans to poorer countries for infrastructure projects, leaving those countries looking at a familiar situation, but with China holding the loans, rather than the IMF or the World Bank.
The choking death of a homeless and hungry black man, Jordan Neely, by another subway passenger, stokes the fear that the State and the City of New York believe the solution to the homeless and the mentally ill is for them to be removed from society, rather than helped to become a functioning part of it.
Russian Federation soldiers who disturbed the ground, fished, and otherwise behaved as if a known radiation contamination zone did not contain radiation contamination now understand the phrase "play foolish games, win foolish prizes" as they are suffering from radiation sickness from all of the contamination they disturbed. I suspect they might be interested in the Charge of the Light Brigade as some light reading. And that they should be taken care of from the personal funds of Mr. Putin, since he was likely the person who ordered them to do these things in the face of knowledge and self-preservation.
An inquiry about why customer service satisfaction ratings among different racial groups are similar, even when the recordings of the interactions show clearly worse customer service against the non-white groups. The headline conclusion there is "non-white people are so used to being given poorer customer service that they don't notice it's happening" but I think it might be more accurate to say "non-white people are so used to being given poorer customer service that they know complaining about it won't do a damn thing."
On a different part of customer service, Apple Store workers in Maryland are looking to include tipping as part of their compensation as part of their new contract in union negotiations. Reading the article, though, I think tipping is the wrong way to ask for what they want, which seems to be about profit-sharing and otherwise helping with making sure everyone is fairly paid. If it's profit-sharing you want, then you don't want to try and grab it from the customers in the form of tips, you want to grab it from the company in the form of profit-sharing agreements and possibly having money that would otherwise go to executive bonuses and other frivolities redirected to the employees who make the company work. Or the franchise work, or however it is set up in the retail environment.
Self-check machines are also starting to ask for tips for the human workers at their various establishments, and this seems to be even more of a proof that the wage system in the United States is fundamentally broken and that if we are reduced to begging people to spend more money for the service they receive, then there's excess money somewhere in that system that can be used to pay the employees properly.
The practice of Buddhism (not just meditation or mindfulness) in a highly Latine area, with both monks and laity drawn from the surrounding community. And in a different but similar way, A Buddhist retreat in Arkansas that functions with both monks and volunteers to achieve a place to learn many of the precepts, and then for the volunteers, to give them the opportunity to practice them in their ordinary lives. (Funny how a story of a tailgater in this story turns out to be helpful for me, since I recently got honked at by someone driving a genital substitute vehicle for driving the actual speed limit through a town that is usually festooned with patrol cars looking to catch the unwary. I pulled off to the side so as to let them whoosh by, since they were in a clear hurry, and I still almost caught back up to them based on the lights and their timing. May we all have turn-offs to let the impatient fly by.)
Noted racist, white supremacist, and general Karen of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene attempted to portray a colleague as a dangerous Black man threatening her safety and security with his mockery of her and her party's positions that lead to preventable injury and death, especially of children and those who have already given enough time to the workforce. His description of her as a white supremacist is accurate, and that she compared it to her calling him an "n-word" is telling about which of those words she thinks is worse, but also that she still thinks it's a negative thing to be called a white supremacist, in contrast to most of her actions and her party's positions, who are fundamentally opposed to projects like providing reminders and accounts of the impacts of slavery, even in the part of the country that was faster to abolish it and fought the war to abolish it everywhere, even though the amendment in question didn't fully outlaw slavery, a loophole that continues to be exploited by the prison pipeline.
The Unqualified are everywhere, of course, and many of them believe that school and library boards are vulnerable and can be taken over and made to do the bidding of reactionary conservatives. When public library professionals attempt to thwart this, or at the very least to get their boards to behave according to their own stated policies and the organizational norms that the library world has developed over the decades, the professionals are often fired and replacements sought who lack the training and qualifications to run a library appropriately. Or the Unqualified get friends in government to make it impossible to do anything but cave to the demands of the most fanatical. Who turns out to be a smaller percentage of challengers than we might think, but who also might all be hiding behind one name so as not to receive the consequences of their decisions.
Not that they need much excuse in friendly states. Arkansas, for example, is about to get sued out the backside because the governor signed a bill saying it was okay to prosecute librarians for letting kids read the books they want to, so long as the state believed they were "obscene," Miller test be damned. Several other states are considering doing the same or already have decided to criminalize the provision of books the state doesn't like, or otherwise attempt to get them indexed in such a way that something that the state didn't like would not be allowed in libraries, and something the state didn't care for would require parental permission to borrow. At this point the relevant question is at what point do we stop pretending they can be stopped by process, procedure, the courts, or their own consciences and start preparing ourselves for having to live, do our jobs, and fight back against local and state authorities that intend to censor materials and criminalize those whose job it is to try and provide wide access to materials? Books are the abstract version of this, but several of these states also have criminalized things like reproductive choice or living according to a gender identity that is true to you but different than what was assigned to you at birth. Getting rid of the books is in tandem with trying to get rid of the people, by making the potential penalties for existing openly so harsh that someone has to closet themselves or risk the power of the state jailing them, bankrupting them, or taking them away from their families and support system. (Florida has declared they have this power over anyone in the state, regardless of whether they are a resident of the state or visiting from another state, which should make any trips to the Disney campus in Florida a complete no-go. Or anywhere else in the state.)
The worst part of the upcoming election cycle is how much it looks like one side is going to be about who can more effectively court the white supremacists. Neo-Nazis held a rally in Florida and none of the major Florida politicians, save Senator Rick Scott, denounced their presence. Several state-level officials objected to them, and the conference lead said he attempted to have them removed, but could not because the neo-Nazis were on public property that they could not control. Florida has quite a bit of this kind of problem, including a woman who got the Youth Poet Laureate's poem banned in a Florida school by herself trying to apologize for also having promoted the ur-antisemitic text, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. She claimed to not be a reader of things and that she zeroed in on a word and assumed something about the works, which is certainly saying the quiet part out loud about how book challenges work.
A convicted felon who participated in the January 6 insurrection is suing his social media provider for deleting his posts and banning him from the platform, citing a law passed in Texas after the banning and deletion that forbids taking down social media posts for political beliefs. The law itself carves out exceptions for exactly the kind of speech the insurrectionist used, but also, Texas really does like passing laws antithetical to functioning democracy and trying to moderate the forum in such a way that constructive speech can happen.
Published writer Chuck Wendig on how it's not exactly a great situation to be a published writer in 2023, and two of the major threats to published writers: LLMs turning out garbage for humans to rewrite at lower costs and book banners looking to erase entire identities from publication and public life.
There are still problems with missing stairs, and in the UK's journalism circles, those missing stairs are even harder to get ousted, because there are few places to go to and be taken seriously about the bad behavior of their people. And because they'll come up with just about anything they can to excuse the behavior that doesn't involve taking responsibility for it. And then get their friends to attack their opponents and then help them get re-situated after they are eventually forced out, usually by using their own columns to say how harmless the missing stair is and how fierce and vengeful and somehow wrong his opponents are.
The state of Montana decided they wanted to have affordable housing, so they proceeded to remove most of the laws and regulations in the way of creating multiplex houses and housing built on top of commercial space and the other elements that were pushing construction in ways that encouraged sprawl. And did so bipartisanly, the article is quick to point out, suggesting that other states could help combat their own NIMBYs in a similar way. Staying on the theme of housing, The Anderson Scholar House in Indiana provides supports to single mothers to help them get through classes and earn collegiate degrees, providing rent-assisted housing and a support group to help those mothers make it through college, get their children in school or day care, and ultimately succeed at finding a good-paying job and being able to move out into their own housing. Amazing what happens when your stance about being in favor of life and people actually comes with supporting people, rather than restricting their choices and insisting that they must trust in God and behave in an approved manner before being allowed any support.
North Dakota adopts a law giving preference to Native parents when Native children are up for adoption, as an insurance policy in case the current Supreme Court decides that the Federal law keeping children with people who will keep their culture alive and teach them important things about being Native is unconstitutional race-based discrimination. The federal statute, the Indian Child Welfare Act, was enacted in response to the widespread adoption of Native children by non-Native families, itself a result of policies that kept Native parents in poverty and let white institutions remove those children in the belief that they would have better lives with white parents. One wonders how many stereotypes are at play in the case before the Court about who gets to adopt Native children.
While several states of the United States try to make it easier for younger children to be doing dangerous and difficult work full-time, we much point out the historical evidence of working children suggests that their outcomes are generally terrible and they're not given the opportunity to develop into healthy humans. Plus, there are a significant number of other situations and scenarios that a government could turn toward if they needed to fill gaps left by retirement, illnesses, and deaths, that would be better than employing children in dangerous jobs for low wages. But child labor is in line with the particular beliefs of the party pushing it, plus they probably believe that children are less likely to do things like demand fair wages or form unions.
The Attorney General of the state of Texas, Ken Paxton, has been impeached by the Texas House. The charges are related to accusations of bribery and impropriety, while the Attorney General says the impeachment is retaliation against him because he's been so effective at fighting Democrats and liberal Republicans who aren't as on board with his vision of what Texas (and the United States) should be. Until the Texas Senate decides his fate, Mr. Paxton is suspended from his work and cannot continue to do those things he believes are best for everyone (which, so far, have included threats to librarians, trying to enforce bounty hunting on those who provide reproductive services, and other such things that he would be proud of, even if they horrify others.)
Going back to Indiana, based on easily disproven allegations and scare tactics, the Indiana government forbade any state funds from being used to support the Kinsey Institute and their sexological research. Which is not surprising (this is the state that "can't have dinner with any women alone unless it's my wife" Mike Pence was governor of before he became the Vice-Administrator, but it's still the kind of thing where the puritanical elements are trying desperately to find some sort of victory to please their base with, and "defunding the sex researchers" seems like the one that came up for them at this particular moment. They could have gone in the direction of Noted racist, white supremacist, forced-birth enthusiast and general Karen of Congress Lauren Bobert and tried to claim that having a child was less expensive than the uninsured price of contraception. Which is certainly laughable. And produces echoes of the fact that she met the husband she is now divorcing when they were of ages that the Romeo and Juliet laws wouldn't have covered them. And that he pleaded guilty to exposing himself to teenagers. And that he needed anger management and alcohol management classes. And that she dropped out of high school because she was pregnant with a child and needed to work. And that he was apparently very unhappy with being served with the divorce papers, as well. The question of what the alternate timeline where she's able to finish high school, possibly go on to university, instead of marrying someone, having many kids with them, and eventually divorcing him after he's given her ample reasons to believe that he's not the best-caliber material, is an interesting one. She might not have become the Congresscritter she is in that world, or she might have done it all the same. But she appears to want to condemn others to her own decisions and remove their choices because she doesn't like them. And because she has a very shaky grasp of mathematics and the costs of raising a child.
There are more conceptions of gender and presentations of gender, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your Western philosophy, on the Pacific islands. Which makes for some useful cross-pollination and sharing of knowledge, but also risks the imposition of specific terms because those terms often have funding and other such things associated with them, which can impose a box where one need not be.
After getting roasted from the Los Angeles community and several local officials about their decision to exclude the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence from their event, brought on because Catholic groups didn't like being satirized, the Los Angeles Dodgers apologized to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and re-invited them back to Dodgers Pride Night, and in the interim, the Anaheim Angels also invited the Sisters to their Pride Night, making baseball even more queer, as it should be.
Some libraries doing things that are useful for their constituencies, by providing play cribs for small children next to computer stations so the grownups can do what they need to and the kids are safe and nearby and have play opportunities or offering cell phones with unlimited data plans, long term loan periods, and social and other services already programmed into the contact lists to those who need them, especially the unhoused, which, surprisingly, helps the unhoused and unemployed get housing, employment, and other social services.
And one state doing an extremely good job with the governance. Minnesota, even with a very slim majority, was able to enact a sweeping set of liberal reforms in the state, disproving the idea that Democrats with low majorities can't get anything done.
Project 562, a project intended to showcase the Native Americans of the United States, usually through beautiful photography. Observe the gallery for Project 562 here, and enjoy further that it is the project of one person.
The use of coconut fiber as a base to build living shorelines upon, so as to dissipate and absorb the energy of the water, often being pushed by ocean currents, a sighting of a rainbow-colored sea slug, how much people of earlier times loved their cats, and therefore did not order their extermination so much so that any major disease could have invaded and taken hold, cleaning up after the damage that water buffaloes caused when containing fences failed, returning to a community to help raise it above the potential floods of the monsoon season, trying, failing, and documenting how we really don't know all that much about intolerances, sensitivities, and allergic reactions to the things in our environments, which may have a common food additive as part of the reasons why, women in Bogota driving electric buses, and in places where there hasn't been a working public transport service for a long time, which is certain to annoy most of the right wing, since it's about climate and about women being empowered and about brown people finding meaningful formal work.
Those who are joining the disabled have things to learn, but also things to tell, things to work through, and adjustments to make. Coming to terms with having a disability takes time, even if many of the accommodations and services might be available from the beginning.
We do need to continue doing research on the disease and its long-term consequences, including the possibility that infections with SARS-CoV-2 might make a person more susceptible to Parkinson's or similar post-infection acute responses. And, when studying symptoms, it's important to consider whether or not exercise would be something that would help in recovery or impede it completely, depending on whether post-exertional malaise might be present. Yet another reason why they prescribe lots of rest for recovery from the virus, assuming you have the ability to do that and your employer isn't demanding your immediate return as soon as you're not likely to infect others.
Using a survey of those suffering from long COVID, researchers have tried to chart what the most common symptoms are to help make long COVID into a more reproducible diagnosis, applying point values to specific symptoms that make things appear to be more or less likely to have been caused by the infection.
Rutgers University is pursuing a vaccine candidate they believe may be more robust against current and future strains of the virus, with the additional benefit of not requiring special cold-storage procedures for effectiveness, and possibly an attempt at targeting the parts of the spike protein that don't change between the rapid mutations producing different variants. We can hope the Rutgers research is fruitful, even if it doesn't produce a perfect vaccination.
A woman with an active case of tuberculosis has yet to be brought in for treatment, despite civil warrants out for her, and the people who know her appear to not be encouraging her to get treated or to appear before the court. If she's afraid of being responsible for the treatment bill, that makes sense, but to also hear the spokespeople for the police talk, they believe she's not high enough of a priority, regardless of what kind of public health risk she is, compared to the work they have to do for the criminal warrants and arrests. It seems unlikely they're somehow understaffed or under-resourced, given that police departments have the ability to demand whatever they want and get it without questions being asked in the United States. Maybe at some point, when the person is finally able to get treatment, we'll learn the real reason why the police weren't responding to a public health emergency as quickly as they should have.
In technology, Google decided they wanted to let people register new top-level domains (TLDs) so that people could have websites that end in .zip or .mov, along with other possible sites. It became immediately clear that having TLDs that are the same as common file extensions would immediately become a vector for malware and phishing attacks, to the point where someone should have raised objections before allowing this decision to go forward, and now that it's gone forward, everyone who allowed it to happen or pushed it should be fired. There are already exploits in the wild taking advantage of the new top-level domain to potentially auto-download malware.
If cybersecurity is fundamentally a problem of humans, then the best that technology can do is make it harder for humans to get hacked. Because humans taught computers how to manipulate symbols, and it turns out those symbols can be used both to represent instructions for computers to execute and the data for those instructions to manipulate. So the best that humans can do to stop malicious hacking is to instruct both the how of the building of the tools and the why and the questions of whether building the tool is a morally-beneficial action or a morally-harmful action, and to let people who know how the worst people in the world think explain how the tool might be exploited for great harm instead of or in addition to the great benefit the creator wants to create. Because the tools aren't neutral in technology, (nor are the tools, books, and other resources necessarily neutral in the library, either. If we're in the business of trying to get people to become literate with their information choices and what they seek, then we have to take on the responsibility of making decisions about what we consider acceptable and what we don't.
Gaining and keeping the benefits of remote work, assuming you haven't already had your remote work erased completely, involves pushing back against the intrusion of surveillance into your home, using your relative privilege to enrich your neighborhoods, instead of gentrifying them or benefiting exploitative landlords, and organizing with your colleagues, preferably into a union, so that you can bargain collectively for your benefits. Because the thing that's being lost the most by remote work has been the ability of the bosses to make sure they know where you are and what work you're doing, and to be able to harass and exploit you and your commute.
More reasons not to use biometric data to secure your devices, as fingerprint authentication can be spoofed or the approximations expanded through attaching an additional board and then running brute-force attacks until an approximation that will authenticate is found.
However, at least in one jurisdiction, the government has been told they must adhere to a higher standard rather than engaging in warrantless searches of digital devices. A circuit court judge held that the government's interests in preventing contraband or other forbidden items from crossing the border don't justify warrantless phone searches, because even digital contraband is unlikely to be remotely destroyed, and the data might still come across the border anyway, even if the device were seized, because copies of contraband usually exist on foreign servers for being downloaded again.
Google intends to delete accounts that have been inactive, although after outcry about how much material they have stored on their servers that might belong to people who have since died or otherwise would be unable to access their account, they've softened that stance a little bit.
HP continues to be a company nobody should do business with, after a firmware update meant to prevent third-party inkjet cartridges from being used in their printers instead destroyed the functionality of several printers. We've known they're a company that is doing their best to thrash around a lot before expiring, but they're ramping up the damage they do with each of these bursts. A group that endorses good environmental practice with printers and ink wants their label removed from all HP products that prevent third-party ink, as well as complaining that HP claims certifications for their products that don't exist.
An employee of Tesla has turned over files containing safety complaints and reports about the cars, their self-driving features, and matters involving acceleration and braking, as well as accidents. In addition to all of the safety data, there is information in the document trove about how little Tesla wanted to generate a paper trail, probably so that there would be no written evidence to have to turn over or make available for those who came investigating or litigating.
The Rust programming language, and its memory protections, are working their way into the Windows 11 kernel.
The U.S. President proposes an excise tax of 30% on electricity use by cryptocurrency mining operations as a way of trying to get them to pay for the costs they impose on others. I mean, we all know it's a scheme and it will eventually collapse, but sticking it to them for the amount of pollution and energy use while they're in the death throes seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Hopefully, it will accelerate their eventual demise. So that we don't have situations where the chief financial officer of a company puts millions of his employer's money in a cryptocurrency exchange without permission and loses it all when the exchange crashes.
The EU has made significant new regulations for the cryptocurrency market, to make transactions traceable and to make exchanges and businesses liable for the amounts of their deposits should they get lost or stolen, as well as energy disclosures and license requirements. Which will also likely help dry up the interest in cryptocurrency once it can't be used as a method for money laundering or other unregulated financial transactions.
Using an old Android device as a webserver, including the potential for it being a portable webserver, so long as all the records line up appropriately. Mostly taking advantage of the fact that Android is not nearly as locked down as iOS, and therefore apps like terminal emulators can be used on Android to achieve these kinds of situations. Admittedly, as with many ideas that are about hosting from your consumer accounts, you may have to check with your AUP as to whether they actually allow this and whether you have bandwidth caps to contend with. Still, being able to develop and then serve a static page or set of static pages from your phone would be excellent, and even better if you can then also display something like a URL/QR combination on the phone itself that will lead people to the website that's being served from the phone. (Kind of like how the PirateBox project was adapted to an Android phone idea, but without requiring those who want to participate to connect to the Piratebox's specific WiFi signal. Which the PirateBox project wants to be intentional, so that things aren't tracked over the web so easily.)
US lawmakers moved swiftly to try and mandate that all new vehicles manufactured in the US, including electric vehicles, include an AM radio tuner in them. The sponsors of the legislation cited the need for AM because AM is used for the transmission of emergency data. For that, there are already several methods that can work, which makes the AM requirement seem more and more like it's about keeping the talk radio business going. (That said, a fair amount of the "traffic advisory" systems around here use AM broadcasts, so knowing whether a pass is open or not can be helpful. That information is often also visually displayed on boards to help you plan what's going on with your trip should the roads change condition suddenly.)
Many smartphones have an FM radio tuner inside their modems, which may be accessed through the use of specific apps.
Using extremely cold and dehumidifying freezers to attempt to preserve literature and documents caught in floods in Italy.
It is extremely easy to recover usable human DNA from environments where humans have been, which raises significant questions about the ethics of handling, sequencing, and doing research on this data and that populations who are shedding it. Because it's identifiable material and high quality, that means matters of whether someone consented to have their identifiable DNA used or not. For things like crime detection, that's not as much of an issue, but for things like virus detection in the environment, the closer it gets to individual identification, the more likely it is that ethics concerns are going to be not just theoretical, but required.
A suggested list of resources for learning the Ruby programming language, and then progressing to the Rails application framework on top of Ruby, with a stop along the way with Sinatra, a lighter-weight framework to use to build applications before progressing from there to Rails.
Last out, If you've used Facebook between 24 May 2007 and 22 December 2022, you might be able to receive whatever small amount is your part of a settlement from a class-action lawsuit against the company.
And some suggestions on how to recognize and reroute your cognitive shortcuts so they bias you less than the otherwise might.
And, of course, recognizing when you need to take time and read books under a flashlight instead of trying to face another day.
(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.)
And now, for the capstone, specifically: Time War made it to the NYT Bestseller list. (That's Amal.) Time War made it to the NYT Bestseller list. (That's Max.)
And also, people who find Bigolas Dickolas at convention are (properly) asking for signatures on their copies of Time War.
The One Right Word. Or, in this case, the One Right Tweet.
Sadly, there is no more Tina Turner, passed on at 83 years of age after a long battle with cancer. Fuck cancer forever.
There is good news in the world, regarding disease elimination, the greater safety of the world, and rights going forward, rather than backward, in the world. But it's not what gets focused on in a lot of media stories, so more of the usual to follow.
Corporations backed by the government of China have started calling in loans to poorer countries for infrastructure projects, leaving those countries looking at a familiar situation, but with China holding the loans, rather than the IMF or the World Bank.
The choking death of a homeless and hungry black man, Jordan Neely, by another subway passenger, stokes the fear that the State and the City of New York believe the solution to the homeless and the mentally ill is for them to be removed from society, rather than helped to become a functioning part of it.
Russian Federation soldiers who disturbed the ground, fished, and otherwise behaved as if a known radiation contamination zone did not contain radiation contamination now understand the phrase "play foolish games, win foolish prizes" as they are suffering from radiation sickness from all of the contamination they disturbed. I suspect they might be interested in the Charge of the Light Brigade as some light reading. And that they should be taken care of from the personal funds of Mr. Putin, since he was likely the person who ordered them to do these things in the face of knowledge and self-preservation.
An inquiry about why customer service satisfaction ratings among different racial groups are similar, even when the recordings of the interactions show clearly worse customer service against the non-white groups. The headline conclusion there is "non-white people are so used to being given poorer customer service that they don't notice it's happening" but I think it might be more accurate to say "non-white people are so used to being given poorer customer service that they know complaining about it won't do a damn thing."
On a different part of customer service, Apple Store workers in Maryland are looking to include tipping as part of their compensation as part of their new contract in union negotiations. Reading the article, though, I think tipping is the wrong way to ask for what they want, which seems to be about profit-sharing and otherwise helping with making sure everyone is fairly paid. If it's profit-sharing you want, then you don't want to try and grab it from the customers in the form of tips, you want to grab it from the company in the form of profit-sharing agreements and possibly having money that would otherwise go to executive bonuses and other frivolities redirected to the employees who make the company work. Or the franchise work, or however it is set up in the retail environment.
Self-check machines are also starting to ask for tips for the human workers at their various establishments, and this seems to be even more of a proof that the wage system in the United States is fundamentally broken and that if we are reduced to begging people to spend more money for the service they receive, then there's excess money somewhere in that system that can be used to pay the employees properly.
The practice of Buddhism (not just meditation or mindfulness) in a highly Latine area, with both monks and laity drawn from the surrounding community. And in a different but similar way, A Buddhist retreat in Arkansas that functions with both monks and volunteers to achieve a place to learn many of the precepts, and then for the volunteers, to give them the opportunity to practice them in their ordinary lives. (Funny how a story of a tailgater in this story turns out to be helpful for me, since I recently got honked at by someone driving a genital substitute vehicle for driving the actual speed limit through a town that is usually festooned with patrol cars looking to catch the unwary. I pulled off to the side so as to let them whoosh by, since they were in a clear hurry, and I still almost caught back up to them based on the lights and their timing. May we all have turn-offs to let the impatient fly by.)
Noted racist, white supremacist, and general Karen of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene attempted to portray a colleague as a dangerous Black man threatening her safety and security with his mockery of her and her party's positions that lead to preventable injury and death, especially of children and those who have already given enough time to the workforce. His description of her as a white supremacist is accurate, and that she compared it to her calling him an "n-word" is telling about which of those words she thinks is worse, but also that she still thinks it's a negative thing to be called a white supremacist, in contrast to most of her actions and her party's positions, who are fundamentally opposed to projects like providing reminders and accounts of the impacts of slavery, even in the part of the country that was faster to abolish it and fought the war to abolish it everywhere, even though the amendment in question didn't fully outlaw slavery, a loophole that continues to be exploited by the prison pipeline.
The Unqualified are everywhere, of course, and many of them believe that school and library boards are vulnerable and can be taken over and made to do the bidding of reactionary conservatives. When public library professionals attempt to thwart this, or at the very least to get their boards to behave according to their own stated policies and the organizational norms that the library world has developed over the decades, the professionals are often fired and replacements sought who lack the training and qualifications to run a library appropriately. Or the Unqualified get friends in government to make it impossible to do anything but cave to the demands of the most fanatical. Who turns out to be a smaller percentage of challengers than we might think, but who also might all be hiding behind one name so as not to receive the consequences of their decisions.
Not that they need much excuse in friendly states. Arkansas, for example, is about to get sued out the backside because the governor signed a bill saying it was okay to prosecute librarians for letting kids read the books they want to, so long as the state believed they were "obscene," Miller test be damned. Several other states are considering doing the same or already have decided to criminalize the provision of books the state doesn't like, or otherwise attempt to get them indexed in such a way that something that the state didn't like would not be allowed in libraries, and something the state didn't care for would require parental permission to borrow. At this point the relevant question is at what point do we stop pretending they can be stopped by process, procedure, the courts, or their own consciences and start preparing ourselves for having to live, do our jobs, and fight back against local and state authorities that intend to censor materials and criminalize those whose job it is to try and provide wide access to materials? Books are the abstract version of this, but several of these states also have criminalized things like reproductive choice or living according to a gender identity that is true to you but different than what was assigned to you at birth. Getting rid of the books is in tandem with trying to get rid of the people, by making the potential penalties for existing openly so harsh that someone has to closet themselves or risk the power of the state jailing them, bankrupting them, or taking them away from their families and support system. (Florida has declared they have this power over anyone in the state, regardless of whether they are a resident of the state or visiting from another state, which should make any trips to the Disney campus in Florida a complete no-go. Or anywhere else in the state.)
The worst part of the upcoming election cycle is how much it looks like one side is going to be about who can more effectively court the white supremacists. Neo-Nazis held a rally in Florida and none of the major Florida politicians, save Senator Rick Scott, denounced their presence. Several state-level officials objected to them, and the conference lead said he attempted to have them removed, but could not because the neo-Nazis were on public property that they could not control. Florida has quite a bit of this kind of problem, including a woman who got the Youth Poet Laureate's poem banned in a Florida school by herself trying to apologize for also having promoted the ur-antisemitic text, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. She claimed to not be a reader of things and that she zeroed in on a word and assumed something about the works, which is certainly saying the quiet part out loud about how book challenges work.
A convicted felon who participated in the January 6 insurrection is suing his social media provider for deleting his posts and banning him from the platform, citing a law passed in Texas after the banning and deletion that forbids taking down social media posts for political beliefs. The law itself carves out exceptions for exactly the kind of speech the insurrectionist used, but also, Texas really does like passing laws antithetical to functioning democracy and trying to moderate the forum in such a way that constructive speech can happen.
Published writer Chuck Wendig on how it's not exactly a great situation to be a published writer in 2023, and two of the major threats to published writers: LLMs turning out garbage for humans to rewrite at lower costs and book banners looking to erase entire identities from publication and public life.
There are still problems with missing stairs, and in the UK's journalism circles, those missing stairs are even harder to get ousted, because there are few places to go to and be taken seriously about the bad behavior of their people. And because they'll come up with just about anything they can to excuse the behavior that doesn't involve taking responsibility for it. And then get their friends to attack their opponents and then help them get re-situated after they are eventually forced out, usually by using their own columns to say how harmless the missing stair is and how fierce and vengeful and somehow wrong his opponents are.
The state of Montana decided they wanted to have affordable housing, so they proceeded to remove most of the laws and regulations in the way of creating multiplex houses and housing built on top of commercial space and the other elements that were pushing construction in ways that encouraged sprawl. And did so bipartisanly, the article is quick to point out, suggesting that other states could help combat their own NIMBYs in a similar way. Staying on the theme of housing, The Anderson Scholar House in Indiana provides supports to single mothers to help them get through classes and earn collegiate degrees, providing rent-assisted housing and a support group to help those mothers make it through college, get their children in school or day care, and ultimately succeed at finding a good-paying job and being able to move out into their own housing. Amazing what happens when your stance about being in favor of life and people actually comes with supporting people, rather than restricting their choices and insisting that they must trust in God and behave in an approved manner before being allowed any support.
North Dakota adopts a law giving preference to Native parents when Native children are up for adoption, as an insurance policy in case the current Supreme Court decides that the Federal law keeping children with people who will keep their culture alive and teach them important things about being Native is unconstitutional race-based discrimination. The federal statute, the Indian Child Welfare Act, was enacted in response to the widespread adoption of Native children by non-Native families, itself a result of policies that kept Native parents in poverty and let white institutions remove those children in the belief that they would have better lives with white parents. One wonders how many stereotypes are at play in the case before the Court about who gets to adopt Native children.
While several states of the United States try to make it easier for younger children to be doing dangerous and difficult work full-time, we much point out the historical evidence of working children suggests that their outcomes are generally terrible and they're not given the opportunity to develop into healthy humans. Plus, there are a significant number of other situations and scenarios that a government could turn toward if they needed to fill gaps left by retirement, illnesses, and deaths, that would be better than employing children in dangerous jobs for low wages. But child labor is in line with the particular beliefs of the party pushing it, plus they probably believe that children are less likely to do things like demand fair wages or form unions.
The Attorney General of the state of Texas, Ken Paxton, has been impeached by the Texas House. The charges are related to accusations of bribery and impropriety, while the Attorney General says the impeachment is retaliation against him because he's been so effective at fighting Democrats and liberal Republicans who aren't as on board with his vision of what Texas (and the United States) should be. Until the Texas Senate decides his fate, Mr. Paxton is suspended from his work and cannot continue to do those things he believes are best for everyone (which, so far, have included threats to librarians, trying to enforce bounty hunting on those who provide reproductive services, and other such things that he would be proud of, even if they horrify others.)
Going back to Indiana, based on easily disproven allegations and scare tactics, the Indiana government forbade any state funds from being used to support the Kinsey Institute and their sexological research. Which is not surprising (this is the state that "can't have dinner with any women alone unless it's my wife" Mike Pence was governor of before he became the Vice-Administrator, but it's still the kind of thing where the puritanical elements are trying desperately to find some sort of victory to please their base with, and "defunding the sex researchers" seems like the one that came up for them at this particular moment. They could have gone in the direction of Noted racist, white supremacist, forced-birth enthusiast and general Karen of Congress Lauren Bobert and tried to claim that having a child was less expensive than the uninsured price of contraception. Which is certainly laughable. And produces echoes of the fact that she met the husband she is now divorcing when they were of ages that the Romeo and Juliet laws wouldn't have covered them. And that he pleaded guilty to exposing himself to teenagers. And that he needed anger management and alcohol management classes. And that she dropped out of high school because she was pregnant with a child and needed to work. And that he was apparently very unhappy with being served with the divorce papers, as well. The question of what the alternate timeline where she's able to finish high school, possibly go on to university, instead of marrying someone, having many kids with them, and eventually divorcing him after he's given her ample reasons to believe that he's not the best-caliber material, is an interesting one. She might not have become the Congresscritter she is in that world, or she might have done it all the same. But she appears to want to condemn others to her own decisions and remove their choices because she doesn't like them. And because she has a very shaky grasp of mathematics and the costs of raising a child.
There are more conceptions of gender and presentations of gender, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your Western philosophy, on the Pacific islands. Which makes for some useful cross-pollination and sharing of knowledge, but also risks the imposition of specific terms because those terms often have funding and other such things associated with them, which can impose a box where one need not be.
After getting roasted from the Los Angeles community and several local officials about their decision to exclude the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence from their event, brought on because Catholic groups didn't like being satirized, the Los Angeles Dodgers apologized to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and re-invited them back to Dodgers Pride Night, and in the interim, the Anaheim Angels also invited the Sisters to their Pride Night, making baseball even more queer, as it should be.
Some libraries doing things that are useful for their constituencies, by providing play cribs for small children next to computer stations so the grownups can do what they need to and the kids are safe and nearby and have play opportunities or offering cell phones with unlimited data plans, long term loan periods, and social and other services already programmed into the contact lists to those who need them, especially the unhoused, which, surprisingly, helps the unhoused and unemployed get housing, employment, and other social services.
And one state doing an extremely good job with the governance. Minnesota, even with a very slim majority, was able to enact a sweeping set of liberal reforms in the state, disproving the idea that Democrats with low majorities can't get anything done.
Project 562, a project intended to showcase the Native Americans of the United States, usually through beautiful photography. Observe the gallery for Project 562 here, and enjoy further that it is the project of one person.
The use of coconut fiber as a base to build living shorelines upon, so as to dissipate and absorb the energy of the water, often being pushed by ocean currents, a sighting of a rainbow-colored sea slug, how much people of earlier times loved their cats, and therefore did not order their extermination so much so that any major disease could have invaded and taken hold, cleaning up after the damage that water buffaloes caused when containing fences failed, returning to a community to help raise it above the potential floods of the monsoon season, trying, failing, and documenting how we really don't know all that much about intolerances, sensitivities, and allergic reactions to the things in our environments, which may have a common food additive as part of the reasons why, women in Bogota driving electric buses, and in places where there hasn't been a working public transport service for a long time, which is certain to annoy most of the right wing, since it's about climate and about women being empowered and about brown people finding meaningful formal work.
Those who are joining the disabled have things to learn, but also things to tell, things to work through, and adjustments to make. Coming to terms with having a disability takes time, even if many of the accommodations and services might be available from the beginning.
We do need to continue doing research on the disease and its long-term consequences, including the possibility that infections with SARS-CoV-2 might make a person more susceptible to Parkinson's or similar post-infection acute responses. And, when studying symptoms, it's important to consider whether or not exercise would be something that would help in recovery or impede it completely, depending on whether post-exertional malaise might be present. Yet another reason why they prescribe lots of rest for recovery from the virus, assuming you have the ability to do that and your employer isn't demanding your immediate return as soon as you're not likely to infect others.
Using a survey of those suffering from long COVID, researchers have tried to chart what the most common symptoms are to help make long COVID into a more reproducible diagnosis, applying point values to specific symptoms that make things appear to be more or less likely to have been caused by the infection.
Rutgers University is pursuing a vaccine candidate they believe may be more robust against current and future strains of the virus, with the additional benefit of not requiring special cold-storage procedures for effectiveness, and possibly an attempt at targeting the parts of the spike protein that don't change between the rapid mutations producing different variants. We can hope the Rutgers research is fruitful, even if it doesn't produce a perfect vaccination.
A woman with an active case of tuberculosis has yet to be brought in for treatment, despite civil warrants out for her, and the people who know her appear to not be encouraging her to get treated or to appear before the court. If she's afraid of being responsible for the treatment bill, that makes sense, but to also hear the spokespeople for the police talk, they believe she's not high enough of a priority, regardless of what kind of public health risk she is, compared to the work they have to do for the criminal warrants and arrests. It seems unlikely they're somehow understaffed or under-resourced, given that police departments have the ability to demand whatever they want and get it without questions being asked in the United States. Maybe at some point, when the person is finally able to get treatment, we'll learn the real reason why the police weren't responding to a public health emergency as quickly as they should have.
In technology, Google decided they wanted to let people register new top-level domains (TLDs) so that people could have websites that end in .zip or .mov, along with other possible sites. It became immediately clear that having TLDs that are the same as common file extensions would immediately become a vector for malware and phishing attacks, to the point where someone should have raised objections before allowing this decision to go forward, and now that it's gone forward, everyone who allowed it to happen or pushed it should be fired. There are already exploits in the wild taking advantage of the new top-level domain to potentially auto-download malware.
If cybersecurity is fundamentally a problem of humans, then the best that technology can do is make it harder for humans to get hacked. Because humans taught computers how to manipulate symbols, and it turns out those symbols can be used both to represent instructions for computers to execute and the data for those instructions to manipulate. So the best that humans can do to stop malicious hacking is to instruct both the how of the building of the tools and the why and the questions of whether building the tool is a morally-beneficial action or a morally-harmful action, and to let people who know how the worst people in the world think explain how the tool might be exploited for great harm instead of or in addition to the great benefit the creator wants to create. Because the tools aren't neutral in technology, (nor are the tools, books, and other resources necessarily neutral in the library, either. If we're in the business of trying to get people to become literate with their information choices and what they seek, then we have to take on the responsibility of making decisions about what we consider acceptable and what we don't.
Gaining and keeping the benefits of remote work, assuming you haven't already had your remote work erased completely, involves pushing back against the intrusion of surveillance into your home, using your relative privilege to enrich your neighborhoods, instead of gentrifying them or benefiting exploitative landlords, and organizing with your colleagues, preferably into a union, so that you can bargain collectively for your benefits. Because the thing that's being lost the most by remote work has been the ability of the bosses to make sure they know where you are and what work you're doing, and to be able to harass and exploit you and your commute.
More reasons not to use biometric data to secure your devices, as fingerprint authentication can be spoofed or the approximations expanded through attaching an additional board and then running brute-force attacks until an approximation that will authenticate is found.
However, at least in one jurisdiction, the government has been told they must adhere to a higher standard rather than engaging in warrantless searches of digital devices. A circuit court judge held that the government's interests in preventing contraband or other forbidden items from crossing the border don't justify warrantless phone searches, because even digital contraband is unlikely to be remotely destroyed, and the data might still come across the border anyway, even if the device were seized, because copies of contraband usually exist on foreign servers for being downloaded again.
Google intends to delete accounts that have been inactive, although after outcry about how much material they have stored on their servers that might belong to people who have since died or otherwise would be unable to access their account, they've softened that stance a little bit.
HP continues to be a company nobody should do business with, after a firmware update meant to prevent third-party inkjet cartridges from being used in their printers instead destroyed the functionality of several printers. We've known they're a company that is doing their best to thrash around a lot before expiring, but they're ramping up the damage they do with each of these bursts. A group that endorses good environmental practice with printers and ink wants their label removed from all HP products that prevent third-party ink, as well as complaining that HP claims certifications for their products that don't exist.
An employee of Tesla has turned over files containing safety complaints and reports about the cars, their self-driving features, and matters involving acceleration and braking, as well as accidents. In addition to all of the safety data, there is information in the document trove about how little Tesla wanted to generate a paper trail, probably so that there would be no written evidence to have to turn over or make available for those who came investigating or litigating.
The Rust programming language, and its memory protections, are working their way into the Windows 11 kernel.
The U.S. President proposes an excise tax of 30% on electricity use by cryptocurrency mining operations as a way of trying to get them to pay for the costs they impose on others. I mean, we all know it's a scheme and it will eventually collapse, but sticking it to them for the amount of pollution and energy use while they're in the death throes seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Hopefully, it will accelerate their eventual demise. So that we don't have situations where the chief financial officer of a company puts millions of his employer's money in a cryptocurrency exchange without permission and loses it all when the exchange crashes.
The EU has made significant new regulations for the cryptocurrency market, to make transactions traceable and to make exchanges and businesses liable for the amounts of their deposits should they get lost or stolen, as well as energy disclosures and license requirements. Which will also likely help dry up the interest in cryptocurrency once it can't be used as a method for money laundering or other unregulated financial transactions.
Using an old Android device as a webserver, including the potential for it being a portable webserver, so long as all the records line up appropriately. Mostly taking advantage of the fact that Android is not nearly as locked down as iOS, and therefore apps like terminal emulators can be used on Android to achieve these kinds of situations. Admittedly, as with many ideas that are about hosting from your consumer accounts, you may have to check with your AUP as to whether they actually allow this and whether you have bandwidth caps to contend with. Still, being able to develop and then serve a static page or set of static pages from your phone would be excellent, and even better if you can then also display something like a URL/QR combination on the phone itself that will lead people to the website that's being served from the phone. (Kind of like how the PirateBox project was adapted to an Android phone idea, but without requiring those who want to participate to connect to the Piratebox's specific WiFi signal. Which the PirateBox project wants to be intentional, so that things aren't tracked over the web so easily.)
US lawmakers moved swiftly to try and mandate that all new vehicles manufactured in the US, including electric vehicles, include an AM radio tuner in them. The sponsors of the legislation cited the need for AM because AM is used for the transmission of emergency data. For that, there are already several methods that can work, which makes the AM requirement seem more and more like it's about keeping the talk radio business going. (That said, a fair amount of the "traffic advisory" systems around here use AM broadcasts, so knowing whether a pass is open or not can be helpful. That information is often also visually displayed on boards to help you plan what's going on with your trip should the roads change condition suddenly.)
Many smartphones have an FM radio tuner inside their modems, which may be accessed through the use of specific apps.
Using extremely cold and dehumidifying freezers to attempt to preserve literature and documents caught in floods in Italy.
It is extremely easy to recover usable human DNA from environments where humans have been, which raises significant questions about the ethics of handling, sequencing, and doing research on this data and that populations who are shedding it. Because it's identifiable material and high quality, that means matters of whether someone consented to have their identifiable DNA used or not. For things like crime detection, that's not as much of an issue, but for things like virus detection in the environment, the closer it gets to individual identification, the more likely it is that ethics concerns are going to be not just theoretical, but required.
A suggested list of resources for learning the Ruby programming language, and then progressing to the Rails application framework on top of Ruby, with a stop along the way with Sinatra, a lighter-weight framework to use to build applications before progressing from there to Rails.
Last out, If you've used Facebook between 24 May 2007 and 22 December 2022, you might be able to receive whatever small amount is your part of a settlement from a class-action lawsuit against the company.
And some suggestions on how to recognize and reroute your cognitive shortcuts so they bias you less than the otherwise might.
And, of course, recognizing when you need to take time and read books under a flashlight instead of trying to face another day.
(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: 2023-06-01 07:01 am (UTC)China won’t budge in taking losses, and the IMF won’t offer low-interest loans if the money is just going to pay China first
This is true, as far as it goes: China's state banks (and all those 'independent' banks that are extensions of the state) are refusing to sit down for a lenders agreement in which everyone takes their share of a 'haircut' of write-downs, write-offs, and renegotiations.
That's bad practice, but it happens: Western 'vulture funds' do much the same.
What's worse, here, is that China's lenders have used escrow accounts and swaps to take effective ownership of the borrower countries' cashflows and foregn currency reserves.
That, and the collateralisation of national assets, means that China gets paid first, in full, no matter what agreements are made by the IMF and other lenders.
So the IMF and the other lenders can't put together a relief program, because there's no relief to be had when all the money ends up going to China, no matter what.
So there's no possibility of an equitable loss-sharing agreement; and, worse, all relief in any aid, debt-forgiveness or stabilisation programme goes straight to China and the debtors' economies are still destroyed.
So everyone is forced to sit on their hands while those countries collapse into a complete reversal of their economic development, the expropriation of all their resources, and a collapse of functioning government.
...And China will simply send-in Chinese workers to operate the mines and farms and fisheries, and pay local militias to secure those assets in the violent chaos of a failed state.
no subject
Date: 2023-06-01 07:41 am (UTC)Thanks for the update links!
no subject
Date: 2023-06-01 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-01 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-02 08:19 am (UTC)Plus, of course, increasing awareness of the pernicious (read: vampiric) effects of Western lending to the very poorest countries in the World.
The 'Paris Club' agreements, debt 'forgiveness', and the IMF-brokered creditor conferences emerged from that.
So, too, did the concept of 'onerous debt', a recognition that saddling an entire country's population with crippling debts by corrupting their governments is not an enforceable contract...
...Although an exception was made for Haiti, with the removal of Aristides and a democraticially-elected government with a popular policy of repudiating onerous debt.
So why hasn't China learned these lessons?
Partly, because they don't want allies, they want client states, and their regional (and, increasingly, geopolitical strategy) seems to consist of cultivating economic basket cases with autocratic governments propped-up by Chinese money, with all the extractable economic value in the country owned by China.
The issue there - and here, in China's exploitative lending strategy - is that 'owned by China' doesn't necessarily mean owned by the Chinese national banks and the economic entities of the Peoples Liberation Army.
It also means 'owned by wealthy Chinese', some of whom are regional governers and politburo members, and others who are so wealthy and powerful that they have become a de facto nobility that the government can't (or won't) control.
They wanted a slice of this lucrative pie, too, and they've got it.
Politics...
The state and government of China is, like most dictatorships, an uneasy equilibrium between a king and his unruly noblemen.
Or billionaires, governors, generals and politburo members, as we call them in this century.
The National Banks and the Politburo can't inflict 'haircut' losses on them - or themseves - because the nobility simply cannot cooperate in such a thing. Furthermore, they all vehemently reject foreign interference.
Or use it as a bogeyman to halt such a discussion.
So an externally-mediated solution isn't going to fly.
The Gripping Hand, though, is that the economic and social collapse of these countries into 'basket case' client states is a desirable outcome for the Chinese nobility and government: exploitation is profitable, for some, and the globally destabilising effect of failed states appears to suit China's geopolitical goals.
no subject
Date: 2023-06-03 03:07 am (UTC)I'm shocked, Shocked, I tell you, comrade
Date: 2023-06-03 10:01 am (UTC)Your cynicism left me so shocked and appalled that Champagne bubbles tickled my moustache.