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silveradeptLet us begin with someone very slowly figuring out the reasons that people stay in and socialize over digital methods rather than going out and doing it in meatspace. Several of the reasons are present in this piece, even as the author steadfastly tries to push past them, as if they aren't real reasons. Like needing to make rent and expenses, or the absolute lack of places that allow young people to hang out and be young people without seeing them as pests, or the part where young people aren't interested in doing a lot of the riskier behavior of previous generations, because who wants to end up as someone's meme fodder or to have unhappy parents confronting them about their behavior because the parents have installed trackers and spyware to make sure they're behaving well? There's really precious little time and money for anyone to use either on mediocre in-person experiences when there may be better ones available over stream, or in groups of people they know are going to be okay and friendly and wanting to do something enjoyable together?
The Autauga-Prattville Library Board must be replaced, because they chose to ban all books for children under 17, and demand all adult books be labeled as dangerous to children.
These rules are a affront to the ethics of the library profession, are almost certainly contrary to the laws of the country, and there are really two ways to deal with this policy: ignore it as the overreach it is and no nothing to enforce it (risky, probably going to get fired before you have the legal shield to ignore it), or to enforce what was written, rather than what was intended, and make sure that all the books for children and teens are safely secured and stored somewhere, and when there are complaints about nearly no books on the shelves, point to the Board policy and explain every book with a gendered pronoun in it had inappropriate "gender identity" in it, and any references to a mother, father, or parent is inappropriate "sexual intercourse," and to make very sure that the religious books with all of the sex and violence in them are very prominently displayed, since they're the ones with the exceptions. (Still risky, because malicious compliance usually provokes retaliation.)
The board has to be replaced. And then replaced again until the board understands the current policy must be fully repealed. Because they don't want to be sued into the ground.
It's not likely to happen, though, because so many lawmakers, administrators, and people in power have decided they are no longer bound by the requirement to keep their religion out of government and are on crusades to impose their personal, often fringe, morality on the rest of us. The linked article is an exemplar, and someone who feels confident enough he can operate in the open instead of even having to find a fig leaf of a secular reason.
A journal has issued a retraction notice for three papers they had previously published, citing issues with the methodology and conclusions of the papers, as well as undisclosed possible sources of bias in the research and researchers. The primary author of all three retracted studies complained back and said their science was perfectly fine and they're being persecuted for having conclusions outside of accepted orthodoxy. Why do we care about these papers? They were heavily cited in a Texas judge's ruling that ordered the FDA to take mifepristone, one of a pair of drugs usually used to perform a medication abortion, off the market because they supposedly did not do sufficient and proper studies of the drug's safety. The Supreme Court is set to hear the case as to whether mifepristone will still be allowed in the United States, and with the current makeup of the Court, it's pretty decent odds that even with the retractions of the supporting papers, the justices will find some manner or method to enact the order and demand the FDA remove mifepristone, despite the evidence of several other, likely more scientifically rigorous, studies on the safety of the drug and the process of its use. The fact that this seems to be the agreed opinion of both those who want forced birth and those who want reproductive choice says quite a bit about the perceived legitimacy of the court and the likelihood that their decision will be respected.
Greece joins the Century of the Fruitbat, although it does not extend the ability of married couples to have a child through surrogacy.
A regular reminder that the practice of tipping service workers, much like so many other things that are a part of US culture, originates in racism and the desire to ensure that even newly-freed black people still had to remain subservient. Minimum wage should be minimum wage for everyone, none of this "my ability to live depends on whether or not you found me sufficiently pleasing/cute/sexy/flirty/whatever" nonsense.
On the difficulties of trying to approach a deeply spiritual practice as if it were a fad, and the escalator that can lead someone into the places of that practice that are more about the personality of the instructor or the intensity of the workout. The kinds of places that are about getting practitioners to have deep experiences, but whose instructors and guides haev not been trained on how to help them ride those experiences and gather something more than existential despair from them. The problem that comes with chasing the results and believing that more is better and there must always be more. (It is still difficult to understand, sometimes, that for at least some set of these things, the point of the practice is the practice and nothing more.)
King Charles of England has cancer, which was discovered during a routine prostate procedure. It is not prostate cancer, specifically, but a cancer discovered after concerns were expressed during a procedure.
The results of the team skating competition from the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games have been reranked due to the disqualification of a skater for a positive doping test. This moves the United States into the gold medal position, Japan to the silver, and drops the Russian Olympic Committee members to third place. Canada, in fourth, is unhappy with these re-rankings and intends to appeal. They likely have a case for asking for further review. What's extra unhappy-making about this is that when she tested positive for doping, the disqualified skater was fifteen years of age, and therefore there have to be others in the organization that provided and encouraged the doping. Given that the Russian federation is officially banned from Olympic competitions over doping, and the ROC athletes wer allowed to compete because they had not tested positive for doping, I would be interested in seeing whether the IOC decides that if there are going to be any Olympic Athletes from Russia in the Paris 2024 games or beyond, they're going to have to compete is independent Olympic athletes, without any affiliation at all with the Russian federation, since it seems the previous sanctions were not enough to discourage the practice of doping children.
Having been told no, Elon Musk cannot grant himself $56 billion USD/year in compensation by the Chancery Court of Delaware, Elon has decided he will put it to a shareholder vote about whether to reincorporate Tesla in Texas. Because he thinks Texas will be more friendly to him, rather than staying in Delaware, one of the most corporate-friendly states in the union. This could turn out like the Twitter deal, or it could turn out that the people with the actual power to run the company tell him no again.
The preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board says the restraining bolts for the door plug that blew off a Boeing 737 MAX-9 plane were not present at all, and thus the plug was blown off. That's not going to end well for anyone, especially if there are people who want to make sure this doesn't happen again, or at the very least that Boeing makes sure that it never happens again.
An examination of multiple perspectives through time and belief about the veracity and villainy of the Woman of Endor.
People's Choice wildlife photography winners.
In technology, B.C. Hydro prevailed against a cryptocurrency mining company that wanted to overturn a policy pausing providing power to crypto mining operations. The courts in Canada said the power provider could regulate demands that could have left them without enough power to serve their non-crypto customers, the ones who are actually doing something useful with their power demands.
Large learning models are being trained to write things and then marketed to humans who either don't want to put the effort into writing something like a book or who are trying to stay on a grind cycle where they offload detail work to LLMs and then edit their output back into the story itself. The conclusions being made are disappointing ones, because they're proving what has long since been suspected: If the thing being written is being written basically as SEO spam, LLMs are perfectly adequate for the task, and are likely going to be used to spew out just such things. People are starting to believe they can use LLMs to generate at least parts of genre novels, as if the genre readers are simply desperate for anything with the right structure and look to them instead of discering customers who will roast a wannabe alive for not understanding what a genre reader wants.
An Air Canada chatbot gave a man wrong information about fares and bereavement discounts, and a Canadian court has said Air Canada has to pay the man back the difference between what he paid and what he should have paid. One can only hope this trend continues and hopefully the hype about confabulation machines dies when it turns out they come with serious liability risks.
The University of Michigan is selling recordings of lectures and study groups so that confabulation machines can get better and more convincing at producing falsehoods. sigh I would like to believe that an institution such as theirs would be smarter than to feed into this nonsense, but the lure of money is always stronger than the objections of ethics, it seems.
The helicopter that flew on Mars had many points in the development where it would have been scuttled or sacrificed for other missions, but with perseverance and ingenuity, the mission was a success and has opened up a new possible frontier to explore.
OCLC accuses a site called Anna's Archive of contempt of business model, claiming the bibliographic metadata scraped from Worldcat was proprietary and the property of the company. The catalogers who have been doing work for their organizations might find that a stretch or wonder why OCLC wants to claim all of their work can't be shared with others, but this is on par for OCLC and their desire to become a company that can then start and accelerate the process of being shitty to their customers and then the rest of us.
The API of Spoutible had returned fast more data than it was supposed to, creating an important security vulnerability and that would have allowed attackers to not only compromise the account, but defeat any of the multi-factor challenges and attack the password reset token as well. That was a yikes, but the developer also fixed the issue quickly once made aware of it.
And speaking of privacy, practical privacy tips, arranged from relatively straightforward to relatively complicated, several of which are about using different services and then eventually trying to ditch the most privacy-invasive services in your life and use their more privacy-respecting counterparts.
Last for tonight, The Testimonials of the Collectively Abandoned, the accounts, pleas, and requests from those who cannot go back to normal to their fellow radicals, anarchists, punks, and people who still care to continue to maintain their precautions and do their best to be inclusive while diseases (and other disasters) continue to rage on.
(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, little_details, 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.)
The Autauga-Prattville Library Board must be replaced, because they chose to ban all books for children under 17, and demand all adult books be labeled as dangerous to children.
“For the avoidance of doubt, the library shall not purchase or otherwise acquire any material advertised for consumers ages 17 and under which contain content including, but not limited to, obscenity, sexual conduct, sexual intercourse, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender discordance,” the updated 53-page policy states. “Age-appropriate materials concerning biology, human anatomy, or religion are exempt from this rule.”
These rules are a affront to the ethics of the library profession, are almost certainly contrary to the laws of the country, and there are really two ways to deal with this policy: ignore it as the overreach it is and no nothing to enforce it (risky, probably going to get fired before you have the legal shield to ignore it), or to enforce what was written, rather than what was intended, and make sure that all the books for children and teens are safely secured and stored somewhere, and when there are complaints about nearly no books on the shelves, point to the Board policy and explain every book with a gendered pronoun in it had inappropriate "gender identity" in it, and any references to a mother, father, or parent is inappropriate "sexual intercourse," and to make very sure that the religious books with all of the sex and violence in them are very prominently displayed, since they're the ones with the exceptions. (Still risky, because malicious compliance usually provokes retaliation.)
The board has to be replaced. And then replaced again until the board understands the current policy must be fully repealed. Because they don't want to be sued into the ground.
It's not likely to happen, though, because so many lawmakers, administrators, and people in power have decided they are no longer bound by the requirement to keep their religion out of government and are on crusades to impose their personal, often fringe, morality on the rest of us. The linked article is an exemplar, and someone who feels confident enough he can operate in the open instead of even having to find a fig leaf of a secular reason.
A journal has issued a retraction notice for three papers they had previously published, citing issues with the methodology and conclusions of the papers, as well as undisclosed possible sources of bias in the research and researchers. The primary author of all three retracted studies complained back and said their science was perfectly fine and they're being persecuted for having conclusions outside of accepted orthodoxy. Why do we care about these papers? They were heavily cited in a Texas judge's ruling that ordered the FDA to take mifepristone, one of a pair of drugs usually used to perform a medication abortion, off the market because they supposedly did not do sufficient and proper studies of the drug's safety. The Supreme Court is set to hear the case as to whether mifepristone will still be allowed in the United States, and with the current makeup of the Court, it's pretty decent odds that even with the retractions of the supporting papers, the justices will find some manner or method to enact the order and demand the FDA remove mifepristone, despite the evidence of several other, likely more scientifically rigorous, studies on the safety of the drug and the process of its use. The fact that this seems to be the agreed opinion of both those who want forced birth and those who want reproductive choice says quite a bit about the perceived legitimacy of the court and the likelihood that their decision will be respected.
Greece joins the Century of the Fruitbat, although it does not extend the ability of married couples to have a child through surrogacy.
A regular reminder that the practice of tipping service workers, much like so many other things that are a part of US culture, originates in racism and the desire to ensure that even newly-freed black people still had to remain subservient. Minimum wage should be minimum wage for everyone, none of this "my ability to live depends on whether or not you found me sufficiently pleasing/cute/sexy/flirty/whatever" nonsense.
On the difficulties of trying to approach a deeply spiritual practice as if it were a fad, and the escalator that can lead someone into the places of that practice that are more about the personality of the instructor or the intensity of the workout. The kinds of places that are about getting practitioners to have deep experiences, but whose instructors and guides haev not been trained on how to help them ride those experiences and gather something more than existential despair from them. The problem that comes with chasing the results and believing that more is better and there must always be more. (It is still difficult to understand, sometimes, that for at least some set of these things, the point of the practice is the practice and nothing more.)
King Charles of England has cancer, which was discovered during a routine prostate procedure. It is not prostate cancer, specifically, but a cancer discovered after concerns were expressed during a procedure.
The results of the team skating competition from the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games have been reranked due to the disqualification of a skater for a positive doping test. This moves the United States into the gold medal position, Japan to the silver, and drops the Russian Olympic Committee members to third place. Canada, in fourth, is unhappy with these re-rankings and intends to appeal. They likely have a case for asking for further review. What's extra unhappy-making about this is that when she tested positive for doping, the disqualified skater was fifteen years of age, and therefore there have to be others in the organization that provided and encouraged the doping. Given that the Russian federation is officially banned from Olympic competitions over doping, and the ROC athletes wer allowed to compete because they had not tested positive for doping, I would be interested in seeing whether the IOC decides that if there are going to be any Olympic Athletes from Russia in the Paris 2024 games or beyond, they're going to have to compete is independent Olympic athletes, without any affiliation at all with the Russian federation, since it seems the previous sanctions were not enough to discourage the practice of doping children.
Having been told no, Elon Musk cannot grant himself $56 billion USD/year in compensation by the Chancery Court of Delaware, Elon has decided he will put it to a shareholder vote about whether to reincorporate Tesla in Texas. Because he thinks Texas will be more friendly to him, rather than staying in Delaware, one of the most corporate-friendly states in the union. This could turn out like the Twitter deal, or it could turn out that the people with the actual power to run the company tell him no again.
The preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board says the restraining bolts for the door plug that blew off a Boeing 737 MAX-9 plane were not present at all, and thus the plug was blown off. That's not going to end well for anyone, especially if there are people who want to make sure this doesn't happen again, or at the very least that Boeing makes sure that it never happens again.
An examination of multiple perspectives through time and belief about the veracity and villainy of the Woman of Endor.
People's Choice wildlife photography winners.
In technology, B.C. Hydro prevailed against a cryptocurrency mining company that wanted to overturn a policy pausing providing power to crypto mining operations. The courts in Canada said the power provider could regulate demands that could have left them without enough power to serve their non-crypto customers, the ones who are actually doing something useful with their power demands.
Large learning models are being trained to write things and then marketed to humans who either don't want to put the effort into writing something like a book or who are trying to stay on a grind cycle where they offload detail work to LLMs and then edit their output back into the story itself. The conclusions being made are disappointing ones, because they're proving what has long since been suspected: If the thing being written is being written basically as SEO spam, LLMs are perfectly adequate for the task, and are likely going to be used to spew out just such things. People are starting to believe they can use LLMs to generate at least parts of genre novels, as if the genre readers are simply desperate for anything with the right structure and look to them instead of discering customers who will roast a wannabe alive for not understanding what a genre reader wants.
An Air Canada chatbot gave a man wrong information about fares and bereavement discounts, and a Canadian court has said Air Canada has to pay the man back the difference between what he paid and what he should have paid. One can only hope this trend continues and hopefully the hype about confabulation machines dies when it turns out they come with serious liability risks.
The University of Michigan is selling recordings of lectures and study groups so that confabulation machines can get better and more convincing at producing falsehoods. sigh I would like to believe that an institution such as theirs would be smarter than to feed into this nonsense, but the lure of money is always stronger than the objections of ethics, it seems.
The helicopter that flew on Mars had many points in the development where it would have been scuttled or sacrificed for other missions, but with perseverance and ingenuity, the mission was a success and has opened up a new possible frontier to explore.
OCLC accuses a site called Anna's Archive of contempt of business model, claiming the bibliographic metadata scraped from Worldcat was proprietary and the property of the company. The catalogers who have been doing work for their organizations might find that a stretch or wonder why OCLC wants to claim all of their work can't be shared with others, but this is on par for OCLC and their desire to become a company that can then start and accelerate the process of being shitty to their customers and then the rest of us.
The API of Spoutible had returned fast more data than it was supposed to, creating an important security vulnerability and that would have allowed attackers to not only compromise the account, but defeat any of the multi-factor challenges and attack the password reset token as well. That was a yikes, but the developer also fixed the issue quickly once made aware of it.
And speaking of privacy, practical privacy tips, arranged from relatively straightforward to relatively complicated, several of which are about using different services and then eventually trying to ditch the most privacy-invasive services in your life and use their more privacy-respecting counterparts.
Last for tonight, The Testimonials of the Collectively Abandoned, the accounts, pleas, and requests from those who cannot go back to normal to their fellow radicals, anarchists, punks, and people who still care to continue to maintain their precautions and do their best to be inclusive while diseases (and other disasters) continue to rage on.
(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, little_details, 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: 2024-02-18 03:26 pm (UTC)It is my professional opinion that while some materials may have been put into young adult, rather than adult, because that is what would make it sell, that there is no threshold of what is inappropriate for a child but what their responsible adults set for them. And that enforcement of that barrier is the sole province of that responsible adult(s). For some teenagers, what might be pearl-clutchingly explicit to their adults is take compared to their lived experiences. And some teens might be seeking explicit work because they are attempting to build an idea of what a healthy relationship that includes sex might look like. I also generally trust that a reader knows whether or not any given work is something they want to read at that moment, and if it is not, the reader will put it down, or file it away in "no more like that, certainly" without any prompting from anyone else. What qualifies as "age appropriate" is an extraordinarily individual thing, and the club of the law will never be able to acknowledge nor address those nuances when it attempts to impose what is appropriate on individuals.
I'm not upset about the explanation. I appreciate context, because context lets me more accurately judge that the governor and those library board members fundamentally misunderstand something important, and all that's left to determine is whether they do so by accident, and therefore can be educated, or whether they do so deliberately, and therefore must be removed as unfit for their positions.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-18 04:55 pm (UTC)There's a group who call themselves "Clean Up Alabama" who are focused on "immediate removal of pornographic, obscene, and indecent books from sections of the libraries that are designated for minors." (quote from their about page) They've already gotten - with influence from the governor - the Alabama Public Library Service, which is the state agency which sets statewide policies for public libraries, to pull out of the American Library Association claiming that it "has used their influence to push leftist progressive values in otherwise traditional communities. The ALA believes that children should be able to view pornography in the name of freedom of expression." (again from the about page) So, it's definitely an exterme right group as they're on the family-friendly, preserve the innocence of children kick. And I've never even heard of them until I went researching this thing with Prattville that you posted which means they are strongest in the mostly rural counties of the state where there's a strong religious and/or family-values overtone to everything.
The Alabama Public Library Service (APLS) is currently in the process of revising the statutes for what a public library must do to qualify for state aid money including policies regarding the "location of sexually explicit or other material deemed inappropriate for children or youth." Weirdly on the next page of the proposed changes they make the statement that: " Exercising discretion in the location of sexually explicit material or other material deemed by the public library board to be inappropriate for children or youth does not constitute a denial of service on the basis of age. Taking age into account when recommending, displaying, or otherwise actively promoting library materials does not constitute a denial of service on the basis of age." Those two policies seem like a contradiction in terms to me. The APLS is also noting that libraries will have an "open public meeting regarding the expenditure of public funds to the ALA."
Strangely, you don't seem to hear much of this kind of thing in the three of the four more urban areas of the state. I've never heard of any of this stuff happening at Jefferson County Library Cooperative (the overarching name for the libraries in Birmingham and the surrounding county), Montgomery, or in Huntsville-Madison. It is happening in the Baldwin-Mobile area on the Gulf Coast which seems to be where hte "Academic Advisor" to Clean Up Alabama is from - she's a children's literature professor at University of South Alabama.
Again, apologies for the length of this... I've been looking into it all morning (CST) because I'd literally never heard about it. And I live in the second largest city in the state. Maybe that has something to do with it... Huntsville, the largest, has a lot of federal government and military related jobs associated with it. Birmingham, the second largest, has a highly regarded teaching hospital and associated university here (University of Alabama at Birmingham) with several other very close by high ranked universities. And third is Montgomery which is the state capital. Fourth is Mobile... and then there's a stark population drop-off as things go rural. And this group spearheading the push to remove stuff from the libraries seems to have started in the rural areas of the state.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-18 05:11 pm (UTC)But as people like Clean Up Alabama like to say, 'Do as I say, not as I do'. Well, they don't say it out loud, but I'm sure that's what they're thinking when bright spotlights of investigative journalism swing their way.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-18 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-19 01:17 am (UTC)I think about all the "conservative Christians" who rail against perversion and abortion and are caught in all sorts of fascinating and compromising positions, in airport bathrooms, etc. I remember one who not only had a mistress, encouraged her to get an abortion. I'm quite fond of today's Non Sequitur comic, particularly the last panel. Like SA, I'm also a librarian. Fortunately a college librarian, not a public. I don't have to put up with nearly the amount of garbage that he does. Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for February 18, 2024 - GoComics
no subject
Date: 2024-02-18 06:13 pm (UTC)I had heard that the governor was pressuring the Alabama library services to leave ALA over this, and the laughably bad reasons they give for it. They're big mad there's someone who might be a little bit on the left in charge of ALA. (And, no matter what they say, relocating and removing material that is published for children based on their own judgment about age-appropriateness is denial of service based on age.)
No, no libraries want children viewing age-restricted material. But there's a world of difference between "someone of age was watching and a child viewed it" and "here, child, have this age-restricted material it is illegal for you to possess."
Most of these activities don't find purchase in more urban areas. Part of it is the more cosmopolitan makeup of those spaces, but part of it is also those urban spaces are often less dependent on state funding to complete their budgets and have local government less willing to let fanatics gain a foothold.
What these organizers understand, though, is that if they can get enough of the rural representation to do their bidding, they don't have to appeal at all to the more urban places, or listen to the correct arguments being made that these policies are a severe curtailment of the constitutional rights of minors.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-18 07:04 pm (UTC)I never said Alabama makes sense. I've seen more contradictions in policy that people don't even notice slip by those in authority here than just about anywhere other than Mississippi. There's a saying among some groups of people here: "Thank God for Mississippi" usually in relation to Alabama not being last on some list of something because Mississippi is last instead.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-18 07:17 pm (UTC)