![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet's begin with this: the more we deny the reality around us, the easier it becomes to allow greater catastrophe to happen. Being hyperaware of all the destruction around without clear abilities to defeat some of it also pulls in a bad direction, though. So I'm sure the solution is somewhere in the order of "find the thing you want to push back on and shove hard, while trusting that the people shoving on the other parts are also doing the same." It can feel impossible until it is done, though, when it seems like all of the people who could make these lifts easier are instead trying to push down on them because it's more profitable to them to screw us over than help us out.
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again is a perfect summary of just how much bullshit there is around the idea of LLMs and AI and how few people will actually need or want to use such things. And that those people who do need or want to use such things already know they need or want them, and for what purposes. Therefore, all the other people who are either being hustled or trying to do hustling should cease or risk wrath and well-executed professional wrestling moves.
A case for using the idea of "gender modality" when asking about the relationship a person has to the gender (or lack thereof) assigned to them at birth, rather than "gender identity," which is about what a person is right at that moment. I like language and concepts that can render more accurate views of the world and the beings on them, so this was a useful thing to hear.
Donald Sutherland, a person with so many roles across so many different genres and styles, passed on at 88 years of age. He was one of the ones that was everywhere, and he made every role he had good.
The mayor of Newbern, Alabama, will once again Patrick Braxton, the lawfully and correctly elected mayor, once a settlement with the town council receives the signature of a federal judge. The white town council had become accustomed to simply appointing the people they wanted to fill civil offices, without any need to elect or let the mostly-black town do anything like voting. And when Braxton properly filed paperwork and ran unopposed for mayor, the town council held a secret special election that had no public notice or other opportunity for persons to declare candidacies or vote and reappointed the previous white mayor, the one who did not file paperwork to contest the election, back to the position. The town council appeared to have found democracy too democratic compared to oligarchical rule. And when they found out the mayor was someone other than who they intended to appoint, they simply locked the Black mayor out of his ability to perform his official functions and hoped he would go away and not contest their secret election.
The New York Public Library and other cultural institutions have finally had their funding restored for the fiscal year 2025 budget for New York City, after a hard-fought campaign to preserve things that actually do help, rather than drain their budgets to supply more cops.
UN Women drops an explainer about the "anti-rights pushback" happening by anti-trans groups that claim to be promoting or protecting women's rights against intrusion. And, because he is both an excellent parent and someone needed as a pro-trans kids icon in and around the United Kingdom, David Tennant may have unintentionally sold an awful lot of trans rights shirts. Specifically, a shirt in trans pride colors that says "You will have to go through ME", which is certainly a sentiment we could have more of.
Doulas for gender, whether for transitioning or talking your way through your identity, which is a lovely thought to have people on hand to help someone through the process of becoming the gendered or ungendered being they want to be.
A Texas libararian was fired for highlighting books that the administration of the library system wanted banned and for pushing back against being told to censor materials. She's getting an award from the Author's Guild in New York, which is fine, but as is noted, what would have been better was for her to keep her job and continue working as the excellent librarian she is, because if she wants to keep working in public libraries, she's going to have to go elsewhere. The place that fired her is almost the only place she could work, and it's unlikely she'll get employed anywhere close that doesn't want to specifically hire someone considered a troublemaker. (And it's unlikely the people who demanded her firing were the people that would support her display ideas.)
I was recently reminded on a different social media space that while it's fairly well-known at this point that libraries have people who do their book purchasing, it's less well-known that bookstores also have people who do their purchasing. And therefore, sometimes you have a situation where an author was looking at the prospect of having two boxes of their very queer-friendly book returned because the bookstore's policies didn't approve of the book, but thankfully, after posting the news on their social site, other books with policies that did approve of the book bought those copies and many more. So, as was noted on the other site, if your apology for book banning is that "it'll be available at the bookstore," it's entirely possible that it won't, because bookstore selectors may decide against carrying it as well.
Staying in the realm of physical things and disappearing things, physical media releases are being ignored by many major media companies, because they prefer rent-seeking, but in the world of anime, places that are doing remasters and aiming for sales of about 5,000 physical units are doing quite well, because they're aiming for the right amount of people who will want the physical object, and because anime fans have already seen the ease in which things disappear from being available, due to the usually limited print runs or release abilities of the companies that dub and then release material.
Jennie Rose Halperin calls bullshit on publishers actually wanting to find a solution that allows controlled digital lending of their materials at reasonable rates, and steps down as the co-chair of the NISO working group that had a paper drafted about it. Because the publishers apparently waited until a draft was circulating and looking for buy-in before letting loose with all of their complaints about the proposal, rather than actually trying to work with the NISO group to make something that works. This is a familiar-looking playbook for anyone who wayched as one of the political parties was all set to deliver bipartisan legislation and then completely came out against it and spiked the legislation because the person they have sworn their true fealty to decided that he didn't want it to happen.
The Living Computers Museum in Seattle will close its doors and auction off its collections, as the late Paul Allen's estate continues to try and dispose of the assets he held. Which is too bad, because having computers of the past that were present, and past technology that could be held and interacted with, in the original hardware and terminals, is not something that people of this day and age get to do. There is software emulation, of course, for many of the operating systems that are there, but getting to tap keys and see results is something that cannot quite be emulated.
The conservatives of the Supreme Court of the United States gave the okay for cities and towns to enact punitive measures and ban public sleeping and camping so that any place that doesn't want to have the unhoused doesn't have to. Not that the people they're banning and sweeping and otherwise harassing have the money to pay exorbitant fines for not having housing and having all the shelter beds being full. As is mentioned, at least one of those towns intends to ensure thhere are no houseless people by driving them out. (Or, presumably, housing them in the jails forever.)
The Court is also busily attempting to ensure that lawfully created entities in Article II jurisdictions have no ability to actually do anything in terms of enforcement of the law, saying that persons who are being fined under Securities and Exchange Commission proceedings must have their cases resolved in the federal courts, instead of in specific administrative courts set up for the purpose of trying such things and also insisting the courts and the legislature have the sole authority to decide any matters of ambiguity in law, rather than the previous precedent that had allowed agencies tasked with enforcement to create rules and interpretations that would be followed, so long as they were deemed reasonable. Obviously, legislators get to clarify anything they want, assuming they can get it passed, but the Court seems to think that any administration is not allowed to resolve ambiguities so they can get their work done. If the courts were hurting for cases for the docket, well, maybe this would make more sense, but instead, this seems like a benefit to anyonw who wants to tie up a thing in the court for as long as they can exhaust appeals on the matter.
The Court also decided there can be no prosecution of a President for anything that comes under their official duties, giving the previous administrator cover to argue that he cannot be prosecuted for clearly criminal acts since he claims them as official acts, and giving the current administrator wide latitude to do terrible things and use the doctrine of the current court that he cannoy be prosecuted for them wither, because they are official acts within the power of the executive.
So, on the one hand, those in the administration of the Executive do not have power to interpret the law so that they may make rules and regulations, but on the other hand, the Executive himself can act with impunity, so long as the action falls under his official duties. Certainly suggests the court is more than ready to abdicate themselves to a strongman and to ensure that the legislature becomes only the puppet of such. With these rulings and others, including the Dobbs decision, it seems entirely likely that the 70% of respondents who believe the Supreme Court puts their own ideologies before the law (whether they believe this is wrong or right) is probably a low estimate at this point. And, after all, this is the Court that was currently constructed by a Republican Senate that refused to let a Democratic president have a hearing on a pick, and then made sure to rush all the picks possible through that they could when they had a useful pawn who would do the nominating. So, given the extraordinarily political nature of their appointments, and their very consistent ideoloigcal rulings, it is the logical conclusion of most people that the Court is currently a political object and more interested in enforcing their own ideologies on the rest of us than in interpreting the laws fairly and following their own precedents.
Because this Court seems extremely ready and willing to disregard the things they have been sworn to uphold, their allies in the states are willing to defy the Constitution in their own ways and believe they will not face consequences. Louisiana has demanded the Cecil B. DeMille version of the Ten Commandments be prominently displayed in all public schools, because they believe that the provisions about not establishing religion do not apply to them. Oklahoma's state superintendant has mandated the teaching of the Bible in classrooms, because he believes the establishment clause does not apply to him. Of course, I also suspect that he will not permit true teaching of the Buble in the way that it relates to the founding and the morality of the country, because doing that would mean having to teach about the slavery present in the Bible, and the deamnds for jubilee that continue to go unanswered, and all the ways in which the the selected canon for the Bible in question says the United States is not a great nation, but is instead the ones who are always being criticized for falling away from the teachings.
The company that owns "Truth" Social continues to not be worth much, with share prices falling and reported losses more than 300 times its earnings. It was basically a Gab clone with the association of someone who is now convicted as a felon 34 times and probably still has more use as a vehicle for laundry than an actual company.
A new trend for men who are trying to find new ways to be edgelords is taking a flight and only examining the flight map, rather than availing yourself of any of the creature comforts of the flight, provided by the flight or carried on by yourself.
Courtney Milan's "The Duke Who Didn't" is an exercise in the direction of attention, both in the plot and in the choices of what objects and tropes are familiar but inaccurate and which ones are accurate but unfamiliar, putting objects in the book that are both true and accurate, but also those that are fradulent and familiar, and then inviting the reader to pay attention to which is which.
On a different axis of interest, an overview of the style of story that can be called "unlimited flow," which seems to be about constructing the barest of frame story and then writing as much id as desired without needing to bother with justification or explanation past 'the system ordered it.' The kind of thing that doesn't do cute references but sticks things in wholesale from other stories or elements and iterates through scenarios for as long as the writer wants the scenario to last. It feels like a profoundly relaxing style to write in for the writer, and with an appreciative and enthusiastic audience I can see it being a really good diaogue between the writer and the readers and that it takes great advantage of serialization as a format.
Trying to ban a phone or social media, thinking it is the cause of the ills of adolescence, fundamentally misunderstands adolescence. The tools are not the cause of the issue, even if the tools may make the issue stronger and wider-spread.
Much like how wearing better helmets increased the rate of head injuries (while decreasing fatalities), Texas's decision to ban abortions has resulted in an uptick of infant mortality. And I would bet on maternal mortality as well, and there probably are some additional infant deaths that come from someone being forced to carry a child to term instead of being able to get proper health care for themselves and said infant. But I think the majority of their new reporting of infant mortality is having to classify as infant deaths what they could have written off as abortions.
The way that historians approach their sources shapes the narratives they make out of those sources, which can be the difference between belief that children were being abused and belief the the person accused was being framed. The accounts in the link are of sexual assault by a man on boys, but there is also a story about how a specific historian chose to order their primary sources in such a way that cast doubt on whether the accounts of the boys were true.
Championships to consume stinging nettle leaves, a request to eat more potatoes than the Russet Burbank variety, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that states in the pathway of pollution cannot be protected from states that wish to pollute, or at least, not by having the Environmental Protection Agency tell the polluting states they have to not pollute their neighbors, and South Africans are attempting to curb rhino poaching by placing radioactive elements inside rhino horns, hoping that those who try to bring illegal ivory over borders will have the contaminated elements ping scanners and require greater scrutiny.
In technology, a lawsuit by the federal government against Adobe systems alleges the corporation engages in deceptive practices by giving potential subscribers to their Creative Cloud Suite what looks like an excellent deal, but doesn't effectively disclose that canceling that version early will mean an early termination fee of half the remaining contract's amount, which is then complicated by having a unnecessarily complex method to cancel the subscription. I would like to see an awful lot of other places that engage with similar patterns have to clean up their offerings and start offering a straightforward way to cancel serices, without hidden fees and without being run around for a significant amount before finidng the one true path that actually does cancel an account.
Rather than provide sufficient funds to repair a roof that may not last another winter, the Ontario premier has instead directed that the Ontario Science Center be closed and moved to another location. The difficulty comes from the concrete used in the initial construction of the building not being good for moisture-laden environments, which Ontario often is, and it also taking a significant amount of time to notice that this concrete was not suited. The opposition believes the premier is more interested in demolishing the structure and selling it to a friend to build a spa on, which could be true, but the premier has also definitely been uninterested in spending any public money on public service if he can avoid doing so.
Paramount decided that the MTV.com website needed to be purged of basically all non-reality show content and did such destruction without having any backup or other way of accessing the content. Probably because they thought it would be too much cost to engage with, rather than thinking of it as something they could wind down, archive, and then let be. Or pass off to a preservation organization that would do such things. But no, it's not actively making them money any more, so it gets destroyed.
The presence of satellite clusters like Starlink will contribute significantly to aluminum oxides that will destroy the ozone layer as the satellites burn themselves up and their components fall down through the layer.
Boeing blamed the right hand not knowing what the left was doing as the cause of the door plug blowout that they are under investigation for, drawing a sharp criticism and sanctions from the National Transportation Safety Board for disclosing investigation material and providing analysis of it.
More recalls for the Cybertruck, as it continues to have parts and pieces fall off or motors that can cause and receive electrical problems. Almost makes you think that regulartions are there for a reason, rather than to be dicks to supergeniuses who already know everything.
I had thought that generally accepted practice when traveling internationally was to get a phone that would work with the cellular network of where you were going to, but there are still people who take their phones on the road with them, and therefore they were affected by an outage of a European partner that was routing much of the roaming connectivity for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
One excellent thing: While we know one of her sons more, for his role in Tenacious D and several movie roles, we have Judith Love Cohen to thank for the successful return of the Apollo 13 mission and for the pictures of the Hubble Space telescope, as she was involved in systems the Apollo 13 astronauts ued to return safely after needing to abort their mission and in some of the matters that helped build the space telescope. It seems to be a regular situation where people who work in the arts also either are or have relatives who are scientists doing excellent things.
Last for tonight, Due to the way that Unicode rules work about the addition of diacritical marks, it is possible to create the phenomenon known as corrupted text or zalgotext. And because it is a known manner of working with rules of Unicode, the corruption can be undone or blocked as well.
And a man with trisomy 21 and a multi-million dollar fun socks business. (They've got king size offerings, which might mean that if I want to expand my sock designs, I actually can find some that will fit nicely.)
(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.)
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again is a perfect summary of just how much bullshit there is around the idea of LLMs and AI and how few people will actually need or want to use such things. And that those people who do need or want to use such things already know they need or want them, and for what purposes. Therefore, all the other people who are either being hustled or trying to do hustling should cease or risk wrath and well-executed professional wrestling moves.
A case for using the idea of "gender modality" when asking about the relationship a person has to the gender (or lack thereof) assigned to them at birth, rather than "gender identity," which is about what a person is right at that moment. I like language and concepts that can render more accurate views of the world and the beings on them, so this was a useful thing to hear.
Donald Sutherland, a person with so many roles across so many different genres and styles, passed on at 88 years of age. He was one of the ones that was everywhere, and he made every role he had good.
The mayor of Newbern, Alabama, will once again Patrick Braxton, the lawfully and correctly elected mayor, once a settlement with the town council receives the signature of a federal judge. The white town council had become accustomed to simply appointing the people they wanted to fill civil offices, without any need to elect or let the mostly-black town do anything like voting. And when Braxton properly filed paperwork and ran unopposed for mayor, the town council held a secret special election that had no public notice or other opportunity for persons to declare candidacies or vote and reappointed the previous white mayor, the one who did not file paperwork to contest the election, back to the position. The town council appeared to have found democracy too democratic compared to oligarchical rule. And when they found out the mayor was someone other than who they intended to appoint, they simply locked the Black mayor out of his ability to perform his official functions and hoped he would go away and not contest their secret election.
The New York Public Library and other cultural institutions have finally had their funding restored for the fiscal year 2025 budget for New York City, after a hard-fought campaign to preserve things that actually do help, rather than drain their budgets to supply more cops.
UN Women drops an explainer about the "anti-rights pushback" happening by anti-trans groups that claim to be promoting or protecting women's rights against intrusion. And, because he is both an excellent parent and someone needed as a pro-trans kids icon in and around the United Kingdom, David Tennant may have unintentionally sold an awful lot of trans rights shirts. Specifically, a shirt in trans pride colors that says "You will have to go through ME", which is certainly a sentiment we could have more of.
Doulas for gender, whether for transitioning or talking your way through your identity, which is a lovely thought to have people on hand to help someone through the process of becoming the gendered or ungendered being they want to be.
A Texas libararian was fired for highlighting books that the administration of the library system wanted banned and for pushing back against being told to censor materials. She's getting an award from the Author's Guild in New York, which is fine, but as is noted, what would have been better was for her to keep her job and continue working as the excellent librarian she is, because if she wants to keep working in public libraries, she's going to have to go elsewhere. The place that fired her is almost the only place she could work, and it's unlikely she'll get employed anywhere close that doesn't want to specifically hire someone considered a troublemaker. (And it's unlikely the people who demanded her firing were the people that would support her display ideas.)
I was recently reminded on a different social media space that while it's fairly well-known at this point that libraries have people who do their book purchasing, it's less well-known that bookstores also have people who do their purchasing. And therefore, sometimes you have a situation where an author was looking at the prospect of having two boxes of their very queer-friendly book returned because the bookstore's policies didn't approve of the book, but thankfully, after posting the news on their social site, other books with policies that did approve of the book bought those copies and many more. So, as was noted on the other site, if your apology for book banning is that "it'll be available at the bookstore," it's entirely possible that it won't, because bookstore selectors may decide against carrying it as well.
Staying in the realm of physical things and disappearing things, physical media releases are being ignored by many major media companies, because they prefer rent-seeking, but in the world of anime, places that are doing remasters and aiming for sales of about 5,000 physical units are doing quite well, because they're aiming for the right amount of people who will want the physical object, and because anime fans have already seen the ease in which things disappear from being available, due to the usually limited print runs or release abilities of the companies that dub and then release material.
Jennie Rose Halperin calls bullshit on publishers actually wanting to find a solution that allows controlled digital lending of their materials at reasonable rates, and steps down as the co-chair of the NISO working group that had a paper drafted about it. Because the publishers apparently waited until a draft was circulating and looking for buy-in before letting loose with all of their complaints about the proposal, rather than actually trying to work with the NISO group to make something that works. This is a familiar-looking playbook for anyone who wayched as one of the political parties was all set to deliver bipartisan legislation and then completely came out against it and spiked the legislation because the person they have sworn their true fealty to decided that he didn't want it to happen.
The Living Computers Museum in Seattle will close its doors and auction off its collections, as the late Paul Allen's estate continues to try and dispose of the assets he held. Which is too bad, because having computers of the past that were present, and past technology that could be held and interacted with, in the original hardware and terminals, is not something that people of this day and age get to do. There is software emulation, of course, for many of the operating systems that are there, but getting to tap keys and see results is something that cannot quite be emulated.
The conservatives of the Supreme Court of the United States gave the okay for cities and towns to enact punitive measures and ban public sleeping and camping so that any place that doesn't want to have the unhoused doesn't have to. Not that the people they're banning and sweeping and otherwise harassing have the money to pay exorbitant fines for not having housing and having all the shelter beds being full. As is mentioned, at least one of those towns intends to ensure thhere are no houseless people by driving them out. (Or, presumably, housing them in the jails forever.)
The Court is also busily attempting to ensure that lawfully created entities in Article II jurisdictions have no ability to actually do anything in terms of enforcement of the law, saying that persons who are being fined under Securities and Exchange Commission proceedings must have their cases resolved in the federal courts, instead of in specific administrative courts set up for the purpose of trying such things and also insisting the courts and the legislature have the sole authority to decide any matters of ambiguity in law, rather than the previous precedent that had allowed agencies tasked with enforcement to create rules and interpretations that would be followed, so long as they were deemed reasonable. Obviously, legislators get to clarify anything they want, assuming they can get it passed, but the Court seems to think that any administration is not allowed to resolve ambiguities so they can get their work done. If the courts were hurting for cases for the docket, well, maybe this would make more sense, but instead, this seems like a benefit to anyonw who wants to tie up a thing in the court for as long as they can exhaust appeals on the matter.
The Court also decided there can be no prosecution of a President for anything that comes under their official duties, giving the previous administrator cover to argue that he cannot be prosecuted for clearly criminal acts since he claims them as official acts, and giving the current administrator wide latitude to do terrible things and use the doctrine of the current court that he cannoy be prosecuted for them wither, because they are official acts within the power of the executive.
So, on the one hand, those in the administration of the Executive do not have power to interpret the law so that they may make rules and regulations, but on the other hand, the Executive himself can act with impunity, so long as the action falls under his official duties. Certainly suggests the court is more than ready to abdicate themselves to a strongman and to ensure that the legislature becomes only the puppet of such. With these rulings and others, including the Dobbs decision, it seems entirely likely that the 70% of respondents who believe the Supreme Court puts their own ideologies before the law (whether they believe this is wrong or right) is probably a low estimate at this point. And, after all, this is the Court that was currently constructed by a Republican Senate that refused to let a Democratic president have a hearing on a pick, and then made sure to rush all the picks possible through that they could when they had a useful pawn who would do the nominating. So, given the extraordinarily political nature of their appointments, and their very consistent ideoloigcal rulings, it is the logical conclusion of most people that the Court is currently a political object and more interested in enforcing their own ideologies on the rest of us than in interpreting the laws fairly and following their own precedents.
Because this Court seems extremely ready and willing to disregard the things they have been sworn to uphold, their allies in the states are willing to defy the Constitution in their own ways and believe they will not face consequences. Louisiana has demanded the Cecil B. DeMille version of the Ten Commandments be prominently displayed in all public schools, because they believe that the provisions about not establishing religion do not apply to them. Oklahoma's state superintendant has mandated the teaching of the Bible in classrooms, because he believes the establishment clause does not apply to him. Of course, I also suspect that he will not permit true teaching of the Buble in the way that it relates to the founding and the morality of the country, because doing that would mean having to teach about the slavery present in the Bible, and the deamnds for jubilee that continue to go unanswered, and all the ways in which the the selected canon for the Bible in question says the United States is not a great nation, but is instead the ones who are always being criticized for falling away from the teachings.
The company that owns "Truth" Social continues to not be worth much, with share prices falling and reported losses more than 300 times its earnings. It was basically a Gab clone with the association of someone who is now convicted as a felon 34 times and probably still has more use as a vehicle for laundry than an actual company.
A new trend for men who are trying to find new ways to be edgelords is taking a flight and only examining the flight map, rather than availing yourself of any of the creature comforts of the flight, provided by the flight or carried on by yourself.
Courtney Milan's "The Duke Who Didn't" is an exercise in the direction of attention, both in the plot and in the choices of what objects and tropes are familiar but inaccurate and which ones are accurate but unfamiliar, putting objects in the book that are both true and accurate, but also those that are fradulent and familiar, and then inviting the reader to pay attention to which is which.
On a different axis of interest, an overview of the style of story that can be called "unlimited flow," which seems to be about constructing the barest of frame story and then writing as much id as desired without needing to bother with justification or explanation past 'the system ordered it.' The kind of thing that doesn't do cute references but sticks things in wholesale from other stories or elements and iterates through scenarios for as long as the writer wants the scenario to last. It feels like a profoundly relaxing style to write in for the writer, and with an appreciative and enthusiastic audience I can see it being a really good diaogue between the writer and the readers and that it takes great advantage of serialization as a format.
Trying to ban a phone or social media, thinking it is the cause of the ills of adolescence, fundamentally misunderstands adolescence. The tools are not the cause of the issue, even if the tools may make the issue stronger and wider-spread.
Much like how wearing better helmets increased the rate of head injuries (while decreasing fatalities), Texas's decision to ban abortions has resulted in an uptick of infant mortality. And I would bet on maternal mortality as well, and there probably are some additional infant deaths that come from someone being forced to carry a child to term instead of being able to get proper health care for themselves and said infant. But I think the majority of their new reporting of infant mortality is having to classify as infant deaths what they could have written off as abortions.
The way that historians approach their sources shapes the narratives they make out of those sources, which can be the difference between belief that children were being abused and belief the the person accused was being framed. The accounts in the link are of sexual assault by a man on boys, but there is also a story about how a specific historian chose to order their primary sources in such a way that cast doubt on whether the accounts of the boys were true.
Championships to consume stinging nettle leaves, a request to eat more potatoes than the Russet Burbank variety, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that states in the pathway of pollution cannot be protected from states that wish to pollute, or at least, not by having the Environmental Protection Agency tell the polluting states they have to not pollute their neighbors, and South Africans are attempting to curb rhino poaching by placing radioactive elements inside rhino horns, hoping that those who try to bring illegal ivory over borders will have the contaminated elements ping scanners and require greater scrutiny.
In technology, a lawsuit by the federal government against Adobe systems alleges the corporation engages in deceptive practices by giving potential subscribers to their Creative Cloud Suite what looks like an excellent deal, but doesn't effectively disclose that canceling that version early will mean an early termination fee of half the remaining contract's amount, which is then complicated by having a unnecessarily complex method to cancel the subscription. I would like to see an awful lot of other places that engage with similar patterns have to clean up their offerings and start offering a straightforward way to cancel serices, without hidden fees and without being run around for a significant amount before finidng the one true path that actually does cancel an account.
Rather than provide sufficient funds to repair a roof that may not last another winter, the Ontario premier has instead directed that the Ontario Science Center be closed and moved to another location. The difficulty comes from the concrete used in the initial construction of the building not being good for moisture-laden environments, which Ontario often is, and it also taking a significant amount of time to notice that this concrete was not suited. The opposition believes the premier is more interested in demolishing the structure and selling it to a friend to build a spa on, which could be true, but the premier has also definitely been uninterested in spending any public money on public service if he can avoid doing so.
Paramount decided that the MTV.com website needed to be purged of basically all non-reality show content and did such destruction without having any backup or other way of accessing the content. Probably because they thought it would be too much cost to engage with, rather than thinking of it as something they could wind down, archive, and then let be. Or pass off to a preservation organization that would do such things. But no, it's not actively making them money any more, so it gets destroyed.
The presence of satellite clusters like Starlink will contribute significantly to aluminum oxides that will destroy the ozone layer as the satellites burn themselves up and their components fall down through the layer.
Boeing blamed the right hand not knowing what the left was doing as the cause of the door plug blowout that they are under investigation for, drawing a sharp criticism and sanctions from the National Transportation Safety Board for disclosing investigation material and providing analysis of it.
More recalls for the Cybertruck, as it continues to have parts and pieces fall off or motors that can cause and receive electrical problems. Almost makes you think that regulartions are there for a reason, rather than to be dicks to supergeniuses who already know everything.
I had thought that generally accepted practice when traveling internationally was to get a phone that would work with the cellular network of where you were going to, but there are still people who take their phones on the road with them, and therefore they were affected by an outage of a European partner that was routing much of the roaming connectivity for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
One excellent thing: While we know one of her sons more, for his role in Tenacious D and several movie roles, we have Judith Love Cohen to thank for the successful return of the Apollo 13 mission and for the pictures of the Hubble Space telescope, as she was involved in systems the Apollo 13 astronauts ued to return safely after needing to abort their mission and in some of the matters that helped build the space telescope. It seems to be a regular situation where people who work in the arts also either are or have relatives who are scientists doing excellent things.
Last for tonight, Due to the way that Unicode rules work about the addition of diacritical marks, it is possible to create the phenomenon known as corrupted text or zalgotext. And because it is a known manner of working with rules of Unicode, the corruption can be undone or blocked as well.
And a man with trisomy 21 and a multi-million dollar fun socks business. (They've got king size offerings, which might mean that if I want to expand my sock designs, I actually can find some that will fit nicely.)
(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: 2024-07-02 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 04:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 04:23 am (UTC)Regarding gender modality, while on the one hand I too appreciate making more cognitive space for representation of the actual world, I expect that much of the 80%+ cis majority will latch on to these additional descriptors as yet more ways to "understand" that boring old binary trans women must "therefore be" categorically different from cis women. 😔
no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 04:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 04:24 am (UTC)It's been a very long time since I needed to bring a separate phone for international travel; while some US carriers had GSM even in the 2G days the phones were often lacking needed frequency bands, so a local or multiband phone was worthwhile. Once I had phones that covered the needed bands, I would buy a local SIM rather than paying exorbitant roaming costs (since I only got unlocked phones).
My current phone (iPhone 15 Pro) has a quad-band GSM/EDGE phone buried within it as a fallback if none of the dozens of 5G or LTE bands are working...but no SIM slot even if I wanted to get a local SIM card. (I haven't tried the multiple eSIM support.) Though I haven't bothered to get a local SIM of any sort in years, since my current plan has a generally solid international roaming setup. (My usual travel destination has been Germany, where T-Mobile's majority owner provides service, so I suspect it wouldn't have depended on Syniverse.)
no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 04:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-03 11:39 pm (UTC)Yeah, opsec is a whole different and terrible bucket of worms. :-(
no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 12:17 pm (UTC)It's one of the reasons mental health issues are growing - being faced with all the bad things and your own powerlessness is not healthy. I think that's also the reason far-right ideology is on the rise: they over a world view, where it's easy to blame somebody else, admit no fault and reality isn't as bad as the mean scientist make it out to be.
Re AI:
There are SO MANY awesome things we could (and can) do with AI. Fighting cancer, fighting wildfires, preventing over-fishing. Also, watching Star Trek Discovery, I once again feel in love with their ship computer, Zora. As on the Enterprises, this is how AI should help us.
Instead, it's used to take away work from human artists and experts, price gorge and to spread misinformation. I think a lot of people are hating on AI just because it's used for the benefit of the few, instead of the many.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 02:35 pm (UTC)The working kinds of AI are limited in scope and being used as tools, rather than hyped as things by themselves or used as ways of extracting wealth from people. They're hating on misuse and malicious use and selling it as something it's not, which is a perfectly good thing to do.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 03:14 pm (UTC)The AI article was hilarious, but also painfully illuminating. My husband works in IT, so not particularly shocking! But insightful nonetheless.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 03:32 pm (UTC)