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silveradeptGreetings! Let us begin with an Atlas Obscura article about the Yuletide fic exchange that understands the reasons why it's popular and still going strong, even decades after starting.
The Romantasy genre is not new, not by a long shot. Nor are the issues of having the Fantasy readers who go "ew, romance" and the Romance readers go "Excuse you, there are rules here." And because so very much of getting books sold is about knowing there are readers there for it, authors and their agents occasionally have to deal with one or the other (or both) factions that want the book to be more of their preference, rather than letting the book sit in the pocket it was written for.
Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria, and his regime has finally come to a close. Which is a cause for celebration and jubilation, for reunification, and for healing. And for once again considering that there is such a thing as the future, as justice, and as freedom. And also, it is a time for ensuring that the crimes are prosecuted, that those with power are held accountable, and that it is not simply a situation where a strongman skips off into history, only to be held accountable by whatever awaits them after death.
The government in France dissolved after a confidence vote succeeded, bolstered by representatives of both the far right and far left blocs.
A gunman murdered the Chief Executive Officer of UnitedHealthcare. This is not generally an encouraged thing.
However, it turns out that UnitedHealthcare was known for a much higher than average denial rate for coverage, was using an algorithm that was wrong 90% of the time on whether to approve or deny, and also had employees who laughed and otherwise seemed happy at the prospect of denying care to those who needed it. In addition to the regular ghoulishness that is for-profit health insurance care where the profits are usually increased through the denial of coverage, so the shareholders who get those profits usually do so off of another person dying. (It's a bit like the "push this button, receive a million dollars, and someone you do not know will die," but without the part where it comes back to be someone known and possibly loved to the person pushing the button.)
A news organization attempted to verify a graphic passed around about how much above the industry average UnitedHealthcare was in denial rate, and failed, because they couldn't find enough data to verify it completely, because there's not actually standardized collection of this data. What was available did verify the extremely high denial claim rate made, but it's not a comprehensive picture by any means.
If you are the kind of person or company that makes money on the suffering of others, people are much more likely to be relieved, if not happy, at your death because they will often see it is a net benefit to the world.
Seeing the relief and the general positivity around an impediment to care being removed, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield's decided to scrap a planned change to their insurance that would have only covered anesthesia for a predetermined amount of surgery time, realizing that they do not want to be a company that is being criticized for their unwillingness to provide care at the moment.
Other companies considered the possible risks to their executives, but the jury is still out on whether they recognize one of the best ways of reducing the risks their executives will face is if they stop trying to maximize profit through the denial of care and the increase of premiums, and instead decide that if they are an insurance company, their primary purpose is to insure against catastrophic loss and that all of their members are entitled to drawing from the shared pool of resources for what treatments they need.
On my socials, however, there was also some very pointed comparisons between the swiftness and speed at which a manhunt was spiraled up for finding the shooter of the CEO, eventually arresting a suspect and charging them with the killing within a few days, while at the same time, a man caught on camera choking a homeless Black man to death on the New York Subway was first charged only with manslaughter and/or criminally negligent homicide, and then the jury acquitted or deadlocked on those charges. There is a stark contrast here between who gets all the effort to find and convict their killer and who gets all the effort to try and find ways of absolving them of killing someone else, even with clear evidence of the killing, because they want to blame the victim as having invited their own killing.
In states that have done their best to ban reproductive health care, they're more interested in covering up the damage and death happening as a result of their policies than in trying to stop those deaths and damages. More states will join the coalition of the coverup, now including Idaho, who was allowed to enforce its Fugitive Abortion Slave Act.
Information about the menopause for people who might need accurate information in an environment that is hostile to it.
If you are going to allow for religious figures to give invocations, then you have to allow for all religious figures to give invocations. At least, if you are following the dictates of the United States Constitution. But, of course, certain religions believe that the right to be religious in public is reserved only to them. This is not surprising to see, nor is it surprising to see that the uproar is supposed Christians outraged at the idea that other religions might enjoy the same freedoms they do. I'm sure there will be plenty of legislation intended to ensure something like that never happens again. Because what passes for much of Evangelical Christianity in the United States is not a religion, but a political position, one that starts in racism and expand further out to condemn things that their religious book says they should be championing.
The election of the Republican candidate does not mean that the people that he and his party intend to target will hide themselves again in the closet and hope that it will all pass. They know it will not. And, at least electorally speaking, focusing on culture war issues, especially transphobia, has been a major loser for the Republicans. Even though there's still the strong possibility that a lot of damage will be done in the interim by ideologues who are using their structural advantages to get their agendas passed before they're thrown out and their edifices destroyed. The loyal opposition also needs to understand they should not give further fuel to this fire, unless they want to lose their seats to actual liberals.
Attempts are underway to design a scientifically strong experiment about the efficacy of puberty blockers, but there are still significant questions to be answered, like how obvious it would be to a placebo group that they are in the placebo group, and whether it is ethical at all to require children to potentially go through a traumatic event for science. Perhaps my U.S. cynicism is showing unduly, but I would expect a study here in the States to "randomly" choose all white boys and girls for the treatment group and all non-white girls and boys for the placebo, and then proclaim they have no idea where Tuskegee, Alabama is and why it would be important.
A significant amount of first-line cabinet picks for the incoming administration have been credibly accused or convicted of sexual misconduct, and that's not an accident. The point is to demonstrate that being accused of sexual misconduct is a non-entity, a non-issue in this administration, and therefore, all other men should feel that it will be a non-issue for them, too. Misogyny was a plank in the platform the Republican candidate ran on, and the misogynists are crowing that they have the power now.
The last time there were major anti-immigrant purges, the economy and the community suffered greatly. Of course, that would assume that the people who want to enact the next one have studied any history at all. Or even studied anything contemporary, because as usual, the tax plan from the Republican is meant to ease the burdens of the wealthy and shift them to the working.
The CEO of Delta Airlines certainly thinks he's going to have a good friend in the incoming administration and is looking forward to having less regulation to deal with.
The point of a lot of this is to try and exhaust all the coverage of them, so that through sheer volume, some of it slips through. Or to quibble points about whether or not someone would actually go through with their rhetoric. But when the rhetoric is the kind of thing that explicitly paints the people who don't agree with you as unhuman, the fat that they're saying it, regardless of whether they believe it, should be enough for there to be an opposition.
Understanding the culture of the WWE, and the ways that it works its kayfabe, gives insight into understanding the incoming administration, and helps explain why one of the WWE top brass is being picked to lead a Cabinet department.
President Biden pardoned his son so as to pull him out of the firing line for the incoming administration. If he stops with just his son, though, it will be a travesty. Good news, a large swath of commutations of sentences and more pardons issues. Better news yet would be to be more expansive still with the power of pardoning and commutation, especially with an eye toward what the incoming administration will want to prosecute.
In technology, entities claiming they were offering savings accounts with FDIC backing have declared bankruptcy, and missing assets, and the FDIC is not paying those who lost their deposits, because the entities claiming to have backing weren't actually banks with deposit insurance. That's going to be an extremely vicious lawsuit to try and find and restore the depositors' money.
Not that banking institutions are covering themselves in glory, as they generally fight tooth and nail to put the blame and liability on a customer if the customer gets scammed out of money. Even though the average phish is way more sophisticated than it was before, and can defeat many of the standard ways of stopping hacks, because the phish gets the customer to believe the scammers are from the bank and provide the necessary keys for the scam to work. Usually with data bought from warehouses or black market sites or both.
The operator of a website that allows people to take selfies of themselves using the sprawling network of surveillance cameras in New York City has received a cease-and-desist notice from the City, who apparently do not like the possibility of ordinary folks not only knowing where the cameras are, but using them to capture frames of themselves willingly.
ChatGPT currently had hard stops implemented in its systems so that certain names do not get results, but instead return errors. Rather than abandon the project as a waste of resources, of course, OpenAI will continue, as will so many other LLM and algorithm projects. Which means we're probably going to keep finding these pieces and nuggets in all kinds of LLMs, and then it will be only a little while before they get used for adversarial or protective purposes.
A new potential use for the AirTag devices is to securely share the location of an AirTag with a third party, so that, say, lost luggage can be more easily found and reunited with the traveler.
Last for tonight, a meditation on how SARS-CoV-2 would have impacts on the mostly scent-driven and hormonal omegaverse, and an appreciation for all the ways that Deep Space 9 showed characters who were close to the lines of crossing sides.
And the SCARF model of managing change and leadership, a system that says people generally seek Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness in their workplaces. If decisions will threaten or reduce one of those dimensions, expect pushback on the implementation of those decisions, or worse morale after doing so. Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. And if you're stuck in Library Nice, you're almost certainly dealing with unclear and unkind.
(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 Romantasy genre is not new, not by a long shot. Nor are the issues of having the Fantasy readers who go "ew, romance" and the Romance readers go "Excuse you, there are rules here." And because so very much of getting books sold is about knowing there are readers there for it, authors and their agents occasionally have to deal with one or the other (or both) factions that want the book to be more of their preference, rather than letting the book sit in the pocket it was written for.
Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria, and his regime has finally come to a close. Which is a cause for celebration and jubilation, for reunification, and for healing. And for once again considering that there is such a thing as the future, as justice, and as freedom. And also, it is a time for ensuring that the crimes are prosecuted, that those with power are held accountable, and that it is not simply a situation where a strongman skips off into history, only to be held accountable by whatever awaits them after death.
The government in France dissolved after a confidence vote succeeded, bolstered by representatives of both the far right and far left blocs.
A gunman murdered the Chief Executive Officer of UnitedHealthcare. This is not generally an encouraged thing.
However, it turns out that UnitedHealthcare was known for a much higher than average denial rate for coverage, was using an algorithm that was wrong 90% of the time on whether to approve or deny, and also had employees who laughed and otherwise seemed happy at the prospect of denying care to those who needed it. In addition to the regular ghoulishness that is for-profit health insurance care where the profits are usually increased through the denial of coverage, so the shareholders who get those profits usually do so off of another person dying. (It's a bit like the "push this button, receive a million dollars, and someone you do not know will die," but without the part where it comes back to be someone known and possibly loved to the person pushing the button.)
A news organization attempted to verify a graphic passed around about how much above the industry average UnitedHealthcare was in denial rate, and failed, because they couldn't find enough data to verify it completely, because there's not actually standardized collection of this data. What was available did verify the extremely high denial claim rate made, but it's not a comprehensive picture by any means.
If you are the kind of person or company that makes money on the suffering of others, people are much more likely to be relieved, if not happy, at your death because they will often see it is a net benefit to the world.
Seeing the relief and the general positivity around an impediment to care being removed, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield's decided to scrap a planned change to their insurance that would have only covered anesthesia for a predetermined amount of surgery time, realizing that they do not want to be a company that is being criticized for their unwillingness to provide care at the moment.
Other companies considered the possible risks to their executives, but the jury is still out on whether they recognize one of the best ways of reducing the risks their executives will face is if they stop trying to maximize profit through the denial of care and the increase of premiums, and instead decide that if they are an insurance company, their primary purpose is to insure against catastrophic loss and that all of their members are entitled to drawing from the shared pool of resources for what treatments they need.
On my socials, however, there was also some very pointed comparisons between the swiftness and speed at which a manhunt was spiraled up for finding the shooter of the CEO, eventually arresting a suspect and charging them with the killing within a few days, while at the same time, a man caught on camera choking a homeless Black man to death on the New York Subway was first charged only with manslaughter and/or criminally negligent homicide, and then the jury acquitted or deadlocked on those charges. There is a stark contrast here between who gets all the effort to find and convict their killer and who gets all the effort to try and find ways of absolving them of killing someone else, even with clear evidence of the killing, because they want to blame the victim as having invited their own killing.
In states that have done their best to ban reproductive health care, they're more interested in covering up the damage and death happening as a result of their policies than in trying to stop those deaths and damages. More states will join the coalition of the coverup, now including Idaho, who was allowed to enforce its Fugitive Abortion Slave Act.
Information about the menopause for people who might need accurate information in an environment that is hostile to it.
If you are going to allow for religious figures to give invocations, then you have to allow for all religious figures to give invocations. At least, if you are following the dictates of the United States Constitution. But, of course, certain religions believe that the right to be religious in public is reserved only to them. This is not surprising to see, nor is it surprising to see that the uproar is supposed Christians outraged at the idea that other religions might enjoy the same freedoms they do. I'm sure there will be plenty of legislation intended to ensure something like that never happens again. Because what passes for much of Evangelical Christianity in the United States is not a religion, but a political position, one that starts in racism and expand further out to condemn things that their religious book says they should be championing.
The election of the Republican candidate does not mean that the people that he and his party intend to target will hide themselves again in the closet and hope that it will all pass. They know it will not. And, at least electorally speaking, focusing on culture war issues, especially transphobia, has been a major loser for the Republicans. Even though there's still the strong possibility that a lot of damage will be done in the interim by ideologues who are using their structural advantages to get their agendas passed before they're thrown out and their edifices destroyed. The loyal opposition also needs to understand they should not give further fuel to this fire, unless they want to lose their seats to actual liberals.
Attempts are underway to design a scientifically strong experiment about the efficacy of puberty blockers, but there are still significant questions to be answered, like how obvious it would be to a placebo group that they are in the placebo group, and whether it is ethical at all to require children to potentially go through a traumatic event for science. Perhaps my U.S. cynicism is showing unduly, but I would expect a study here in the States to "randomly" choose all white boys and girls for the treatment group and all non-white girls and boys for the placebo, and then proclaim they have no idea where Tuskegee, Alabama is and why it would be important.
A significant amount of first-line cabinet picks for the incoming administration have been credibly accused or convicted of sexual misconduct, and that's not an accident. The point is to demonstrate that being accused of sexual misconduct is a non-entity, a non-issue in this administration, and therefore, all other men should feel that it will be a non-issue for them, too. Misogyny was a plank in the platform the Republican candidate ran on, and the misogynists are crowing that they have the power now.
The last time there were major anti-immigrant purges, the economy and the community suffered greatly. Of course, that would assume that the people who want to enact the next one have studied any history at all. Or even studied anything contemporary, because as usual, the tax plan from the Republican is meant to ease the burdens of the wealthy and shift them to the working.
The CEO of Delta Airlines certainly thinks he's going to have a good friend in the incoming administration and is looking forward to having less regulation to deal with.
The point of a lot of this is to try and exhaust all the coverage of them, so that through sheer volume, some of it slips through. Or to quibble points about whether or not someone would actually go through with their rhetoric. But when the rhetoric is the kind of thing that explicitly paints the people who don't agree with you as unhuman, the fat that they're saying it, regardless of whether they believe it, should be enough for there to be an opposition.
Understanding the culture of the WWE, and the ways that it works its kayfabe, gives insight into understanding the incoming administration, and helps explain why one of the WWE top brass is being picked to lead a Cabinet department.
President Biden pardoned his son so as to pull him out of the firing line for the incoming administration. If he stops with just his son, though, it will be a travesty. Good news, a large swath of commutations of sentences and more pardons issues. Better news yet would be to be more expansive still with the power of pardoning and commutation, especially with an eye toward what the incoming administration will want to prosecute.
In technology, entities claiming they were offering savings accounts with FDIC backing have declared bankruptcy, and missing assets, and the FDIC is not paying those who lost their deposits, because the entities claiming to have backing weren't actually banks with deposit insurance. That's going to be an extremely vicious lawsuit to try and find and restore the depositors' money.
Not that banking institutions are covering themselves in glory, as they generally fight tooth and nail to put the blame and liability on a customer if the customer gets scammed out of money. Even though the average phish is way more sophisticated than it was before, and can defeat many of the standard ways of stopping hacks, because the phish gets the customer to believe the scammers are from the bank and provide the necessary keys for the scam to work. Usually with data bought from warehouses or black market sites or both.
The operator of a website that allows people to take selfies of themselves using the sprawling network of surveillance cameras in New York City has received a cease-and-desist notice from the City, who apparently do not like the possibility of ordinary folks not only knowing where the cameras are, but using them to capture frames of themselves willingly.
ChatGPT currently had hard stops implemented in its systems so that certain names do not get results, but instead return errors. Rather than abandon the project as a waste of resources, of course, OpenAI will continue, as will so many other LLM and algorithm projects. Which means we're probably going to keep finding these pieces and nuggets in all kinds of LLMs, and then it will be only a little while before they get used for adversarial or protective purposes.
A new potential use for the AirTag devices is to securely share the location of an AirTag with a third party, so that, say, lost luggage can be more easily found and reunited with the traveler.
Last for tonight, a meditation on how SARS-CoV-2 would have impacts on the mostly scent-driven and hormonal omegaverse, and an appreciation for all the ways that Deep Space 9 showed characters who were close to the lines of crossing sides.
And the SCARF model of managing change and leadership, a system that says people generally seek Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness in their workplaces. If decisions will threaten or reduce one of those dimensions, expect pushback on the implementation of those decisions, or worse morale after doing so. Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. And if you're stuck in Library Nice, you're almost certainly dealing with unclear and unkind.
(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: 2024-12-17 07:36 pm (UTC)Ohhh that was interesting!
no subject
Date: 2024-12-17 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-18 02:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-18 04:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-18 05:25 am (UTC)Still.