platforms, especially Cory’s bête noire, generally already write at great length about how they judge abusive material……and, if anything, they risk being criticised for being too verbose about it

some new parts are massively onerous and clearly designed to pander to the interests of civil society data scientists who want material with which they can flog the wicked, capitalist platforms in order to justify their salaries

just very recently in the last again about 15 years it's discovered 27:48 that fungus actually has another method for digesting wood and 27:54 it's called non-enzymatic chelate or mediated biocatalysis you want to make a note of that for 27:59 discussion at the dinner table tonight with your family

The opinion went on to define a deficient counsel as one who “made errors so serious that counsel was not functioning as the ‘counsel’ guaranteed the defendant by the Sixth Amendment”—a definition that is not only vague but circular. The inadequacy of the standard has allowed a patchwork of different rules to proliferate across the country. A lawyer can sleep during part of a client’s cross-examination, or be arrested for drunk driving on the way to court, or be mentally unstable, or have been disbarred midway through a trial without sinking to the level of constitutionally defective performance—all of these instances have been adjudicated in various jurisdictions.

I want you to have that feeling too. I think it would change how we think about the internet, in a grounding and healthy way. I think it would help us regain a sense of agency and ownership, with which we would be way more demanding of the sort of internet we want to live with, a sense that is currently so distant from us that we have forgotten it is possible and can’t even tell that it is missing.

Then there’s the feeling that people are visiting and - the corollary - if other people’s experience of your website is just in that tiny box, then your experiences of all other websites are similarly physically located in boxes too.

First there’s the feeling of “I made that!” which leads to the feeling of “I can make all kinds of things!” You will definitely get that more when you install the software on the web server yourself, and also when you copy over your own hand-coded text files. (The web is just text!)

But what I remember feeling most magical was the idea that there was somebody visiting that server on my desk. There was somebody coming from a long way away and going inside. An electronic homunculus.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’ve been finding myself perplexingly incapable of late. I’m a smart guy with enormous privilege, financial resources, and I’ve been known to have moxie by times. And yet problems that, in theory, are solvable have been slaying me, and I’ve been grasping for reasons why.

It isno more possible to compose with the paraphernalia of critique than itis to cook with a seesaw. Its limitations are greater still, for the hammerof critique can only prevail if, behind the slowly dismantled wall of ap-pearances, is finally revealed the netherworld of reality. But when thereis nothing real to be seen behind this destroyed wall, critique suddenlylooks like another call to nihilism. What is the use of poking holes indelusions, if nothing more true is revealed beneath?This is precisely what has happened to postmodernism, which canbe defined as another form of modernism, fully equipped with thesame iconoclastic tools as the moderns, but without the belief in a realworld beyond.

The decision not to have children so as not to increase the burden on the world’s resources is based on a probability, not on a certainty; and the precise probabilities for particular calamities differ, including among scholars.

I am quite sure that there is nothing that I, or perhaps any man, could have said to relieve her distress. But I swear I never saw a pregnant woman who looked absurd to me.

But the fact that I cannot speak about the birth process from the inside does not disqualify me from speaking about it altogether. (Women have hardly been inhibited by their personal unfamiliarity with the subjectivity of manhood from telling men how to live; women’s knowingness about men is one of the salient themes of our culture.) So

Environmental catastrophe is a great equalizer, and it is equality that we seek, though not only of the morbid sort.

The analysis of a planetary crisis in terms of identity misunderstands the reach of the crisis, unless of course the identity that is championed is the human one. Now there is an intersection — the one between every living being on the planet! An intersection, and an opportunity for the most comprehensive solidarity in history. Indeed, the planetary character of this crisis arrives as a correction to the plague of particularisms that is injuring so many contemporary societies. There is no greater commonality than the sky. (“When skies are blue,” says the holy fool in the Ian Dury song, “we all feel the benefit.”)

In an emergency, one must be concrete. When a scientist or an engineer makes a significant breakthrough in the struggle for the planet, it may turn out that the providential individual in the lab coat or the hard hat is also a bigot, but that must be left for another day. His or her scientific integrity will be all that counts; we possess, or we lack, many integrities, and everyone’s record is mottled.

To argue that the hole in the ozone layer was made by racism is to play into the hands of the hole-punchers.

There is an idea here, and a very popular one with a long past unknown to the author. The idea is that every unfairness is like every other unfairness; and luck runs together, too.

Fear cannot be overcome without making discriminations among its varieties. There are instances in which the threat precedes the fear and instances in which the fear precedes, or invents, the threat. There are fears that have a basis in reality, the so-called rational fears, which cannot be reduced to psychology or psychopathology. And there are fears that are expressions of subjective realities searching for objective realities with which to justify themselves, and usually finding them. Those latter fears are the ones that hurt people, sometimes many millions of them. The challenge for politics in a populist era is how to address false fears. Of course they will not be constructively addressed unless we are willing to recognize fears that are true, not least in people with whom we disagree. But that is not easily accomplished: the most crushing blow of the pandemic, aside from the number of deaths, was the discovery that not even the plain factuality of the virus sufficed to unite the country, to join us all in a single, empirically warranted fear. If this damaged sense of reality persists into our confrontation with the future of nature, we truly will be the authors of our own destruction.

In truth, our predicament is Pascalian, and it calls for a wager: if a strict regime of regulation makes a decisive difference in saving us, then we (and all life) will have won everything, and if it does not, then we will have lost nothing, except some profits. Better safe than incinerated.

If I were to say what I think “Catholicism” represents, trend-wise, it would be something like this: the desire to see something ascendent that is aesthetically lush, intellectually rigorous, ambiguously reactionary, and which, above all, people can’t get mad at you for. Because getting mad at people for their religion is an asshole move, and nobody wants to be an asshole, and the people who do mark themselves out as people with whom it’s not really possible to have a conversation.

The lawsuit targets YouTube’s use of algorithms to suggest videos for users based on content they have previously viewed. YouTube’s active role goes beyond the kind of conduct Congress intended to protect with Section 230, the family’s lawyers allege.

Submarine cables! They’ve been around since the 1830s. Sharks bite them. And they all run through central points—I assume blockchain data would also run through these points, which are controlled by just a few Tier 1 Networks. All of this is to say that true “decentralization” and privacy isn’t actually possible unless you can build a separate network of cables on the ocean floor. But please don’t. The coral reefs are dying.

For those of us who perhaps remember ethernet cables but did not grow up analogue, we know a world where the internet has become, or simply has always been, ubiquitous

The institute develops foundational ideas to shape political, economic, and social institutions for the 21st century.

the ongoing emergence of planetary intelligence comprehend its own evolution and the astronomical preciousness of sapience

The Antikythera agenda presumes that the economic genres of the next century will not be a simple extrapolation of the present, nor will they be necessarily legible through the now traditional lenses of public vs. private, state vs. market, top-down vs. bottom-up,  centralized vs. decentralized, pre-vs. post. A different architecture of economic information will be produced, modeled, circulated and expressed. 

As cloud platforms take on roles traditionally performed by modern states, albeit crossing national borders and oceans, conversely states are evolving into cloud platforms. The geopolitical tensions that arise in the friction between these two shifts frame the prospects of planetary governance.

the other bends reality to suit what one wants to see

The politics of simulation, more specifically, is based in recursion. Recursive Simulations are those that not only represent the world but which act back upon what they simulate, completing a cycle of sensing and governing.

what intelligence’s provenance may be.

Antikythera explores the path cleared for the philosophy of synthetic intelligence by the externalization of thought in technical systems. What is reflected back is not necessarily human-like.

Technologies generate ideas as much as ideas generate technologies, but today technology has outpaced theory. All too often the response is to superimpose inherited ideas about ethics, scale, governance, and meaning onto situations that in fact demand a different framework.

the contemporary notion of the planetary and the ‘Anthropocene’

So for medieval people Michaelmas was celebrated as being on par with, say, Christmas and Easter. That’s a big ol’ deal. Much like Christmas and Easter it wasn’t just about going to mass on the day in question though – it was a celebration, bitches. And what a killer time to celebrate! The evenings are closing in. You’ve just finished bringing in the harvest, so there’s enough food to really go to town, and you’ve got the day off. Hell yes. In many regions that is traditionally celebrated by roasting a goose, to the point where calling Michaelmas “Goose Day” became a thing. Even if people were not holding it down with a goose they were extremely partying and having a giant meal, though.

I also noticed that it kept its paragraphs pretty short — the better to breezily hustle the argument along. It did not dilate philosophically upon the subject. It wrote straightforwardly and pithily, but without much style (apart from that witty opening paragraph, with its neatly perceptive point on the “moment of uncertainty”). It wasn’t bad writing! Sure, it didn’t have many turns of phrase that make you suck in your breath with admiration, or make a mental note: Hmm, that’s worth plundering in conversation at some point. But it was perfectly clear.

“We need to come up with a kind of cultural etiquette around what appropriate and healthy consumption is, just like we have for other consumptive problems,” Lembke says. “We have nonsmoking areas. We don’t eat ice cream for breakfast. We have all kinds of laws around who can buy and consume alcohol, who can go into a casino. We need guardrails for these digital products, especially for minors.”

These things affect everyone differently, but it’s clear many people regularly feel overwhelmed by this exposure level.

“It’s kind of an adapted hyper-vigilance. As soon as you send something out into the virtual world, you’re sort of sitting on pins and needles waiting for a response,” Lembke says. “That alone—that kind of expectancy—is a state of hyperarousal. How will people respond to this? When will they respond? What will they say?”

Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatric and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, says we construct our identities through how we’re seen by others. Much of that identity is now formed on the internet, and that can be difficult to grapple with.“This virtual identity is a composition of all of these online interactions that we have. It is a very vulnerable identity because it exists in cyberspace. In a weird kind of way we don’t have control over it,” Lembke says. “We’re very exposed.”

“Even when you’re not on the screens, the screens are in your head,” Rosen says.

It can sometimes feel like the whole world has its eyes on you.Being observed by so many people appears to have significant psychological effects.

this is supposed to be science fiction. escapism! exploring the boundaries that we can’t explore in polite shitty society. and not one character in your entire novel is trans, gay, ace, or queer? you may be excused, old dead white dude, for being born in the early twentieth century when your very exposure to such ideas would have been oppressively policed. like ianthe says, i can respect that but i can’t admire it fade into obsolesence pls kthx

Universal Music, presumably at his behest, even went so far as to demand that YouTube remove a clip of a child dancing to one of his songs in a homemade video (a dispute that ultimately generated precedent helpful to fair-use advocates).

Fair use, in short, is the legal mechanism through which pieces of copyrighted materials move from one work to another without the owner’s imprimatur; it’s how the legal system allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants when we don’t have the money to pay the enterprising copyright owner for the privilege.

A typical feature of Victorian typography — an unthinkable number of typefaces and pins “stamped” into one title-was explained by practical considerations and the desire of printers to use every inch of paper space.The reason for the artlessness of these creations was that businessmen of the Victorian era did not see the connection between their ideas about the beautiful, which were formed under the influence of paintings of the Renaissance, and the immediate practical needs of business and advertising.

During this recently defuncttime of time, manifestos were like so many war cries intended to speedup the movement, ridicule the Philistines, castigate the reactionaries.This huge warlike narrative was predicated on the idea that the flow oftime had one—and only one—inevitable and irreversible direction. Thewar waged by the avant-gardes would be won, no matter how manydefeats they suffered. What this series of manifestos pointed to was theinevitable march of progress. So much so that these manifestos could beused like so many signposts to decide who was more “progressive” andwho was more “reactionary.”

Climate change discourse floats outside the reality of industrial life, with its interlocking material and mechanical dependencies, never touching down until real scarcities assert themselves. In this way, emissions goals are not unlike GDP targets. Both are administered abstractions, somehow all-powerful and impotent at the same time. They reduce action to aggregates and strip human actors of agency.  Maintenance is necessarily more focused on the particular. There is no single all-encompassing maintenance regime. It is always specific to the material systems that fall under its purview and the labor practices that they require. Best practices emerge at the intersection of production and consumption, service and use, formation and dissolution. 

There is tension in the question of whether to build objects more intensively, so that they last longer, or to recognize that some things cannot endure and thus should be designed that way. There’s no hope for a paper plate in the long run, for example. It’s designed to enter the waste stream as cheaply and easily as possible. Conversely, a toaster could last for decades if maintained properly, assuming the manufacturer hasn’t built obsolescence into it (as is often the case). 

Poludnitsa, who makes herself evident in the middle of hot summer days, takes the form of whirling dust clouds and carries a scythe, sickle or shears; most likely the shears would be of an older style, not akin to modern scissors. She will stop people in the field to ask them difficult questions or engage them in conversation. If anyone fails to answer a question or tries to change the subject, she will cut off their head or strike them with illness. She may appear as an old hag, a beautiful woman, or a 12-year-old girl, and she was useful in scaring children away from valuable crops. She is only seen on the hottest part of the day and is a personification of a sun-stroke

Ultimately, branding and unbranding represent two sides of the same coin. To pick a side is to play a game that commodifies self and society alike; it is more radical to refuse to play at all.

To exist on platforms is to be subject to this kind of continual identity reconstitution, to fluidity. Self-branding attempts to hide this inevitability by claiming agency over it, as though by choosing to turn our identity into capital, it becomes a free choice.

Users, especially young people, have always found ways to evade being understood by the wrong people, deploying veiled references and in-jokes to make sure that certain messages make it only to intended recipients, a technique social media scholar danah boyd described as “social steganography.” If historically, spies would plant codes in knitting and embroidery, today, steganography might take the form of absurd or mysterious self-descriptions in a Twitter bio, or  posting for seemingly different audiences, like one’s professional network and one’s fandoms, on the same profile. Creating separate accounts for an exclusive inner circle and the general public also cultivates mystique, as does simply locking your account.  None of these techniques, then or now, obfuscate users from the tech companies that administer these platforms, however. Rather, such strategies participate in the liquefaction of identity on social platforms’ terms. While social media platforms preached transparency to its users and attempted to enforce real-name policies and blue-check verifications, it also built opaque back-end infrastructure to support the brokering of those users’ personal data. These mechanisms remain in place regardless of what trends currently shape posting behavior or content.  To a degree, this infrastructure assigns users a personal brand whether they intentionally participate in that construction or not. Even if we’re anonymous or confusing to other people, we remain pellucid and knowable to platforms, which establish a recognizable personal brand of sorts algorithmically. When we encounter ourselves in the guise of recommended content and customized ads, we are meeting our coherent public image, as the platforms have deduced it from an entire range of our data, and not only our deliberate attempts to communicate. 

Finally, in the section on reports from religious congregations, the calls from women religious for LGBTQ+ inclusion included the following: “Particularly with reference to teachings on marriage and sexuality women religious present a strong call to incorporate current knowledge from the natural sciences, human biology, behavioral sciences, and other empirical studies. Given what is now known from these disciplines about human sexuality in particular, current moral theology regarding sexuality is seen as untenable.”

And it features Angela Burdett-Coattes, one of my personal heroes (and also someone who upholds my pet theory that beekeepers are always reasonably decent people).

When reading the research, there were no long term studies with EMS for strength and fitness in normal subjects, with the longest being in the ballpark of 8-12 weeks (generally successful). There were some studies longer than a year but they were done with spinal cord injury patients (again generally successful), so I figured why not quit lifting weights for a year and try electric stimulation instead. I knew it wouldn’t be a controlled study, lots of potential confounding variables, potential for bias, etc., but I had never heard of anyone doing the same and I figured it would at least give me a general idea of what the new machines were capable of. I figured it would also help me help others with its use as I worked through the practical problems of training all major muscle groups with EMS, and help me work out what I thought were the best electrode placements, best parameters, machines, accessories etc. After about 6 months I got a Globus Genesy 1100, wondering if it was worth the extra cost (for me it was). My year was up in October of 2013 and I learned a ton by doing so. I’m currently writing a book tentatively titled Electric Stimulation for Sport, Fitness, and Rehabilitation in which I hope to combine the practical knowledge I gained on myself and working with my patients (for whom I put EMS on better than 90% of them regardless of diagnosis) integrated with what I have learned reading a considerable number of research studies.

We often call the services offered by these companies “platforms,” but that’s a term Tarnoff rejects. It allows them to “present an aura of openness and neutrality” — when they’re actually shaping what we do for their benefit. Tarnoff instead calls them online malls, private spaces that appear public, in which we’re brought together in service of generating profit for the company that controls it.

Because the social aspect of work is so important to women, we also conducted a study comparing the behaviors and attitudes of women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work with those who do not strongly agree. We discovered that women who strongly agree with the item are: less likely to be actively looking or watching for job opportunities more connected with their coworkers, knowing what is expected of them and trusting their integrity and ethics more likely to rate their own, their team's and their organization's performance more excellently more likely to take risks that could lead to innovation more likely to have a positive experience during the day, such as enjoying what they do, making more progress and getting recognized for successes less likely to report having a negative experience during the day such as worry, stress and feeling tired Having a best friend at work fuels greater performance.

However, when basic engagement needs are met, friendships can take on a powerful dynamic in which casual, friendly banter turns into innovative discussions about how the team or organization can thrive.

Historically, the term “folk” was used when talking about the rural poor and illiterate peasants. It's fitting that folk practices in software are often developed by people illiterate in programming. Without access to formal programming skills, they use what they have to make things work. In ways that demonstrate profound creativity and logical problem-solving. This scavenging in the SaaS landscape is how people express agency and control in a computing environment that limits who has access to programmatic power. Only professional programmers and designers get to decide what buttons go on the interface, what features get prioritised, and what affordances users have access to. Subverting that dynamic is the only way people can get their needs met with the computational tools they have at hand. Software isn't the first discipline to struggle with this power dynamic between professionals and everyday people. Architecture and product design have been at it for centuries

“Make your own home page” is an old appeal. It is older than the mid 90’s. Not even 1994, but 1992. On the internet, one year is equal to ten astronomical years, there is a century between 1992 and 1994. So in 1992, the home page was a document that you saw when you opened your browser – which at that time was WWW on the NEXT computer. As the author of “The Whole Internet” noticed in 1992: “The home page provided by CERN is a good entry point into the web; it points you to a lot of resources fairly quickly. However, there are lots of reasons to want your own home page.” He meant that maybe the links provided by CERN are far from your interests and you’d prefer, for example, links to medicine rather than physics resources when you open your browser. So you could edit the CERN page, filling it with your links and notes and it would be your home page. So 50 years later :), in 1993, with the arrival of the Mosaic browser, the web left academia. Web users got ideas and tools to extend home pages, and turn them into websites. The term “home page” started to change its meaning. It became the first page of a website. Then as a sort of metonymy, it started to mean personal web pages. Making a home page soon meant not making the first document of your website, but making your personal website, your home page, YOUR HOME ON THE WEB. Early web users were very busy imagining what their cyber homes should look like. How to design a space which is cozy, but in a galaxy far away. Many worked with the metaphor literally, using images of houses with porches and roofs, bedrooms and kitchens, over starry backgrounds. A half open door to the universe is quite a frequent motif.

On the other hand we have the publisher web after 25 years still not being able to embrace the concept that you can’t control the distribution of your content once it is online.

Today he runs around 100 hives of bees that are genetically mixed: a bit of New World Carniolan, Italians from the Pol-line, Russians, VHS from Bob Danka in Baton Rouge, Greg Hunt’s “ankle biters” from Purdue, and other genetic lines in which he sees promise.

It’s true that, immediately after the plague, women were able to take advantage of labour shortages – the sumptuary legislation of 1363 had been accompanied by a proviso that women ought to ‘work and labour as freely’ as brewers, bakers and clothworkers – to achieve some degree of economic independence. But this short-term success was also the root of a long-term regression. Urban women who could support themselves with high wages chose to marry late, or not at all; the birth rate remained low through the 15th century. By the 1440s, political instability, agrarian crisis, bullion shortages and a credit crunch prompted a protracted recession known to historians as the Great Slump. In these hard times, working women increasingly came to be seen as a threat to male wages and moral order, and they were pushed back into the home. In 1492, the civic authorities in Coventry decreed that all unmarried women under the age of fifty should go into domestic service rather than live alone. French argues that these legacies of the post-plague economy also intensified the cultural association between women and housework, and demonstrates this by tracking bequests of household goods – basins and ewers, napery, chests, candlesticks and dishware – across the later Middle Ages. In the 1380s, men and women were given these things in almost equal proportions, with men receiving marginally more. But from around 1450, women came to receive 65 per cent of such items. It is very tricky to show cultural change through the flow of objects – and even harder to relate it to underlying changes in the economy – but the figures are striking.

My best friend Eric was killed in 2006. He was a 22-year-old New York City high school math teacher, riding his bike on a separated biking and walking path that runs along the west side of Manhattan. He was killed by a driver who mistakenly turned and entered this biking and walking path. That driver was drunk and speeding. He went to prison. Eleven years later, a different man rented a truck and followed the same route, except this person intentionally turned on to the path. They killed eight people and injured 11 in an act of vehicular terrorism. Others had been killed on this same path. But every time, before the terrorist attack, the story that was told was “it was an accident,” and the dangerous conditions remained. After the vehicular terror attack, the city and state blocked every possible entrance to this biking and walking path with steel bollards and cement barricades. They made it impossible for both the accident and the violence to occur.

But as I looked out at the window and saw a bunch of New Yorkers living their lives—construction workers hanging off the side of a building and laughing, a serious-looking guy yelling into his phone, a woman wiping ice cream off a kid’s cheek—I couldn’t help but think about how I’d never witness those things in the metaverse. There is no mere existence on the internet. There is no being known for who you idly or incidentally are. You have to show up and beg to be loved, then beg to be loved again, but for newer reasons.

Granted, I write and podcast every week, so I’m not exactly unplugged. But since I rarely post photos of my clothes or apartment or activities, strangers no longer know what my day-to-day looks like, and even I can admit that’s the fun part of following someone. This has had the effect of making me more scarce in some people’s minds. This past birthday, when a bunch of friends apologized for forgetting it, I told them it was my fault for not posting about it.

MetaFilter of course has tons of detractors and I’ll be the first to say, we don’t always get it right. But what we hope is that we are in the process of making it better together. And the whole idea about moderation in a paid moderators who don’t have to do things at scale, who can really do it at a human, what I perceive to be a human scale can really take a little bit of time. And if somebody’s irate about something that got deleted, or if somebody’s just having a really bad day, you can maybe understand that through sort of a compassionate lens, even if you don’t agree with somebody or even if they broke the rules. I certainly don’t think I’m an assholes on the internet. I think most people who are assholes on the internet don’t think they’re assholes.

When I as a writer, for example, notice that my hands have moved to open Twitter the very moment I begin to feel my sentence getting stuck, I am under the sway of a technological liturgy.

The majority of software developers still espouse the idea that when they make something more efficient, it will have the positive effect of freeing up more time somewhere else.

While you were writing Coders, you talked about your research to my students — many of whom are engineering and science majors. What really resonated is that some of the engineers you interviewed described experiencing inefficient situations as really troubling, like smelling something awful or tasting something gross. Can you elaborate on this visceral sense of how engineers tick, reflect their sensibilities into products, and project an impatient worldview onto the rest of us?

But efficiency isn’t always value neutral. Placing efficiency over other values can be a mistake — a lapse in ethical, political, personal, or professional judgment. Some human or civic interactions thrive when they’re deliberate and erode when they’re sped up. There’s a great quote that’s been attributed to Virginia Woolf — “Efficiency cuts the grass of the mind to its roots” — though, alas, we can’t find any evidence that it was Woolf who actually said this. But the sentiment rings true and the expression is so beautiful that we wish she did put things this way.

They are environmentally friendly, social, user friendly and responsive by default, because they are low in data size, load fast and are rendered equally on every browser and device. That is because they rely mainly on the W3C Web Standards10

‘Good UX9 is commonly associated with clarity and ease of use, but it also contributes to a homogenization of design and experience’, writes Pressman (Pressman, 2016). He continues: ‘An alternate approach to user experience treats design as a way to communicate ideas through form, rather than as merely a tool for conversion’

The belief that the goal of interface design is efficiency. Evan Selinger writes in his article The efficiency delusion: ‘We believe that if technology can make some aspect of our lives more efficient, we’ll get back free time to do the things we actually find meaningful’ (Selinger, 2019). This is a widespread opinion amongst programmers. Even Paul Ford, author of the Bloomberg Businessweek’s best seller What is code? names this as his main purpose of being a developer in the Scratching the surface podcast (Fuller, 2018). It is easy to fall for this thinking. It is convenient and comfortable to let designers and developers believe they can change the world for the better by making a product efficient. Efficiency can be important in many web designs and should be kept in mind as an attribute contributing to a satisfying product, it is however rarely the only goal. Selinger emphasizes that ‘the lack of efficiency is a feature of the system, not a bug’ (Selinger, 2019). In line with this argument, I also agree with Andy Pressman, who pointed out in his talk at the Design Portland conference 2016 that ‘friction makes memory and meaning. Friction makes the user process an experience rather than just to consume it’ (Pressman, 2016), and ‘that ease of use as only criteria is diminishing the medium’ (Ibid.).

In the Early web era, that is described by Olia Lialina as blunt, bright, rich and personal (Lialina, 2005), there was a webmaster who designed, developed, uploaded and maintained the website. Today the complexity of technologies, the complex knowledge about web design as well as marketing, search engines and Human Computer Interaction split the webmasters discipline into usability and SEO8 experts, user experience and interaction designer, graphic and user interface designer, frontend and backend developer etc. As a consequence this splitting makes it complicated to think about web design coherently, e. g. a mainly usability trained worker is probably not well trained, focused or interested in the graphic design field and will therefore not find alternative usability solutions that may be solved with pure graphic design solutions.

‘Nowadays, we tend to notice the similarities between websites. Design looks like it is driven by technological constraints rather than by contents and aesthetics’, criticizes web designer Yehwan Song in her Anti user friendly design manifest (Song, 2019).

Using templates (e. g. Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix), which get installed in an unreflected manner and show the content but do not convey it. In these templates websites are downgraded to a generic, predictable and impersonal shell with a user experience that focuses only on an efficient way to perceive information rather than communicating an individual experience.

To put it another way, gamification, echo chambers, and moral outrage porn go together like junk food. Different kinds of junk food are unhealthy in different ways—some are too high in salt, some too high in fat, some too high in sugar. But the reason they are often consumed together is that they are all likely to be consumed by somebody who is willing to trade off health and nutrition in return for a certain kind of quick pleasure. The same is true of gamification, moral outrage porn, and echo chambers. They are all readily available sources of a certain quick and easy pleasure, available to anybody willing to relax with their moral and epistemic standards.

Instead of the humbling confrontation with the evidence of one’s errors, echo chambers offer their members the joys of unanimity and uninterrupted confidence.

Life outside of an echo chamber is full of all kinds of cognitive difficulties. We must constantly struggle with conflicting evidence and unexplained phenomena. And we are confronted, over and over again, with evidence of our own cognitive fallibility. These confrontations humble us—which is good for us, but also quite painful. Echo chambers banish all that epistemic friction.31 They remove, through distrust, the impact of disagreeing voices.

An epistemic bubble is a social structure where insiders aren’t exposed to views on the outside. Despite the superficial similarity, epistemic bubbles and echo chambers work through entirely different mechanisms. In an echo chamber, inside members may have plenty of exposure to outside views, but outside voices have been undermined. Epistemic bubbles are structures of bad connectivity; echo chambers are structures of manipulated credence. In an epistemic bubble, outside voices aren’t heard; in an echo chamber, outside voices have been systematically discredited. Importantly, I’ve argued, many communities with problematic belief systems have been misdiagnosed as epistemic bubbles. But actually, they are mostly the result of echo chambers. It isn’t that climate change deniers, for example, are simply unaware of what climate change scientist think, or the standard publicly available arguments for climate change. They are, for the most part, quite well acquainted with those arguments and conclusions. It is that they think that the institutions of climate change science have been systematically corrupted and are untrustworthy. This helps to explain the intractability of climate change denialists. Since an epistemic bubble works through simply omitting outside voices, we should be able to shatter one simply by exposing an insider to more voices and more viewpoints. We should expect epistemic bubbles to go down with the first contact with the missing evidence. But echo chamber members are pre-prepared for encounters with external viewpoints and armed with explanatory mechanisms to dismiss those other voices. Echo chambers are far more robust.

Value capture occurs when: (1) our natural values are rich, subtle, and hard-to-express;(2) we are placed in a social or institutional setting which presents simplified, typically quantified, versions of our values back to ourselves;(3) the simplified versions take over in our motivation and deliberation.

Heuristics, after all, are simplifications of the real thing. They are good heuristics insofar as they remain properly tethered to our deeper values. The successful use of a heuristic involves a complex process of management. We need to step back and reflect on whether using the heuristic is actually helping to achieve the underlying values. Increasing your running mileage might sometimes be a good proxy for fitness, but not when it brings irreversible knee damage. We need to adjust our heuristics when they drift.

Let us call the designed technology which offers points and scores “design for gamification.”

Games, I have argued, are the art form that works in the medium of agency. The game designer doesn’t just create characters, stories, and environments. The game designer sculpts the temporary agency that the player will occupy during the game.

Let me emphasize the fact that Twitter offers us an invitation to change our values. Twitter will not change our values for us. It is a system designed to offer us pleasure in return for simplifying our values—but we still have to take up that offer.

Insofar as Twitter’s gamification motivates its users, then it will drag all of its users’ communicative values in the same direction—towards the same metric. Gamification homogenizes the value landscape.

The first half of the 19th century saw a dramatic increase in the number of women able to write. By 1860, more than 90 percent of the white population in America could both read and write. At the same time, romantic and Victorian notions of subjectivity steadily enhanced the perceived connection between handwriting and identity. Penmanship came to be seen as a marker and expression of the self—of gender and class, to be sure, but also of deeper elements of character and soul. The notion of a signature as a unique representation of a particular individual gradually came to be enshrined in the law and accepted as legitimate legal evidence.

The inability to read handwriting deprives society of direct access to its own past. We will become reliant on a small group of trained translators and experts to report what history—including the documents and papers of our own families—was about.

For many young people, “handwriting,” once essentially synonymous with cursive, has come to mean the painstaking printing they turn to when necessity dictates.

Writing is, after all, a technology, and most technologies are sooner or later surpassed and replaced.

In 2010, cursive was omitted from the new national Common Core standards for K–12 education. The students in my class, and their peers, were then somewhere in elementary school. Handwriting instruction had already been declining as laptops and tablets and lessons in “keyboarding” assumed an ever more prominent place in the classroom. Most of my students remembered getting no more than a year or so of somewhat desultory cursive training, which was often pushed aside by a growing emphasis on “teaching to the test.”

Read the articles on Wikipedia to learn about computer terminals, terminal emulators and shell.

The above is the screenshot of the Gnome terminal application. As you can see the command prompt contains the following information:

In Linux the shell (or terminal) is the lifeline of the developer, and of any power user. Things which can be done on the GUI (by clicking on different buttons), can be done much more efficiently on the terminal by using commands. Maybe one can not remember all the commands, but with regular usage one can easily remember the most useful ones. The following guide will introduce you to a minimal set of basic commands required to use your Linux computer efficiently.

Like their cyberpunk forebears, postcyberpunk works immerse the reader in richly detailed and skillfully nuanced futures, but ones whose characters and settings frequently hail from, for lack of a better term, the middle class. (And we do need a better term; here in the United States, economic mobility has rendered the concept of "class" nearly obsolete.)

Cyberpunk realized that the old SF stricture of "alter only one thing and see what happens" was hopelessly outdated, a doctrine rendered irrelevant by the furious pace of late 20th century technological change. The future isn't "just one damn thing after another," it's every damn thing all at the same time. Cyberpunk not only realized this truth, but embraced it.

Very good or bad mushrooms tend to attract lots of nicknames. This is one of the good ones. It is most commonly known as porcini, an Italian word meaning “pig.” The young fruit bodies resemble pigs, and hogs are in fact fond of them. The English name, penny bun, refers to its rounded shape and brownish color. The German name, Steinpilz (stone mushroom) refers to the species’ firm flesh. The Dutch name is squirrel’s bread. Nobody knows what the Dutch are thinking.

He is the James Patterson or Barbara Cartland of public policy.

the overclass midwits who read The New York Times and The Economist, listen to NPR, and watch TED Talks and PBS

Microformats2 so that computers know how to interpret our blogposts,

WordPress wants to be the Operating System for the Web.

More dramatically, the Salk researchers realized that they could also engineer crops so that their roots would produce suberin, a waxy compound found in cork. Much like the cork in a wine bottle, fragments of the suberin-infused roots would then take an extremely long time to decompose. Up above, harvesting would go on as usual; down below, the roots of the crops would accumulate in the soil, building up its stored carbon.

Do you want a world in which everyone is guaranteed six weeks of paid vacation, enough time to travel overseas in elegant solar- and wind-powered clipper ships?

We would need a second Earth if everyone on the planet ate the way Americans do.

As Bloomberg News recently reported, the personal emissions of the top 0.001% — those with at least $129.2 million in wealth — are so large that these people’s individual consumption decisions “can have the same impact as nationwide policy interventions.”

Oxfam has defined the world’s 1% as the 60 million people earning over $109,000 a year. They defined the 10% as the 770 million people earning over $38,000. Yet even those who are affluent in a global sense might not have the extra cash to replace their gas furnace with a heat pump, put solar panels on their roof or replace their car with an EV. Nor might they have the choice to buy clean power from their utilities. The U.S. government has yet to pass policy that makes private zero-carbon options available or that provides public options like community solar or suburban public transportation. And that is exactly why you should not tell people who live paycheck to paycheck, or who are not already deeply engaged in the climate fight, that they should worry about their individual carbon footprints.

new wardrobes every three months (fashion brands usually produce four “collections” a year)

he site today continues to be a place of pilgrimage throughout the months of June and July, but the three days and two nights of fasting and prayer are no longer framed as literal immersions in Purgatory, but rather as a time of ‘prayer and reflection’.

hese Neapolitan dioramas of Purgatory are partly geared towards prompting each passerby to pray for the souls represented but, in some parts of the city, this logic is reversed: the dead themselves are petitioned for intercession on behalf of the living in return for certain kinds of ‘refreshment’. This refreshment would consist in prayers, songs, flowers, chocolates, cigarettes, etc, and the requests would either involve healing, getting a job, finding a spouse, or getting pregnant. Devotees would adopt a particular soul through the simultaneous adoption of its material counterpart, a skull, which would be polished, cleaned and placed inside a small wooden box. And here again we see the emphasis on giving the immaterial and spiritual a material and physical location, on connecting them to the stuff of this world.

It is here in Naples that the practice of prayer for the souls in Purgatory reaches its greatest contemporary expression. Throughout the ancient centre of the city, small shrines consisting of three-dimensional dioramas of Purgatory can be found embedded in the walls of its narrow, twisting streets. Red and orange flames engulf an ensemble of tiny terracotta figurines – portraying a young woman with flowing hair, an old man, a priest – all raising their arms towards Heaven and the assistance of the Virgin Mary, the queen of Purgatory. People from the surrounding neighbourhoods stuff passport photos of deceased loved ones into the glass cases of these dioramas to gain them, too, some relief from the flames through proximity to Mary’s divine intercession, an intercession accompanied by the prayers of all those walking past.

Yet it is upon these prayers for the dead that the entire logic of Purgatory as a lived, social phenomenon hinges – the belief that death does not sever us irreparably from those we love. For Catholics, prayers for the dead allow one to both ease their suffering in Purgatory and to accelerate their passage through it. Thus love for the deceased is not founded solely upon memory, but rather upon a continuing social life of mutual care and assistance.

As if speaking directly to future historians still wedded to the colonial alcohol discourse, in 1908 , Booker T. Washington wrote: “I have read much in the Northern papers about the prohibition movement in the South being based wholly upon a determination or desire to keep liquor away from the negroes and at the same time provide a way for the white people to get it. … I have watched the prohibition movement carefully from its inception to the present time, and I have seen nothing in the agitation in favor of the movement, nothing in the law itself, and nothing in the execution of the law that warrants any such conclusion. The prohibition movement is based upon a deep-seated desire to get rid of whiskey in the interest of both races because of its hurtful economic and moral results. The prohibition sentiment is as strong in counties where there are practically no colored people as in the Black Belt counties.”

A better explanation for the “dry wave” that swept the South from 1907 to 1910 would be to point out that Southern “wet” forces were far weaker, more dispersed geographically, and far less organized than the well-entrenched brewing and distilling trusts of the North, and were therefore less able to defend against united community activism. Also, in the Democrats’ one-party South, liquor interests had less opportunity to flex their political muscle by throwing their financial weight behind rival political parties or candidates more willing to defend their interests.

In the 1880s, even as violence and lynchings ended Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era began, prohibitionist rallies made the point of announcing that all were welcome to attend, regardless of color. Black and white temperance speakers shared the same stage and applauded each other’s accomplishments despite organizational segregation, as Black voters were courted by white politicians.

From the podium of a national women’s rights convention in 1866—alongside icons Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—Harper called-out her white sisters who talked a big game about their own oppression and disenfranchisement but were complicit in the racial oppression of their African American counterparts. “Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on,” she proclaimed. “I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.” After Harper’s withering j’accuse, Susan B. Anthony moved to rename their National Woman Suffrage Association the American Equal Rights Association, which would demand universal suffrage regardless of race.

Add to this the political dynamics: the brewers, distillers and saloonkeepers who were making money hand over fist tended to be well-to-do whites. And while their clientele included mostly men of every color and creed, those communities that paid a disproportionate price for their men’s addiction—primarily women, African Americans, and Native Americans—had no vote, no legal standing, no political or economic power, and thus no recourse in opposing their systemic alcohol-subordination.

The idea for JAF Herb was to develop a typeface with the prop­er­ties of black­let­ter, without evoking any negat­ive connota­tions. The design retains the complex, humane char­ac­ter of fraktur without appear­ing conser­vat­ive, aggress­ive or intol­er­ant.

He offered Dillenius a job at his garden in Eltham, Kent; and, in 1721, Dillenius migrated to Britain to work on Sherard’s plant collection, the mosses of Britain, and a pinax (illustrated book) of Britain’s plants.

In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty writes: In visual experience, which pushes objectification further than does tactile experience, we can, at least at first sight, flatter ourselves that we constitute the world, because it presents us with a spectacle spread out before us at a distance, and gives us the illusion of being immediately present everywhere and being situated nowhere. Tactile experience, on the other hand, adheres to the surface of our body; we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quite becomes an object. Correspondingly, as the subject of touch, I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere; I cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go to the world, and tactile experience occurs ‘ahead’ of me, and is not centred in me.

Liberating one group often means prohibiting another group from doing its opposite. In ‘expanding human freedom’ for Black people, the 13th Amendment quite explicitly took away white Americans’ perverse freedom to own slaves. The fundamental question about ‘freedom’ is always: who has the freedom to do what and to whom?

‘All great reforms go together,’ Douglass was fond of saying: abolitionism, women’s suffrage and temperance – as Prohibition rightly points out later on.

Did General George Washington ensure that his men had liquor at Valley Forge? Sure. But he also understood that the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania had – at the request of local Native American tribes – a strict prohibition against trafficking the ‘white man’s wicked water’ dating back to William Penn’s Great Law of 1682. That the early colonial Pennsylvania was arguably spared the bloody Indian Wars that plagued the other colonies is credited to the justice and fair play between colonisers and natives embodied in the Quaker prohibition.

Generations of social reformers and activists – both in the United States and around the world – focused not on the alcohol in the bottle, nor on ‘other people’s habits’, but on what they called ‘the liquor traffic’: unscrupulous sellers who got people hopelessly addicted to liquor for their own profit. The difference between opposing liquor and the liquor traffic is subtle, but hugely important. Liquor is just the stuff in the bottle, but trafficking is about profit and predation; like human trafficking, diamond trafficking or the traffic in narcotics and opioids.

Creation occurs across both public and private channels. When you share something funny with your group chat, you are a creator. A text message is a post.

Creators only produce small-scale pieces of content: everything they do is a minor, if not wholly ephemeral, work.

The post should not require interpretation or specialized background knowledge. It should be self-explanatory for its target filter bubble.

Devotees of the Traditional Latin Mass might enjoy a tidbit from a 2003 article by Tolkien’s grandson Simon. It seems that Tolkien, like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, wasn’t a big fan of the liturgical reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council:He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My Grandfather obviously didn’t agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but My Grandfather was oblivious.

Allowing the earliest stages of natal puberty to take place for gender-dysphoric children, prior to the decision of whether to administer puberty blockers, is considered diagnostically meaningful because some will experience their dysphoria remit during this time and some will not. However, what Laidlaw et al. are implying here is that waiting until adulthood is clinically meaningful for gender-dysphoric children, when there is no indication that this is the case – there is no discontinuity between gender dysphoria in adolescence and in adulthood.

I love the idea of socially annotating the web anyhow, but I also have this fear that the service dies and all the precious annotations would be gone.

For those of us who feel different, who don’t easily fit into structures of this society or this world, we have to make our own structures, definitions, and taxonomies to feel at home — that is, to build our own world. And while others might be confused why we spend so much energy inventing new names and containers seemingly constantly, it’s important to remember doing this helps us simply exist … so that we can connect in this one world we share.

Apple meanwhile, they dress it up very well. And it’s very pretty, but if you want to operate in the Apple ecosystem, they control how you breathe and everything has to be exactly like how they want you to do it. And they have this big fight for our privacy going on, which I appreciate of course. I love it. But the end result somehow is that they tripled their advertising revenue over the past quarter or something like that. Somehow everyone now has to use their advertising program. So this is again, someone trying to control the internet.

And this leads to the harsh choice that if you have a device on your network, a modern phone or a modern browser, or a modern Chromebook even, you have to give it unimpeded and uninspectable access to the internet, because the moment you try to figure out “what is my phone telling about me” to it’s creator, then the phone ceases to function. It will not allow you to do that.

The other notable thing about the UK is that they are mad for football over there, everyone is mad for English football. So there is a lot of “unpaid” streaming going on. And also many lawsuits, which means that UK ISPs now routinely get court orders that say, you must block the following illegal streaming sites. And it has now gone so far that internet providers actually preemptively hunt for these streamers. So before big matches, they look what sites suddenly get a lot more traffic. It’s probably no accident if just before the Arsenal match starts you suddenly you have 500 megabits of internet going somewhere. And then they block these sites. So it is quite preemptive.

A fun thing is that found out, I know a lot of people in Iran, I have some sorta family members there, and they told me, yeah, we all use a VPN. And I was very impressed. I thought these people are so privacy conscious. And they said, no, no, it’s the only way to get somewhat performant internet here. Because if you don’t use a VPN, you go through the interception infrastructure and it is like super overloaded. So we use a VPN to get fast internet and crucially, and I was very impressed by that, they said we also have no hopes that the VPN actually gives us privacy, because they were aware to many of the VPN providers out there are not actually that good in terms of providing privacy. But at least they are good at providing a faster internet in Iran.

They have a sort of highly curated Facebook and they even have video conferencing solutions that they built themselves, which were used more during the Corona outbreak even. And they have made their own specifically modified Android tablets and they have a Linux operating system. So these people really run their own internet and it’s probably not even correct to call it an internet. Of specific interest, their modified Android tablets are rumored to be a fully controlled and setup to keep track of everything you do. And that’s just terrible. And then I realized that’s actually what actual Android tablets also do, but they do it on behalf of advertisers. And in this case, they do it on behalf of the north Korean government. The probably only had to change a few domain names in the source code.

we need to remember that the so-called "subtractive principle" - writing 'IX' instead of 'VIIII', for instance - is actually a medieval invention

The move away from that curriculum is overdue. But I’ve come to think that we home in on the shortcomings of Calkins’s methods because dumping them is relatively straightforward. You can’t just fix absurd teacher-student ratios by force of will—you need money and buildings and teachers.

The education crusader Horace Mann, who sparred with the phonics-fixated schoolmasters of Boston, went so far as to claim that children were frightened by the alphabet, which he described as a horde of “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions.”

How much scent is too much is both personally and culturally dependent. Take oud, a super expensive incense that Middle Eastern people scent their clothes with. If you’ve ever strolled through an international airport, you know the scent bower can be large. Part of what one is choosing with perfume is to create a nimbus. The question is, how social or private should that nimbus be? 

Yeah. I wanted to inhabit my body more and stop doing this head-in-a-jar screen thing. It’s funny, when you write about the smell of freshly sharpened pencils, you can’t just go to Wikipedia and start your research there. You have to get actual pencils—a lot of them, it turns out—and sharpen them first. With smell, you bump into thingliness at every turn. 

One owner of eight rental properties in North Carolina posted a blog about her hatred of both landlord and tenant because, in her words, “I don’t believe that there is a hierarchy in the relationship between me, the homeowner, and our clients who choose to rent our homes,” she wrote. Except that the hierarchy is very real, and very clear. As Oksana Mironova, housing policy analyst at Community Service Society of New York, puts it, “A conversation about power is instead becoming a conversation about who is being mean to someone else.”

“When we work with undergraduates on digital humanities projects,” Quinn said, “it's often easier to take a humanities undergrad and teach them just enough coding to do what they need to do rather than taking some of the CS majors who can do the coding in their sleep but don't really think about the questions in the nuanced ways that we need them to.”

Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college.

According to Schmidt, the Great Recession sparked the beginning of a downward spiral in humanities such as history, art, philosophy, English and foreign languages.“In the period of the Great Recession, you had Barack Obama out there saying we need more STEM majors and fewer English majors,” Schmidt said. “That was a story you were hearing from a lot of people in influential positions … and I think that made a difference.”

Several Snohomish residents at Tuesday’s meeting wanted the City Council to pump the brakes. They asked why Snohomish needed to provide affordable housing. They said they worried that low-income housing “brings crime,” and they shared fears of inheriting Everett’s “cesspool.”

Unfortunately, once he’s shone a light on the injustice of the world, told you that you’re right for feeling like the world is fucked up, he essentially hangs up the phone. He says, in this book, his fundamental belief is that “we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos”, and he advocates for this by breaking the novel form, and assigning all information equal value, which is why he does things like name the race of every character, and the size of their breasts or genitals.

(She contrasted the fellowship she felt among lionfish hunters with the behavior of other conservationist types: “Turtle people treat each other like shit and backstab each other.”)

The 1990s also saw the introduction of “stepbacks,” a two-layered cover with the top page “stepped back” a quarter inch from the side to conceal a (typically much sexier) illustration beneath. By hiding suggestive clinches and implausibly fit cover models behind a more innocuous screen, stepbacks provided readers with a cover—literally—if they didn’t want to be seen reading a titillating story in public. The cover of the 2002 mass-market edition of Book 4, Romancing Mr. Bridgerton, shows a landscape background with a lipstick-kissed handkerchief being dropped from the oversize title—but pulling back that page reveals a painted clinch of the protagonists, whose clothes seem about to succumb to the forces of passion and/or gravity.

Plant 10 percent of thefield with pollinizer cultivars toachieve the best pollination andhighest yield (Figure 5). Red Pearland Sussi are two commonly usedpollinizer cultivars.

Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylosuva-ursi) and lingonberries areeasily confused due to theirsimilar leaf structure and berrysize (Figure 4). Both plants arenative in the Pacific Northwest.Kinnikinnick has red berries, 5 to8 mm, while lingonberry fruitsare bright red and 7 to 11 mm.

The inability of people at a lower level in the social scale to make any meaningful provision for themselves from savings, as well as the fact that so much is taken out of their hands by the state, means that their income is, in effect, pocket money of the kind that a child receives from its parents. They spend up to the hilt and even beyond, and remain economic minors. Gone in my lifetime is the idea that debt is to be avoided, that it is discreditable to live entirely on credit, and shameful not to repay. If you have no assets worth speaking of, the bailiffs have nothing to seize, and creditors can whistle for their money. 

First, it puts the meaningful accumulation of assets for those who do not already possess them out of reach. (I speak, of course, in generalities; there are always exceptions). This in turn has the effect of transforming a society divided by permeable classes into a fixed caste society. There have always been advantages to being born in a well-off household, but asset inflation encourages them to become hard-wired, so to speak, into the social fabric.

With the concept of enough go those of modesty and humility. They are replaced by triumph and failure, the latter certain almost by definition to be the more frequent. The humble person becomes someone not laudable but careless of his future, possibly someone who will be a drain on others insofar as he has failed to make adequate provision for himself – even if, given his circumstances, it would have been impossible for him to have done so. For notwithstanding technical progress, automation, and robotics, we shall need people of humble and comparatively ill-paid employment for the foreseeable future.

for not to speculate, but rather to place one’s trust in the value of money at a given modest return, is to risk impoverishment.

the only way to insure against poverty in old age is either to be in possession of a government-guaranteed index-linked pension (which, however, is a social injustice in itself

For one thing, inflation destroys the very idea of enough, because no one can have any confidence that a monetary income that at present is adequate will not be whittled down to very little in a matter of a few years. Not everyone desires to be rich, but most people desire not to be poor, especially in old age.

The alloy was such that a type would cool and turn solid almost instantly, allowing for quick production of identical types.

A matrix isn't a full mould. It only gives the shape of the letter. If you look at actual types shown below, you can see they are like long square rods. Gutenberg would combine the matrix with a hand mould to create the whole mould for a type. Next he would pour a liquid metal alloy consisting of lead, tin, and antimony into the mould. The alloy cools quickly, and out comes a lead type similar to the ones seen below: Square metal rods with typefaces on them.

New Orleans, obviously, was a major city in the Confederacy, and when Louisiana seceded, New Orleans did too. But it was retaken fairly early on in the war. When the Union army occupied New Orleans, the expectation among town people was, “Just wait until August.” Because then, all these unacclimated Union soldiers are gonna die, and they’ll see that yellow fever is on the side of the South. When all these boys die it will vindicate us and our system.Benjamin Butler, who was the occupying general, was really worried about disease, and like everyone in America he had heard the tales of New Orleans. He was acutely aware that most of the men in his army had never been this far south before, that they were decidedly unacclimated and vulnerable to this disease. So he installed a strict quarantine. He didn’t let ships come in or out without a thorough inspection. He doubled the salary of the quarantine officer, he cleaned the streets, he fired people who seemed to be the lackeys of the bureaucrats in New Orleans. He did a whole program of sanitation.And it worked. There were only a few cases of yellow fever reported during the war years, even though hundreds of thousands of people came in and out of the city each year. It’s actually a miraculous demonstration of just how effective martial law can be in stopping diseases, I guess, and how effective quarantine could be when properly instituted and rigorously upheld.But right after the war, when the Union army receded, the same people who had been in control of New Orleans before the war took up their former positions and went back to their old ways. The said, whatever happened during the war, let’s forget about that. Benjamin Butler was very much hated as a tyrant in New Orleans by whites, who associated the quarantine with him but not improved health. And right away health problems came back. There was a serious epidemic again in 1867, and periodic epidemics throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, culminating in the epidemic of 1878, just after the end of Reconstruction. That was the worst in a generation; 5,000 or 10,000 people died in New Orleans alone, 25,000 people died across the Gulf South. It went all the way up to Memphis, which had never had yellow fever before.But once again, in the midst of this devastating epidemic, you had this prevailing attitude among the commercial-civic elite, who say “Quarantines just don’t work here.” They said this even though they had proof that it did work during the war. It was only when immigration dries up so precipitously after the war, and when cotton goes elsewhere, that New Orleans could sort of shake itself free from this attitude.

they counter the pushback by essentially denying disease, both as an epidemiological reality and as a social reality too. Increasingly by the 1850s, you see people saying, well, yellow fever is not that big of a problem. It’s not that serious of an illness, and anybody who’s temperate and well-mannered and courageous and manly will survive. It only kills the immoral, the drunk, the unfortunate. Your cousin in Philadelphia or your niece in Sligo who thinks of New Orleans as a “necropolis,” they don’t know what they’re talking about, these northern critiques of New Orleans’s health situation are a proxy for abolitionists attacking slavery.

I don’t want to conflate immunity with class position because they are distinct in the Bourdieuian sense. But immunocapitalism produces this sort of immune overclass that develops a set of policy positions which include an antipathy toward public health measures. Does a lackadaisical attitude toward yellow fever become a conservative litmus test for pro-slavery politics?In this period, New Orleans spends far, far less on public health than does any other comparable American city. I’m talking about 2 cents on public health per person per year, compared with 69 cents in Boston. It’s the deadliest city in America by far, it has triple the average national mortality rate. And everyone derides it as a Necropolis or The Seat of Pestilence or The Great Charnel House or The City of Death—MH: Jesus.

Immunocapitalism is a system of class rule in which elites in New Orleans used yellow fever and the destruction that it brought to essentially divide and subjugate the masses, both black and white.

People who were rich and white—many of whom owned slaves and country plantations—were able to leave. You would get onto a carriage with your family, or perhaps with enslaved people whom you owned, and you would go to your country plantation. Or you would go to the north and you would take in theater and do business in New York. Some went to London or Paris to do their summer tours there. But that’s only for the very richest people, and many had no choice but to remain in town during epidemics because they did not have the funds or freedom to leave. And if you stuck in town, life would be very miserable. You would spend three months in utter fear that you were going to die. You would steel yourself to keep working because you would be fired if you didn’t, if you gave up your post in your grocery or wholesaler or merchant house. If you did get sick, you would spend all the money you had in the world and then some on doctors and nurses to try to safely take you through the acclimating process. If you survived, you would be known as an acclimated citizen; if you died, you were a poor and unfortunate unacclimated stranger. And you had about a 50% chance of living or dying of this disease in the 19th century.

With the banning of the transatlantic trade, New Orleans becomes the biggest slave market in the United States and the center of the exclusive domestic slave trade.

Make content and publish it on your own site. And also create connections with other people that do the same. Share what you learn, share your successes and your failures. Share your passions, your hobbies. But do it on your own site, with your own voice, at your own pace.

Since vinegar can corrode certain materials,the best containers for this pickling techniqueare our jars with glass lids, thus Fido, Officina 1825and Lock Eat. They are also ideal because they comein large sizes, perfect for gherkins or other, largervegetables.

The fire of the melting leaves traces of itselfin the light of the cooled down material. Thus4,500 million years ago, only the silica dustwould have remained on the surface of theincandescent sphere called earth; therefore thepositive attitude, with its dynamic enthusiasm,clarifies and gives transparency to the truth.Saying BORMIOLI is like saying GLASS.Those eight letters are dressed in blue, blueKlein, a colour that is a source of pure conceptualinspiration; then, in a second moment, theyflare up red in the flames to create just like withprestidigitation skills iconic shapes, multipliedaccording to the language and logic of popart. In the background of a clear horizon freecrystalline beaches can be caught.

Beyond the autobiographical references, itis certain that the activity of a glassmaker,at the service of Ars, never finds a definitivefulfillment, because it takes place withoutend beyond the existence of the individual, inagreement with Life (the one with a capitalL). The permanent evolution of process andof product, which dates back to the time ofthe Phoenician, proves and confirms this.

I could not imagine at that time theonomatopoeia of fate: I could not recognizethe heat of the fire and the light of the glassthat had always resonated within my surname:BORMIOLI.

If enough people in a community are doping, he said, it spreads risk even to those who are clean, as the level of competition rises and more people are pushed to exhaustion and injury.

I think what gives me trouble here, actually, is that the account seems incomplete. It tells us about the demand side of cultural production over the last several decades: There is less demand for intellectually challenging culture (the argument goes) because it is less valuable to consumers as a means of rising in a social hierarchy. But what about the supply side? What about the companies and institutions that create culture? It would be unsophisticated to think that they’re merely responding to some natural market signal, wouldn’t it?The word “money” doesn’t appear in either Goldberg or Marx’s posts, which seems odd to me for posts putting forward an argument about class. As big a story as the expansion of the internet over the last few decades has been the rise of a finance-led asset economy, in which rising asset prices (in stocks as in homes) are prioritized over wages, productivity, semiconductor chips, halfway decent 90-minute movies, etc. What role does all the investment-seeking money play in supposed cultural boredom? Major labels and movie studios1 tend to belong these days to public, integrated multinational conglomerates, which prize consistent returns -- whether from multi-season television shows, or established and wholly owned I.P. -- over any particular kind of innovation, creativity, or daring.

But it does suggest that most of what we get these days, in terms of what’s most widely consumed and covered, is pap. Ross Douthat has described these trends as a symptom of cultural decadence.

And the film writer Farran Smith Nehme took a tour through the last 100 years of box-office hits and found that well-reviewed, popular movies aimed at adults have all but vanished from view:Of the 120 top-10 box office hits for 2008–2019, 42.5% were aimed at children/youths; 25% were superhero movies; 11.7% were Star Wars/science fiction; 13.3% were thrill rides; 2.5% were whatever the Hobbit was supposed to be; 1.7% were poorly reviewed movies for adults; and 3.3% were well-reviewed movies for adults. 

I don’t know, but the music writer Ted Gioia, in a newsletter from January, pointed out that “the new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.”

I’m of two minds about it: On the one hand, there’s a self-flattering conventional wisdom about the emptiness or unoriginality of contemporary culture crudescing among my peers that seems worth resisting, or at least attending to. Why would or should yuppie parents like us be aware of the “scintillating and new”? (Surely the most damning thing you can say about Dimes Square is that people like me are aware of it?) What are we doing ourselves to seek out challenging or even just adult culture, rather than just assume it should be served up to us or dominate whatever passes for “the conversation”? And boy doesn’t it seem like a convenient coincidence that culture was more dynamic at a time when we didn’t get tired at 8 p.m.?

With a full-time aphorism-maker such as Mencken it’s hard to see why one sentence rather than another should be regarded as a ‘quotation’. ‘Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses’ is not regarded as a ‘quotation’ familiar enough to get into the dictionaries, while ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard’ apparently is, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The problem with Wilde is not just that he and every character he created always sound like they’re quoting Oscar Wilde, but that after him quotations that didn’t sound at least a little bit like Oscar Wilde were unlikely to be quoted, because they didn’t sound like quotations.

Quotations are ‘familiar’ in that strange and slightly coercive sense of being ‘stuff that well-informed or with-it people, or members of my family, should know, but which you too could look as though you know if you read this book’.

But the modern book of quotations is also the bastard offspring of the early modern jest book, which ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham recorded in what’s usually called his ‘diary’ (though really it’s more like a commonplace book) the quotation (though really it’s more like a paraphrase): ‘All our new corne comes out of old fields, and all our newe learning is gathered out of old bookes (Chaucer).’

Here’s the thing though: AWS Lambda integrations with AWS services are really really good! Especially Step Functions. If I invoke the ECS RunTask API from StepFunctions (Something I do quite a lot, I might add), its rarely as simple as passing JSON directly. Either using environment variable overrides or command overrides, or a command override plus some API gymnastics in my task to hydrate references. I also have to handle returning response or error data back to my state machine. This experience results in monotonous work that needs to be accurate. Not my cup of tea. (I imagine good tooling could help with this pain-point. I’m watching the functionless framework closely here.)But frameworks will not be able to solve performance issues. You see, lambdas start up within a couple of seconds, while it can take a minute or two for Step Functions to kick off a Fargate task. Observability is also easier with lambda functions. You can click straight through from step functions to lambda execution logs, while Fargate tasks which stop will only linger for an hour. If you want to click through you’d better do so quickly. I concede that you can hook up event bridge to log stopped task details. But then you need to build your own user experience on top of what AWS gives you. I don’t have time for that.An even larger benefit to this proposal there is a whole bunch of great tooling which is built to deploy lambda functions. Serverless Framework, SAM, Chalice, etc. I can’t use that with Fargate or Step Functions Activities. Why shouldn’t you be able to deploy long running tasks to AWS with these great frameworks?

Fellow IndieWeb netizen Maya

Another path of integration to think about is sharing annotated links from h. to my blog or the other way around. I blog links with a general annotation at times (example). These bloggable links I could grab from h. where I bookmark things in similar ways (example), usually to annotate further later on. I notice myself thinking I should do both, but unless I could do that simultaneously I won’t do such a thing twice.

As racially mixed kids (white father, mother of Asian descent), they wouldn’t even fit into any of the prescribed Antiracism, Inc. identity boxes.

This academic year, let’s imagine that my son’s seventh-grade math teacher will be following “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” a recently published antiracist toolkit for teachers, funded in part by the Gates Foundation. Embarking on her “antiracist journey,” my son’s teacher will have learned that standard mathematics instruction is plagued by “the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture” such as “perfectionism,” “worship of the written word” and “objectivity.” In math classrooms, the workbook explains, white supremacy culture manifests whenever “math is taught in a linear fashion,” “rigor is expressed only in difficulty” and grading practices “center what students don’t understand rather than what they do.” To “dismantle” white supremacy in collaboration with her students, my son’s teacher must “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views”; and “expose students to people who have used math as resistance.”

In a chapter called “Let’s Talk About Whiteness,” Singleton declares that “Whiteness represents a culture and consciousness that is shared by White people.” The variation within my own extended white family invalidates this absurd, quasi-mystical claim. With all due respect to my evangelical Christian, Trump-supporting relatives in rural Texas, we share neither a culture nor a consciousness.

This war of words between Catholics and Protestants on the subject of public schools exploded into real violence in Philadelphia in the spring of 1844. Allegations that Catholic residents wanted to remove the King James Bible from the city’s schools led to widespread rioting, with pitched battles between Protestants and Irish Catholics on the streets of Philadelphia featuring stones, torches, sabers and muskets. At least fifteen Philadelphia residents died in the fighting. Dozens of homes and two Catholic churches were razed to the ground. Two months later, at the Fourth of July parade, Protestants marched with banners proclaiming “Foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of a Republican Government” and “The Bible is the basis of Education.”

Mann’s lowest-common-denominator approach to religion in public schools may have been informed by his own religious upbringing and his shift away from the fire-and-brimstone Calvinism of his parents to a kinder, gentler Unitarianism. When Mann was fourteen, his older brother Stephen drowned after skipping a Sunday church service to swim in a local pond. The family minister devoted his eulogy to castigating Stephen for profaning the Sabbath, proclaiming that his future life would be one of eternal damnation.

A little over $2M, but that number keeps growing because I still have loads of usernames despite instagram patching the ratelimit bypass.

times of fecund cultural production

The internet, Marx writes in his book’s closing section, changes this dynamic. With so much content out there, the chance that others will recognize the meaning of any obscure cultural signal declines. Challenging art loses its prestige. Besides, in the age of the internet, taste tells you less about a person. You don’t need to make your way into any social world to develop a familiarity with Cage — or, for that matter, with underground hip-hop, weird performance art, or rare sneakers.

I can think of no recent novel or film that provoked passionate debate.

German brands, Japanese brands, and American brands likely all source their grape flavorings, for example, from the same vendors.

In some cases, yes, a candy is better because it is fundamentally different, on a chemical level, than what’s available in America. Europe’s strict regulations on chocolate quality mean that it offers something that’s not really comparable to a Hershey bar (and that Europeans are generally enthusiastic to tell you how much American chocolate sucks).

the primary feature is the texture. Chewing one feels like you’ve encountered a Starburst that fights back.

To take a shot at mainstream American success, Hi-Chew’s makers did the usual stuff that consumer-products businesses do: They hired retail consultants, switched distributors, that kind of thing. But they also set their sights on a very important group: Major League Baseball players, the only people who routinely spend time chewing snacks in extreme close-up on TV. Morinaga supplied Japanese players in the league with Hi-Chew, Kawabe told me, focusing first on teams in markets where major retailers were headquartered. The gambit worked; ESPN reported on just how obsessed the 2015 Yankees squad was with the little fruit candies. Walgreens and CVS picked up the brand after it became popular with the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox. Regular people tried the newly plentiful and suddenly trendy candy, and then insisted that their brother or spouse or co-workers try it. Hi-Chew’s U.S. sales grew from $8 million in 2012 to more than $100 million in 2021, according to Kawabe.

They chip away at traditions, forgetting that, for students, visiting fellows and new academics, these are the very things that cause rapture and delight.

While the London gentlemen’s clubs are well-dressed and traditional, they’re largely devoid of ceremony; instead, they’re well-appointed places to relax over meals or drinks and sniffingly observe shibboleths of the upper classes, from which syllable to stress in ‘patina’, to why one ought not to own fish knives. Meanwhile, foundationally working-class clubs, such as the Knights of Columbus or the Freemasons, deck themselves in formal ceremony and ritual. The already powerful can afford not to make too much fuss. For the up-and-coming, or the downtrodden, formality gives an unparalleled sense of membership to a grander body.

More importantly, the rules of formality are ultimately accessible to all. Anyone can learn the etiquette and wear the tie, and so become part of the ever larger, ever more diverse in-group that practices the formality of the event.