Link & Meme Archive 12/06/18 - 5/31/19??

Holy crap, I guess I missed my last archive checkpoint, and now I've got almost 6 months to do? blaaaarg.

Serj from System of a Down sings Rains of Castamere. I got goosebumps.

Both interesting and touching (and fun!) How Aladdin Changed Animation (by Screwing Over Robin Williams)

Your laws have to be pretty terrifying if making them public is an act of terror, Georgia "Consistent with its strategy of terrorism, Defendant freely admits to the copying and distribution of massive numbers of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Annotations," reads the lawsuit in part. Because suing someone and claiming its terrorism is a better idea than subsidizing the annotations from the state budget?

Quoted friend: "I can't think of a more concise-but-thorough, from-the-bedrock-up description of rational epistemics, and genuinely think that if schools had a solid, yearlong class just on the contents of this video, maybe around 7th grade, society's sanity waterline would be so significantly higher that you would see ripple effects throughout it."

All the signs were there. This is a short video hosted on reddit of GoT actor's reactions when asked about the final season.

This is why I, too, bathe once a week. Hide your wives!

I just learned that the best game of 2015 is getting a sequel this year!

Long Lost ‘Zork’ Source Code Uploaded to GitHub, But Few People Understand It. I realize all art is transitory. We've lost most of the epics of the ancients, and in a thousand years it's likely we'll only have fragments of Shakespeare and Beethoven. But the digital natural of today's art is speeding all this up drastically. Art is being lost at a ludicrous pace in our own lifetimes. In the same vein as this article, Icewind Dale II couldn't be rereleased because Beamdog had lost the source code. World of Warcraft Classic barely avoided the same fate just 14 years after its original release. Myspace lost uncounted hours of music very recently. Most novels written, and most art drawn, never see physical incarnation. 100 years from now, what will be left of contemporary art?

This is one of those haunting, beautiful episodes that reminds me why I love WtNV

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true. She wasn't the only woman, but her work was crucial to making all of this happen. When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal.

It Could Happen Here is the most interesting new podcast I have found in this year.

"Reminder: Anything you "buy" that has copy protection is a rental. People who "stole" these books still have their copies, people who paid are seeing their "libraries" deleted. Again."

You also lose all notes and annotations you made in those books.

"Starting today, Microsoft is ending all ebook sales in its Microsoft Store for Windows PCs. "Previously purchased ebooks will be removed from users' libraries in early July," ... "Even free ones will be deleted."

A Bill Decriminalizing Teen Sexting Passes the House, Causing Republican to Scream About Anal Sex on the Floor

Ecuador legalized gangs. Murder rates plummeted. "The country allowed the gangs to remake themselves as cultural associations that could register with the government, which in turn allowed them to qualify for grants and benefit from social programming, just like everybody else. ...they’d undergone a stunning transformation. The members were still very active in their gangs, but these were functioning more like social movements or cultural groups. Previously violent Latin Kings were working in everything from catering to crime analysis. And they were collaborating with other gangs they’d warred with in the past."

Alex Winter puts into words what I've been low-level feeling for a couple years... the internet has been completely seized by the normies. What the cybergeeks of the early era remember of as the internet now exists only as "The Dark Net."

I think I will look more into this Dark Net thing. Also, this should probably be called a Bill Talk XD

Remembering The Tragic Death That Gave Life To Temple Of The Dog & Pearl Jam, On This Day In 1990 (cw: depressing)

Meet the Woman Who Invented Cosplay. This sounds like a well-lived life, and I would have loved to meet her. <3Maybe in the future, if she's been suspended. /hope (also, I always thought cosplay had started in Japan, was really surprised by this)

Venom genuinely does not understand why Eddie refuses to admit humans have a hivemind

Boeing has a history of covering up deadly design errors in its planes.

"... if the spring and the end cap were slightly misaligned, the slides could extend beyond their design limit. This would cause a “rudder hardover,” where the rudder suddenly moves to its maximum deflection... [after a crash] investigators wanted to test [the valve], so they took it to the manufacturer for analysis...The remains of the valve were taken from the United Airlines headquarters to the headquarters of Parker Bertea, the company that designed and built the valve, in Irvine, California. Investigators discovered upon their arrival that someone had made off with the spring and end cap, but at the time they did not know the significance of this act. [Boeing] tried to steer the NTSB toward a conclusion that the crash was caused by a wind rotor, a phenomenon similar to a sideways tornado that could sometimes be found along the Rocky Mountains. The NTSB did not buy the theory, but it also could not find any evidence that the dual servo valve had failed...

While the investigation was ongoing, it adopted a philosophy of trying to avoid paying out damages to families of crews because this could be legally interpreted as an admission of responsibility. It had tampered with the PCU from the Colorado Springs crash and repeatedly tried to misdirect the investigation with “alternative” theories. It is widely suspected that Boeing knew about the problems with the PCU for decades but had done nothing, despite the hundreds of reported incidents. Because no one was collecting all the accounts of rudder deflections, it was likely that no one except Boeing realized how common they were. It was not until people started dying in crashes that enough scrutiny was placed on the 737 to uncover this history of ignoring the problem.

...The crashes also highlighted the vulnerability of the NTSB to corporate meddling. In 1996, According to the Seattle Times, the safety board had only 90 employees and relied on manufacturers to provide technical expertise in cases like the United 585 and USAir 427 crashes, which made it much harder to investigate cases where the manufacturer knew that it was responsible. Boeing’s obfuscation at every turn was pure corporate expediency: fixing the problem would require a massive recall costing hundreds of millions of dollars, not to mention millions more in compensation that would have to be paid out if Boeing admitted responsibility. Even when the flaw began to result in deadly crashes, Boeing stuck by this policy. Had the failure been easier to detect and prove, they might not have been able to get away with it, but—thanks in part to Boeing’s muddying of the waters—they never faced the massive backlash that they should have received.

The Paradox of American Friendliness.

"What McCrae Dowless did under the direction of Harris is hire a bunch of people to go and collect the absentee ballots of mainly people of color and the elderly. For North Carolina, third party individuals are not allowed to retrieve your absentee ballots, only immediate family members, so already we have a crime being committed. They would pickup the ballots and ENSURE THAT THE VOTER DIDN’T SEAL THEM. That’s important.

In the testimony in front of the NC General Elections Board, multiple individuals testified that what happened is, they would take the ballots back to Dowless’ house and review the ballots. Most people don’t vote for everything on the ballot. Or they do straight ticket. So, at Dowless’ house, multiple individuals would review the ballots and ensure that app unmarked votes were marked Republican and this is where as one above pointed out, they would destroy a ballot and replace it with a new one and then forge the signature. Or on a majority of the ballots, simply mark the votes for ‘whoever the Republican was’.

Once that identity theft and forging was finished, they would seal the ballot and mail it in on the behalf of these trusting individuals.

Harris up there is crying because his son; a deputy US attorney; testified that he informed his father on 3 separate occasions that was he was doing was illegal and felonies under federal law."

A big first step against Civil Asset Forfeiture, in a *unanimous* decision! Supreme Court Limits Civil Asset Forfeiture, Rules Excessive Fines Apply To States

"Forfeiture of the Land Rover, the court determined, would be grossly disproportionate to the gravity of Timbs's offense," Ginsburg wrote.

She also noted that the ban on excessive fines was added to the Bill of Rights for the purpose of protecting individual liberty. "Protection against excessive fines has been a constant shield throughout Anglo-American history for good reason: Such fines undermine other liberties."

She noted that those fines could be used to retaliate against political enemies and have been used as a source of revenue.

A tax on using people's attention!

"Young men are staying at home to play video games instead of going out to find jobs. There seem to be two related reasons for this: Video games are amazingly good; and there is no such pleasure to be had from anything else you might buy on a minimum wage, so why bother earning one? If this seems a sorry state of affairs, here’s a solution: tax media companies for the hours of human attention they consume. Give them an interest in reducing the hours that people spend staring at their screens. (This first paragraph is a summary from The Browser) ...

Over the past few decades, labor force participation has sharply dropped for men ages 20-34. Theories about the root cause range from indolence, to a lack of skills and training, to offshoring, to (perhaps most interestingly) the increasing attractiveness and availability of leisure and media entertainment. In this essay, we propose that the drop in labor participation rate of young men is a result of a combination of factors: (i) a decrease in cost of access to media entertainment leisure, (ii) increases in both the availability and (iii) quality media entertainment leisure, and (iv) a decrease in the marginal signalling utility of (conspicuous) consumption goods for all but the highest earners...

One potential solution would be to tax the unproductive leisure activities which people prefer over work. This is perhaps not as crazy as it seems, because (i) the true cost of these activities is already distorted from a consumer perspective by the advertisers who subsidize media consumption,and (ii) we already tax income and productivity – if time and money are fungible, you might just pull the idea of income tax ‘above’ the decision of how to spend time, and say that each person is responsible for investing some amount of sweat (in the form of time or money) into the public good.

Of course it would be impossible to gain political support for such a radical idea, especially when people today enjoy leisure time for free. No one would support a policy that required them to buy this time back from the state in the form of a tax.

Since media companies are capitalizing and profiting on a huge amount of attention that might otherwise be spent productively, however, taxing them for the share of the citizenry’s time that they consume could be more sensible and more practical than taxing citizens themselves.

One view of the status quo is that media companies are aggregating human attention and selling it at a discount–far below minimum wage–to advertisers in a massive arbitrage on human capital. So, the state could set the price of an hour of human attention at the minimum wage rate, and charge media companies 12% (the federal income tax rate on minimum wage) of that wage rate for each hour of human attention they consume."

How Colonialism Actually Worked. I'm beginning more and more to see the imposition of legibility by states as great evils.

The top 26 billionaires own $1.4t, out of a global wealth pool of $317t, so 0.44%. Which is still a lot, ~1/200th of all wealth

Chipotle may have outsmarted itself by blocking thousands of employee lawsuits over wage theft. Chipotle engaged in wage theft, then claims thousands of workers cannot engage in a class action lawsuit because they signed arbitration clauses. Hidden ones, in an online document that they couldn't edit. The Judge agreed because morality doesn't exist.

Then when the class action lawyers took the unusual act of deciding to continue to represent their clients through the arbitration process, Chipotle tried to get an injunction saying they couldn’t, because of course they don't want anyone having recourse to legal help. Thank god the judge dismissed it out of hand.

Chipotle is now claiming that having to go through so many individual arbitrations will drive it bankrupt. The numbers say this is total bullshit, but I hope they do go bankrupt. And I hope every Chipotle executive involved in these decisions has a severe health crisis and has to spend years of their life with disfigurement or chronic pain.

Well that's an interesting take! - "The primary function of privacy is not to hide things society finds unacceptable, but to create an environment in which your own mind feels safe to tell you things. If you’re not allowing these unshareworthy thoughts and feelings a space to come out, they still affect your feelings and behavior– you just don’t know how or why.

The hottest take of all: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” played a pivotal role in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism

Ever tried to copy a link from a Google search result, and got a ridiculous mess that won't even paste correctly because it's too damn long? And wondered wtf was even happening, why do I have to click through and then copy from the browser's address bar? "Because nobody cares, Google records every click that you make from a Google search results page, except they use JavaScript to fake the links that you're looking at so that when you mouse over them it looks like the real link but if you actually try and copy to the fucking clipboard it's this gigantic shitty link to Google with all kinds of tracking information. This is a website that removes all that shit and give you the real link, because when you're on a cell phone it's all you've fucking got."

This is from December 2018, so probably outdated and things are worse now. --

TIL that in Venezuela, the minimum wage is the median wage - more than half the country makes only the minimum wage. AND that a day's work at this rate is enough to buy 900 calories if buying only the cheapest available foodstuff.

So, assuming no other expenses at all, a day of labor gets you 900 calories. Not enough to live. This is literally working to starve to death. Oh my god.

What you've heard about "Nanette" on Netflix is true. Go watch it, it's really good/interesting, and often very funny. OK, it's downright fantastic, and it will be with me for a long time.

I read this back in high school, so over 20 years ago now (god I'm old). It's still with me. A Person Paper on Purity in Language by Douglas Hofstadter

You can still vote for What Lies Dreaming once a week at Top Webfiction: http://topwebfiction.com/vote.php?for=what-lies-dreaming