“Francine, I have an exciting new financial opportunity I’d love to share with you. It’s a fun and easy way to make some pin money without Roger ever even knowing…”
The strawberry, blackberry and raspberry fields of the Pajaro Valley stretch for 10 miles along the coast of California’s Monterey Bay, jeweled with fruit from April through early December. The valley’s 30,000 acres of farmland are also ruffled with emerald lettuces, brussels sprouts and varieties of kale, bringing in roughly $1 billion in revenue to the region each year.
All that abundance doesn’t come cheap.
While American farmers elsewhere have watered their crops by freely pumping the groundwater beneath their land, growers in Pajaro must pay hefty fees for irrigation water — making it one of the most expensive places to grow food in the country, if not the world. The cost: Up to $400 per acre-foot, a standard measurement equal to water covering one acre, one foot deep. The fees bring in $12 million a year, which is used to recycle, restore and conserve the region’s groundwater.
The Pajaro Valley’s unusual system — essentially a tax on water — was born of a berry-growing disaster some 40 years ago that forced farmers to act. Today, as the nation faces a spreading crisis of dwindling groundwater, stemming from a combination of climate change, agricultural overpumping and other issues, some experts say the Pajaro Valley is a case study in how to save the vital resource.
New research on the program revealed a direct connection between paying for the groundwater and conserving it: A 20 percent increase in the price of groundwater has resulted in a 20 percent decrease in the extraction of groundwater.
One reason experts see Pajaro as a model: Despite the high price of water, agriculture in the region is thriving. It is the headquarters of major brands, including Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry supplier, and Martinelli’s, which grows most of the apples for its sparkling cider in the Pajaro Valley.
Soren Bjorn, a senior executive at Driscoll’s who in January will become the chief executive, said in an interview that he “absolutely” sees the region as a model of water pricing that could be replicated in water-stressed regions from Texas to Portugal. “Water can’t be free anywhere, because you can’t run a sustainable water supply without pricing it,” he said. “That would apply to the globe.“
Yet, if the Pajaro Valley experiment were to be replicated across the country, it could trigger changes across the economy that affect both farmers and shoppers, resulting in higher prices at the grocery store while forcing farmers to abandon low-cost commodity crops that are needed for animal feed and other purposes, such as textiles.
The tempest prognosticator, also known as the leech barometer, is a 19th-century invention by George Merryweather in which leeches are used in a barometer. The twelve leeches are kept in small bottles inside the device; when they become agitated by an approaching storm, they attempt to climb out of the bottles and trigger a small hammer which strikes a bell. The likelihood of a storm is indicated by the number of times the bell is struck.
Immensity is not in itself a good thing. A living man is worth more than a lifeless galaxy. But immensity has indirect importance through its facilitation of mental richness and diversity. Things are of course only large and small in relation to one another. To say that a cosmos is large is only to say that, in relation to it, some of its constituents are small. To say that its career is long is merely to say that many happenings are contained within it. But though the spatial and temporal immensity of a cosmos have no intrinsic merit, they are the ground for psychical luxuriance, which we value. Physical immensity opens up the possibility of vast physical complexity, and this offers scope for complex minded organisms. This is at any rate true of a cosmos like ours in which mind is conditioned by the physical.
Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.
There’s some even funnier context in the source thread - apparently there was a contest for shortest Python quine, and someone submitted an empty file. It does work!
The contest organizers gave this the prize and then changed the rules to ban it, which is of course the highest honor you can receive in a programming competition.
This chest belonged to Robert Jillett, pioneer whaler, Kāpiti, New Zealand, 1836-1845. It was supplied by the Apothecary’s Hall, London, and replenished at Hobart Town, Tasmania.
They stole something from you. For decades, they stole it. That thing they stole? Your entire culture. For all of human history, works created in living memory entered the public domain every year. 40 years ago, that stopped.
First in 1976, and then again in 1998, Congress retroactively extended copyright’s duration by 20 years, for all works, including works whose authors were unknown and long dead, whose proper successors could not be located. Many of these authors were permanently erased from history as every known copy of their works disappeared before they could be brought back into our culture through reproduction, adaptation and re-use (copyright is “strict liability,” meaning that even if you pay to clear the rights to a work from someone who has good reason to believe they control those rights, if they’re wrong, you are on the hook as an infringer, and the statutory damages run to six figures).
Works that are still in our cultural currents 50 or 70 or 90 years after their creation are an infinitesimal fraction of all the works we create as a species. But these works are – by definition – extraordinarily important to our culture. The creators who made these works were able to plunder a rich public domain of still-current works as inputs to their own enduring creations. The slow-motion arson attack on the public domain meant that two generations of creators were denied the public domain that every other creator in the history of the human race had enjoyed.
As 2019 drew nearer, the copyright resistance who had fought over this grew nervous, then…elated. Was Congress actually going to heed the evidence of a decades-long failed experiment and decline to extend copyright again?
I had pitched email debates with comrades over this. Michael S Hart, visionary founder of the Project Gutenberg, was
certain it wouldn’t happen (he didn’t live to see it). But then, miraculously, astoundingly, 2019 rolled around and
we got new works in the public domain!
For decades, Jennifer Jenkins from the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain published an annual lament for the public domain works we
weren’t getting that year. Jenkins painstakingly cataloged the materials that the public would be denied, though their creators had been only too happy to release them with the belief that the copyright would be 40 years shorter than it turned out.
Starting in 2019, those laments turned into celebrations, starter pistols for a generation of creators discovering a living public domain for the first time since the
Carter administration. The 1923 works that entered the public domain in 2019 were mostly curiosities, but with each successive year, the public domain’s new arrivals get ever more vibrant.
The public domain shipment that arrived on January 1, 2023 was a
banger: we got some Virginia Woolf, some Hemingway, some Kafka, some Faulkner, some Agatha Christie and Edith Wharton, as well as Proust and Hesse:
All of Sherlock Holmes came home to the public domain last year. We also got “Ol’ Man River,” “Puttin’ On the Ritz” and “Mississippi Mud.”
What we didn’t get 2023? Sound recordings. The Music Modernization Act froze all sound recordings in copyright until 2024 – that is, until 11 days hence.
The West Midlands Police were kind enough to upload a high-rez of their surveillance camera control room to Flickr under a CC license (they’ve since deleted it), and it was the perfect frame for dozens of repeating clown images with HAL9000 red noses. This worked out
great. The clown face is from a 1940s ad for novelty masks.
I spent an absurd amount of time transforming a photo I took of three pinball machines into union-busting themed tables, pulling in a bunch of images from old Soviet propaganda art. An editorial cartoon of Teddy Roosevelt with his big stick takes center stage, while a NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo’s official portrait presides over the scene. I hand-made the eight-segment TILT displays.
I am objectively very bad at visual art. I am bad at vision, period – I’m astigmatic, shortsighted, color blind, and often miss visual details others see. I can’t even draw a stick-figure. To top things off, I have cataracts in both eyes and my book publishing/touring schedule is so intense that I keep having to reschedule the surgeries. But despite my vast visual deficits, I thoroughly enjoy making collages for this blog.
For many years now – decades – I’ve been illustrating my blog posts by mixing public domain and Creative Commons art with work that I can make a good fair use case for. As bad as art as I may be, all this practice has paid off. Call it unseemly, but I think I’m turning out some terrific illustrations – not all the time, but often enough.
And I liked reflecting on the year’s art so much, I decided I’d do it again. Be sure to scroll to the bottom for some downloadables – freely usable images that I painstakingly cut up with the lasso tool in The Gimp.
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The original AD&D hardcover cover art is seared into my psyche. For several years, there were few images I looked at so closely as these. When Hasbro pulled some world-beatingly sleazy stuff with the Open Gaming License, I knew just how to mod Dave Trampier’s ‘Eve Of Moloch’ from the cover of the
Players’ Handbook. Thankfully, bigger nerds than me have identified all the fonts in the image, making the remix a doddle.
Even though I don’t keep logs or collect any analytics, I can say with confidence that “Tiktok’s Enshittification” was the most popular thing I published on Pluralistic this year. I mixed some public domain Brother’s Grimm art, mixed with a classic caricature of Boss Tweed, and some very cheesy royalty-free/open access influencer graphics. One gingerbread cottage social media trap, coming up:
“Our difficulty is that human consciousness has not adjusted itself to a relational and integrated view of nature. We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.”
Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. When American patience for racial profiling in traffic stops reached a breaking point, cops rolled out dashcams. Dashcam footage went AWOL, or just recorded lots of racist, pretextual stops. Racial profiling continued.
Tasers and pepper spray were supposed to curb the undue use of force by giving cops an alternative to shooting dangerous-seeming people. Instead, we got cops who tasered and sprayed unarmed people and then shot them to pieces.
Next came bodycams: by indelibly recording cops’ interactions with the public, body-worn cameras were pitched as a way to bring accountability to American law-enforcement. Finally, police leadership would be able to sort officers’ claims from eyewitness accounts and figure out who was lying. Bad cops could be disciplined. Repeat offenders could be fired.
Police boosters insist that police violence and corruption are the result of “a few bad apples.” As the saying goes, “a few bad apples spoil the bushel.” If you think there are just a few bad cops on the force, then you should want to get rid of them before they wreck the whole institution. Bodycams could empirically identify the bad apples, right?
Well, hypothetically. But what if police leadership
don’t want to get rid of the bad apples? What if the reason that dashcams, tasers, and pepper spray failed is that police leadership are fine with them? If that were the case, then bodycams would turn into just another expensive prop for an off-Broadway accountability theater.
Police unions pushed for body cams as a “reform” to counter demands for more oversight and budget cuts. Now we have seen the result of those “reforms:” when police abuse their power the body cam footage is lost, but when they need evidence in court the cameras work perfectly. Instead of a tool to monitor police body cams are a tool used by the police.
Reforms are useless when police don’t get punished for breaking the rules. Sometimes worse than useless.
La Hauss. Curso Online de Especialista en UX-UI 2022-23. Diseño
responsive para web del museo Mothers of Modern Art. Proyecto de Sara González Álvarez.
ok so for those of you who don’t know, there’s this twitter account of a japanese hero mascot named dentman who went viral recently due to this tweet
but yeah he saw the tweet. and his response went viral as well (which is how i found his account)
and he just has like. hourly posts reminding you to brush your teeth
oh and his rival? his name is mr. mutans. whenever dentman posts he makes a post of his own, ofc
but THAT’S NOT ALL. literally while making this post i found a THIRD ACCOUNT that’s all about taking your meds
safe to say i’m losing my mind
anyway the point of all this was that people are ALREADY beginning to draw them ship art 😭
and the reactions are everything
I CANT ADD ANY MORE IMAGES BUT TRUST ME THIS IS SO FUNNY
toxic one-sided dentman yaoi wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card but it DEFINITELY IS NOW!
Encounter: dental-health-themed superhero, his frenemy-slash-ex candy monster nemesis, and their third wheel friend whose job is to remind people to take their meds
The artwork picture looks like a picture but doesn’t discharge pictorial functions as we would, in a different setting, expect. I don’t mean, when I say this, that art always startles or agitates or shocks. That would be avant-garde-ist or modernist in a parochial way. But that is not the view. Paintings and other pictorial works of art stand to the background place of picture-making in our lives in something like the way that irony stands to straight-talk (…). They are different, but each presupposes the other.
Alva Noë. 2023.
The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
so judging by how astonished people are by it every time we explain it to anybody, it seems like my wife and I might really be onto something here
during the pandemic, we invented something we call “astronaut time.”
when it’s astronaut time, it’s like we are two astronauts wearing the big helmets, moving around the station on totally separate tasks. one of us is outside the space station and one of us is inside the space station. our radios do not work and we have no way of communicating with each other. we might see each other through the lil porthole windows, but we ignore each other because we both have different things to do.
“astronaut time” is how we get total privacy when we live in the same apartment. I will pretend you don’t exist. You will pretend I don’t exist. we have a nonverbal, zero-contact signal for when astronaut time is over (usually “I’ll draw a smiley-face on the whiteboard in the kitchen when I’m done”). No talking, stay out of each other’s line of sight, we are actively avoiding each other, unless you are currently experiencing a medical emergency
goodbye.
it has been. a godsend. imagine living with your partner and being able to close every single tab in your brain related to social interaction. no fear of being interrupted by a “hey, quick question–” or “sorry to bother you, but do you know where the scissors are?” or “did you want something to eat, too?” Once or twice a month, we look at each other lovingly, hold hands, and say “baby I think I need some astronaut time tonight,” and the other person goes “okay cool. bye! have a nice night!” and nobody’s feelings are hurt and we both go and have a lovely evening completely by ourselves.
like idk it’s a small thing but it’s made our lives so much nicer, so if you and your partner/roommate are both people who sometimes need total privacy in order to recharge, maybe try it
I’m the wife in question and I cannot recommend this enough. When I told my therapist about astronaut time, she asked if she could share it with the couples she councils, so even the professionals give it two thumbs up.
On November 29,I’m at NYC’s Strand Bookswith my novelThe Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called “completely delightful.”
This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:
The failure to enforce competition law allowed a few companies to buy out their rivals, or sell goods below cost until their rivals collapsed, or bribe key parts of their supply chain not to allow rivals to participate:
The resulting concentration of the tech sector meant that the surviving firms were stupendously wealthy,
and cozy enough that they could agree on a common legislative agenda. That regulatory capture has allowed tech companies to violate labor, privacy and consumer protection laws by arguing that the law doesn’t apply when you use an app to violate it:
But the regulatory capture isn’t just about
preventing regulation: it’s also about
creating regulation – laws that make it illegal to reverse-engineer, scrape, and otherwise mod, hack or reconfigure existing services to claw back value that has been taken away from users and business customers. This gives rise to Jay Freeman’s perfectly named doctrine of “felony contempt of business-model,” in which it is illegal to use your own property in ways that anger the shareholders of the company that sold it to you:
Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But what does that actually
look like? I say that enshittification is always precipitated by a lost argument.
It starts when someone around a board-room table proposes doing something that’s bad for users but good for the company. If the company faces the discipline of competition, regulation or self-help measures, then the workers who are disgusted by this course of action can say, “I think doing this would be gross, and what’s more, it’s going to make the company poorer,” and so they win the argument.
But when you take away that discipline, the argument gets reduced to, “Don’t do this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make the company richer.” Money talks, bullshit walks. Let the enshittification begin!
But why do workers care at all? That’s where phrases like “don’t be evil” come into the picture. Until very recently, tech workers participated in one of history’s tightest labor markets, in which multiple companies with gigantic war-chests bid on their labor. Even low-level employees routinely fielded calls from recruiters who dangled offers of higher salaries and larger stock grants if they would jump ship for a company’s rival.
Employers built “campuses” filled with lavish perks: massages, sports facilities, daycare, gourmet cafeterias. They offered workers generous benefit packages, including exotic health benefits like having your eggs frozen so you could delay fertility while offsetting the risks normally associated with conceiving at a later age.
But all of this was a transparent ruse: the business-case for free meals, gyms, dry-cleaning, catering and massages was to keep workers at their laptops for 10, 12, or even 16 hours per day. That egg-freezing perk wasn’t about helping workers plan their families: it was about thumbing the scales in favor of working through your entire twenties and thirties without taking any parental leave.
In other words, tech employers valued their employees as a means to an end: they wanted to get the best geeks on the payroll and then work them like government mules. The perks and pay weren’t the result of comradeship between management and labor: they were the result of the discipline of competition
for labor.
If we were forced to split crazy walls into two simple categories, we’d have those created by people in the midst of the crazy – a serial killer, a time traveller, a script writer – and those created by people outside the crazy, attempting to figure it out from scratch.
Many of those in the latter category are the police and other security forces, either piecing together clues to catch the criminal or, as here, trying to work out what on Earth is going on in their little German town where people disappear, other dead bodies appear, and something weird seems to be happening every 33 years.
Adversarial interoperability is one of the most reliable ways to protect tech users from predatory corporations: that’s when a technologist reverse-engineers an existing product to reconfigure or mod it (interoperability) in ways its users like, but which its manufacturer objects to (adversarial):
“Adversarial interop” is a
mouthful, so at EFF, we coined the term “competitive compatibility,” or comcom, which is a lot easier to say and to spell.
Scratch any tech success and you’ll find a comcom story. After all, when a company turns its screws on its users, it’s good business to offer an aftermarket mod that loosens them again. HP’s $10,000/gallon inkjet ink is like a bat-signal for third-party ink companies. When Mercedes announces that it’s going to sell you access to your car’s accelerator pedal as a subscription service, that’s like an engraved invitation to clever independent mechanics who’ll charge you a single fee to permanently unlock that “feature”:
Comcom saved giant tech companies like Apple. Microsoft tried to kill the Mac by rolling out a truly cursèd version of MS Office for MacOS. Mac users (5% of the market) who tried to send Word, Excel or Powerpoint files to Windows users (95% of the market) were stymied: their files wouldn’t open, or they’d go corrupt. Tech managers like me started throwing the graphic designer’s Mac and replacing it with a Windows box with a big graphics card and Windows versions of Adobe’s tools.
Now part of what makes it difficult to keep this radical entanglement of art and nature apart from the more domestic entanglement of the New Synthesis is that technology (which organizes) and art (which reorganizes) are frequently materially identical.
Alva Noë. 2023.
The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
I want a Santa movie where he’s actually Saint Nicholaos of Myra. Three kids run away from home and find a portal to the Council Of Nicaea in 325 AD. Then the kids watch him debate the promulgation of canon law. In the end they return home and tell their parents that presents aren’t important so long as Pentecost is counted 50 days after Easter on the Roman solar calendar and not the Jewish lunar calendar.
And the kids tell their parents the whole story and the dad is like “those kids and their imaginations.” But then he sees a piece of paper in the dog’s mouth and goes “whatcha got there boy? Is that…orders from the Holy See that the schismatic bishop Meletius is to remain in Lycopolis and keep his episcopal title but the ecclesiastics ordained by him must again receive the laying of hands? But…how?” And then he gazes off to the sky and you hear a light jingling of bells and then a voice over goes “Ho ho ho! The baptisms performed by the Paulian heretics are invalid! Merry Christmas!”
having Complicated Feelings (concern, a small but nonzero amount of recognition of the self through the other,
admiration, sexual desire,) about this one, lads
The best part is that that’s a Schuko socket. It’s used in a lot of the world, but it’s also used in places that are 240v.
They’re adapting it to a NEMA 1-15 plug, used in America, which is 120v.
So not only is this terrible adapter horribly dangerous for reasons of fire and/or getting electrocuted, but it might explode whatever they’re plugging into it!
Art aims, instead, at the disturbance of habit. Art is a kind of reflective activity. Works of art—whether pictures or writings or dances or songs, or whatever—represent and explore us by reworking the raw materials of our organization. I don’t mean that artists—always and everyday— are revolutionaries; that is a particularly and narrowly contemporary (“avant-garde”) conception. But the very
workof art—the work of drawing, say— can end up being revolutionary, emancipatory, anyway.
Alva Noë. 2023.
The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100.
Measuring purely by confirmed kills
,the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose 4-year old McVeigh killed.
McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century.
The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography
Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.
I’m not a psychology researcher, but my guess would be that the nature of it being a time-limited puzzle game where you have to juggle multiple factors means that your short-term memory gets filled and the traumatic images are “dumped” in favor of remembering how many times to rotate the L piece. “As soon as possible” is probably because the sooner you do it, the less likely it is to become part of your long-term memory.
If that is true, then other time-limited activities where you have to remember and plan in a tight time frame may serve a similar purpose.
This can have an effect hours after the traumatic event happens too!All participants were
treated within about 6 hours and played for a
total of 20 minutes of Tetris (with at least one play time of 10 minutes straight).
Before your very eyes, your teeth take on a healthful green glow! Now there will be no doubt that you have brushed your teeth, but given the strange looks you’ll get and the jokes behind your back, you might wish you hadn’t.
What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity.
—William S. Burroughs
I’m a Buddhist Inverse Solipsist. I believe that I am the only guy still in samsara, and all of reality is a truman-show-like act by billions of bodhisattvas who are just humoring me.
I’m a Theo-Illegslist Muslim. I believe that Islam was the original religion practiced by Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. However, I also believe I shouldn’t be held by a divine covenant I wasn’t there to sign.
I’m a polytheist with high standards. The pantheon only has the one. For now.
I’m a Post-Nicene Navajo Arianist. I believe that Christ was NOT co-eternal with God the Father, and that Coyote is part of the godhead. I actively refuse to explain how.
I’m a protestant accelerationist. I want the Catholic Church to sell more indulgences so god will smite them faster.
I’m a scientific puritan. I believe the only way to truly test if humans have free will is to try and convince Christ to kill himself.
I’m a Judeo-Islamic Para-evangelist. I believe the Messiah will only return once every jinn has converted to Judaism.
I’m a Sumerian Traditionalist. All the gods are dead because we haven’t fed their idols in 2400 years.
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