dailyoverview:

The Museum of Pop Culture (also known as MoPOP) is a nonprofit museum in Seattle, Washington, dedicated to contemporary popular culture. Founded in 2000, it contains exhibits on fantasy, horror cinema, video games, science fiction, music and more. The museum’s unique, 140,000-square-foot (13,000 sq. meter) structure was designed by architect Frank Gehry.

See more here: https://bit.ly/2YFlLgU

47.621500°, -122.348611°

Source imagery: Nearmap

rjzimmerman:

Receding, melting glaciers: These two satellite photos show the receding of the HPS-12 glacier in Chile:

Here, melting of Arctic Ocean ice:

Here, rising sea levels affecting coastal Louisiana:

Opinion | What Climate Change Looks Like From Space

molecularhomosexual:

There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and so on.

Or there’s the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is “Does it work, and how does it work?” How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading’s intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret.

Gilles Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic”

memewhore:

rjzimmerman:

Rich countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan and much of western Europe, account for just 12 percent of the global population today but are responsible for 50 percent of all the planet-warming greenhouse gases released from fossil fuels and industry over the past 170 years:

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

A decade ago, the world’s wealthiest economies pledged to mobilize $100 billion per year in climate finance for poorer countries by 2020. But they are stillfalling short by tens of billions of dollars annually, and very little aid so far has gone toward measures to help poorer countries cope with the hazards of a hotter planet, such as sea walls or early warning systems for floods and droughts.

Separately, vulnerable countries have also emphasized that they won’t be able to adapt to every storm or every hurricane or famine worsened by climate change. The world will continue to warm. People will continue to die from climate related disasters. Villages will continue to disappear beneath rising seas.

So, those countries, many of which still produce a tiny fraction of overall emissions, have asked for a separate fund, paid for by wealthy countries, to compensate them for the damages they can’t prevent. This issue is referred to as“loss and damage.”

“Lots of people are losing their lives, they are losing their future, and someone has to be responsible,” said A.K. Abdul Momen, the foreign minister of Bangladesh. He compared loss and damage to the way the United States governmentsued tobacco companies in the 1990s to recover billions of dollars in higher health care costs from the smoking epidemic.

Wealthy countries have historically resisted calls for a specific funding mechanism for loss and damage, fearing that it could open the door to a flood of liability claims. Only the government of Scotland has been willing to offer specific dollar amounts,pledging $2.7 million this week for victims of climate disasters.

At the same time, some of the world’s biggest developing economies are beginning to catch up on emissions. China, home to 18 percent of the world’s population, is responsible for nearly 14 percent of all the planet-warming greenhouse gases released from fossil fuels and industry since 1850. But today it is the world’s largest emitter by far, accounting for roughly 31 percent of humanity’s carbon dioxidefrom energy and industry this year.

Who Has The Most Historical Responsibility for Climate Change?

ousia-poetica:

Life manifests itself in infinite forms. Science Posters By Kelsey Oseid on Etsy

mostlysignssomeportents:

The city of Stockholm commissioned Skolplattform, an omnibus app to deliver timely information to students, teachers and parents. It was a mess: a late, SEK 1B (USD 117M) “IT disaster” boondoggle with a 1.2 star rating.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.stockholm.vardnadshavare&hl=en&gl=US

Among the groups that were poorly served by the app were parents, and among those parents was Christian Landgren, a software developer. Landgren created a streamlined version of the app just for parents that he dubbed Öppna (open) Skolplattformen. As the name suggests, it was free/open source software, hosted on Github:

https://github.com/kolplattformen/skolplattformen

Öppna Skolplattformen worked because Landgren and his collaborators reverse-engineered the Skolplattformen, discovering the URLs and syntax for its private API. That may sound daunting, but it’s something web developers do all the time — their primary sources were the web developer tools built into Chrome!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.skolplattformen.app&hl=en_GB&gl=US

Now, Skolplattformen carries a lot of potentially sensitive information about students, staff and parents, so it’s reasonable that the City of Stockholm wanted to assure itself that Öppna Skolplattformen wasn’t harvesting user-data and violating their privacy.

That’s a reasonable concern, but the way Stockholm acted on it was entirely unreasonable. As Matt Burgess writes in Wired, the City did everything it could to exterminate, rather than validate, Öppna Skolplattformen.

https://www.wired.com/story/sweden-stockholm-school-app-open-source/

The City began by warning that the app might be illegal, and told parents to stop using it. Without any factual basis, the City told parents the app was accessing their private information. It altered its code to break the Öppna app. It referred the app to the to the national data protection authority.

Finally, the City complained to the police, calling the app a cyber-crime, and seeking an official audit of the app’s data-handling.

https://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/utbildningsforvaltningen/pressreleases/juridisk-utredning-om-betalapp-klar-saekerhet-gaar-foere-it-utveckling-3090899

Separately, the City commissioned a third-party audit of the app’s data-handling from the outside firm Certezza. However, when that audit reported in, the City illegally refused to publish it.

Why would they do that? It’s impossible to know what was going through the minds of City officials like Hélène Mossberg, deputy head of digitization and IT for Stockholm’s education department, but here’s a possible explanation. When the police cybercrime division investigated Öppna app, they concluded “All information that Öppna Skolplattformen has used is public information that the City of Stockholm voluntarily distributed.”

The police report referenced Certezza’s report. It’s reasonable to conclude, then, that the City knew from early days that it was wrong when it accused the 40 volunteers who maintained the Öppna app of breaching privacy law.

Indeed, those volunteers were busily discovering and reporting bugs in the official apps — bugs that could have exposed Skolplattformen users — teachers, students and parents — to privacy breaches.

Here’s the thing: the City of Stockholm should have scrutinized any third party app that touched its systems for privacy breaches. That’s its job. But the way it proceeded shows that its primary concern wasn’t safeguarding private data — it was safeguarding its reputation. By blocking a third-party app that succeeded where its app had failed, the City was able to maintain the fiction that the billion kroners Skolplattformen cost to produce was money well-spent. By slandering the volunteers who discovered security defects in its billion-kroner app, the City was able to maintain the fiction that it had exercised good oversight in public spending.

There’s a name for this conduct: privacywashing, when legitimate adaptation, investigation and modification is blocked in the name of preserving privacy.

Privacywashing is when Doordash threatened its workers over their use of #Para, an app that let them know how much a job was worth before they agreed to do it, by falsely claiming that Para compromised driver and customer privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

Privacywashing is when Facebook declared war on Ad Observer, a plugin that volunteers use to determine when Facebook violates its own policies on paid political disinfo. Facebook falsely claimed that Ad Observer violated user privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

Privacywashing is when corporate, anti-Net Neutrality shills decry antitrust proposals with dire and wholly unfounded predictions that competition will lead to privacy breaches:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211103/14273847872/data-privacy-is-price-latest-antitrust-proposals.shtml

The core premise of privacywashing is that the entities that provide online services are the best guardians of their users’ privacy. Time and again, we learn that this is untrue. Facebook says it needs the power to block independent scrutiny of its ads or Cambridge Analytica will steal all our data. The thing is, Facebook has always had that power and it already let Cambridge Analytica steal all our data. And even if FB blocks the next Cambridge Analytica, it obviously can’t be trusted not to lie to us and steal all our data for itself.

Likewise, Doordash has had multiple, ghastly breaches of its customers’ most sensitive data, including a swatter-friendly database of their home addresses. Its argument that we should let it make the final determination about who can plug new stuff into Doordash because it’s so good at making those calls is obvious bullshit.

Interoperability is the key to technological self-determination. It’s a way for users to help themselves — by fixing bad moderation policies, bad information design and bad accessibility choices.

Interop allows us to address monopolization without having to wait decades for a breakup order to work its way through the courts. If you’re stuck on Facebook because the cost of leaving behind your friends, family and community is too high, interop lets you leave — and still stay in touch with them.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

Interop definitely creates privacy risks — but so does its absence. Facebook, Doordash, and other bullies who’ve attacked interoperators are quite capable of abusing our privacy without help from third parties. The same goes for the Skolplattformen, which was shown by the Öppna volunteers to have significant security defects.

It’s possible (and necessary) to policy privacy online without engaging in privacywashing. In “Privacy Without Monopoly,” the EFF white-paper I co-wrote with my colleague Bennett Cyphers, we present a solution:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

To have data-protection without monopoly, you need a freestanding privacy law that specifies what is, and is not, permissible. Then, you need a public authority that holds everyone — itself, tech companies, interoperators — to the standard set by that law.

This is very nearly what the City of Stockholm did! When they learned of a third-party app that could have been breaching user privacy, they audited it. The problem is in what happened next: rather than publishing the audit, they buried it, and made libellous accusations about the volunteers who’d developed the app.

Why’d they do it? Perhaps it was to save face, since their opening gambit wasn’t to audit the Öppna app, but rather to smear it, before they’d bothered to make a factual determination about its data-handling. Having pre-committed to the position that the app was privacy-invading, any disclosures that contradicted that position would make them seem incompetent.

Sweden is part of the EU, which means it actually has a freestanding privacy law that it can refer to in order to determine whether apps like Öppna Skolplattformen were coloring within the laws. The GDPR isn’t perfect, but it is an objective standard to assess every service against — both first-party apps like Skolplattformen and follow-on apps like the Öppna version.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/gdpr-privacy-and-monopoly

Privacy and interoperability are entirely compatible with one another, and Sweden is better-poised than most jurisdictions to ensure this compatibility:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/24/illegitimate-greatness/#peanut-butter-in-my-antitrust

We should demand that app developers — both public and private — adhere to good privacy, accessibility and usability standards. But no standard will ever be complete. There will always be people whose use-cases and disability adaptations are not covered by the design brief, no matter how well-intentioned or comprehensive.

It’s fine and proper for the operators of online services to solicit feedback on how to make them better, but that can’t be the end of the story. The ability of users — and the toolsmiths that serve them — to adapt digital systems means that we don’t have to rely on the good judgment of flawed and conflicted service operators to decide what is a bug and what is a feature.

There’s a name for this ability: Competitive Compatibility, AKA comcom (nee “Adversarial Interoperability”).

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Comcom has been a part of technology’s story since the earliest days. It is a legitimate and vital practice that humanizes technology and makes it accountable to the people who rely on it. It’s a trump card that users can play to overrule shareholders, executives and bureaucrats who value their profits or reputations over their users’ digital lives.

That’s important when we’re talking about affluent, tech-savvy parents in rich Nordic countries — but it’s even more important when we’re talking about marginalized groups who have no social power. It’s conceivable that Landgren could have simply petitioned the City to fix its app, but Doordash’s misclassified, precarious workforce needed the kind of immediate relief it got from Para.

None of this is to say we should have a free-for-all. Both the operators of services and the interoperators who mod them can expose users to risk. Neither group should be trusted to mark their own exams when it comes to deciding whether that risk has been addressed. The story of Öppna Skolplattformen is a parable about how public authorities could address that risk — and what happens when they abdicate that responsibility.

Image:
Christian Landgren
https://twitter.com/Landgren/status/1319712457196261376

noosphe-re:

“Fungi are everywhere but they are easy to miss. They are inside you and around you. They sustain you and all that you depend on. As you read these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they have done for more than a billion years. They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behaviour and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. Yet they live their lives largely hidden from view, and more than 90 per cent of their species remain undocumented. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.”

— Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

weaselle:

viejospellejos:

Reblog si este cono patina mejor que tú

mucho

noosphe-re:

“If our troubles originate in a kind of “ocean” of thought and language, in which we are submerged, but of which we are only dimly aware, it would seem reasonable to begin immediately to inquire into the actual function of our thought and language. To do this requires, of course, that we give this function our serious attention. We do give such attention to a vast range of things, including nature, technology, politics, economics, society, psychological problems, and so forth. Why should thought and language be the one field left to function automatically and mechanically, without serious attention, so that the resulting confusion vitiates most of what we try to do in all other fields? The first step in giving proper attention to thought and language depends on seeing that thought is real. Its reality can in fact be demonstrated by instruments such as the electroencephalograph. These show that there is no thought without electrical and chemical changes, muscular tensions, and so forth. But the very same activity that is revealed on one side through such instruments is seen on the other side as meaningful function, both inward and outward. (The inward aspect is thought, imagination, etc., while the outward aspect is language, communication, practical activity, etc.) Houses, tables, chairs, cars, roads, farms, factories, and, indeed, almost all that we see in everyday life are thus extensions of thought. Nature may be regarded as that which takes shape by itself, while human activity leads to the creation of artifacts, shaped by human participation in natural process, ordered and guided by thought.”

— David Bohm, On Creativity

love-is-the-cure:

Gay weddings from different cultures

albarrancabrera:

“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”

― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

oldguydoesstuff:

The Xerox Alto from 1973. It still puzzles me why Xerox did not dominate the mini computer market. This machine was so far ahead of it’s time, first machine with a mouse, one of the first if not the first with a graphical user interface, WYSIWYG editing of documents on a portrait format display. Apple and Microsoft later (infamously) lifted many of these concepts and features for their product lines.

oldguydoesstuff:

The DEC GT40 terminal, an oddball vector graphics display that could be used to display graphs, and more importantly, play lunar lander!

containerization:

Photo by @MarineTainer

parkerdotstudio:

koulamara:

Дуга-3, radar system in Chernobyl.

:

liberalbydefault:

In a massive 10-yearstudy published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a group of scientists examined the genomes of dominant plant species and important soil microbes from the Atacama, and identified 265 genes that play a heavy role in adapting these plants to the harsh desert conditions. The authors describe these findings as a “genetic goldmine” that could help scientists breed more resilient crops able to withstand the drier climates expected to arise during climate change-induced droughts.

The need to engineer new crops has never been more crucial. Droughts around the world are more frequent and more devastating with each passing year. From 2010–2018, about $116.7 billion in crops and livestock in the developing world was lost due to droughts.

“The Atacama desert is like a perfect natural laboratory to study what an arid world would look like,” Rodrigo Gutierrez, a Chilean researcher and a coauthor of the new study, told The Daily Beast. “This is an ecosystem-level study. We basically characterized all the plant species that live here, and nailed the most important ones and what we can learn from them.”

Plants in This Desert Could Help Humanity Survive Droughts

headspace-hotel:

“Abyssal Plain,” poem assembled from quotations from Wikipedia articles

placesandpalaces:

focsle:

nothwell:

focsle:

nothwell:

there’s a glass thing aboard wooden whaling ships where it’s like a little crystal they put in the ceiling to let light in belowdecks

what the fuck is it called

it looks kind of like this

???

Deck prism!

#they’re so amazing

YES! THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Sure thing! I remember being so surprised at HOW much light they brought into a space, when I first saw them in action.

[ID: photo of closely clustered ship bunks, lit by an overhead prism. /end ID]

The yellow light is artificial but the blue is from the deck prism, on a cloudy day.

The group Liter of Light helps light the homes of impoverished people around the world with a similar invention: a clear plastic bottle containing a liter of water and three milliliters of bleach. They’re placed in the roof of the home much like the deck prism and “refract the light from outdoors into the house, lighting up much like a light bulb.” They can be used to replace kerosene lamps, which are both a fire and fume hazard.

Since the bottle only works with sunlight, Liter of Light came up with a solution for night time. Huffington Post stated, “by slipping a test tube with a small LED light bulb into the bottle, which in turn is hooked up to a mini-solar panel, the bottle can still refract light during the day, but then also be used as a light bulb at night.” They also make streetlights!

:

yournewkeyboard:

hmmmm

lionfloss:

A Ganoderma from the West coast of Tasmania. planet_fungi

archatlas:

Ghostly Aerial Photos Frame Isolated and Abandoned Houses Scattered Across North America

In his ongoing series titled Thin Places, Portland-based photographer Brendon Burton documents battered houses that stand alone in barren fields, amidst an encroaching marsh, or at the edge of the mountain.

Keep reading

archatlas:

Ghostly Aerial Photos Frame Isolated and Abandoned Houses Scattered Across North America

In his ongoing series titled Thin Places, Portland-based photographer Brendon Burton documents battered houses that stand alone in barren fields, amidst an encroaching marsh, or at the edge of the mountain.

The decrepit structures have been Burton’s preferred subject matter since 2011 when he began seeking abandoned buildings across the continent that exude a sense of impermanence and the uncanny. “This series is for the sake of satisfying my curiosity about the past and exploring isolated parts of North America. It mixes archeology with fantasy,” he says.

everythingstarstuff:

dailyoverview:

Lake of the Ozarks is a reservoir in central Missouri that was created by the damming the Osage River. It has a surface area of more than 54,000 acres (220 square km) and at least 1,150 miles (1,850 km) of shoreline. The Village of the Four Seasons, shown here at center, is home to about 2,200 residents and a popular tourist destination.

See more here: https://bit.ly/3BvjxxZ

38.201111°, -92.715556°

Source imagery: Maxar

archatlas:

Beautiful Painted Staircases Inspired by Andean Textiles Transform the Hills of Lima, Peru

In the rolling hills of Lima, Peru, colorful murals coat the sloping staircases that forge paths through the city’s diverse neighborhoods. An effort to beautify and celebrate the cultural history of each district, the painted stairs form part of the city’s endeavor to recognize art as an essential part of community development. Peruvian artist Xomatok took part in this tremendous project, translating his artistic vision onto 13 stairways in the hilly footpaths of Alisos de Amauta.

In collaboration with local residents, the artist transformed the plain stairs of the neighborhood with geometric designs inspired by the vibrant motifs commonly found in handwoven Andean textiles, especially traditional shawls or blankets called llicllas.

“in this effort to ‘simplify’ these routines by making the office paperless, Zuboff found that the implementation of computers wound up eradicating the basis of the clerks’ situated knowledge. Suddenly, making changes to a client’s account meant simply inputting data in an order that was constrained by the computer itself. Work became a process of filling in blanks; there was no longer anywhere for the clerks to experience decision-making in their jobs. What Zuboff observed was that as intellectual engagement with the work went down, the necessity of concentration and attention went up. What the computer did was make the work so routine, so boring, so mindless, clerical workers had to physically exert themselves to be able to focus on what they were even doing. This transition, from work being about the application of knowledge to work being about the application of attention, turned out to have profound physical and psychological impact on the clerical workers themselves.”

– Laine Nooney,How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body | VICE

fuckyeahfluiddynamics:

Materials like oobleck – a suspension of cornstarch particles in water – are tough to classify. In some circumstances, they behave like a fluid, but in others, they act like a solid. (Image and research credit: D. Ozturk et al.; via Physics Today)

Read the full article

in today’s edition of “adulting is hard” meets “automated puritanism”

shrinkrants:

“Decentralized, distributed energy production like renewables can have a broader disruptive impact on energy infrastructures and how they interact with social and political relations. Integrating distributed, small-scale energy generation within towns and cities can make them more self-sufficient; whereas most people now are alienated from their modes of energy production, bringing production into their spheres of governance and living can alter that relationship in positive ways. Neighborhood-controlled energy, for instance, can have positive civic impacts, making towns more democratic and profit-sharing more widespread. Further integrating some form of degrowth economics—such as circular economy principles—could also disrupt the fossil economy even more broadly. Nuclear is necessarily a top-down energy source; solar and wind can be (though are not inevitably) a bottom-up energy source, particularly when paired with degrowth principles and policies. Embracing nuclear would leave many status quo structural relations largely intact, given the way it depends on states, militaries, and command-and-control politics.”

— Samuel Miller McDonald, Is Nuclear Power Our Best Bet Against Climate Change? (via probablyasocialecologist)

aromaseraphy-lavender:

guerrillatech:

Nobody wants to risk death for minimum wage. Imagine that

dailyoverview:

Sea ice breaks apart in various block sizes roughly 40 miles (64 kilometers) off the coast of Antarctica. Antarctic sea ice extends far north in the winter and retreats almost to the coastline every summer. In the 1980s, Antarctica lost 40 billion tons (36.3 billion metric tons) of ice every year. In the last decade, that figure was estimated at a staggering 252 billion tons (229 billion metric tons) per year.

See more here: https://bit.ly/3nxqZnj

-65.539300°, 101.884100°

Source imagery: Maxar

mostlysignssomeportents:

People who fret about the debt we’re taking on to deal with climate change are (half) right. Because there’s two ways of dealing with the climate emergency: either we can avert it, or we can seek high ground and erect high walls. Guess which one we’re doing.

Yeah.

The world’s richest countries are on track to spending more on their “border defense” than they are on their climate commitments. Molly Taft breaks it down for Gizmodo: Contributions to the Green Climate Fund are dragging behind their (inadequate) commitments, and countries are spending more than double their GCF funding for militarized border controls.

https://gizmodo.com/wealthy-countries-are-spending-more-on-border-security-1847931924

This isn’t an arbitrary comparison. If you are planning to let the world’s poor people literally roast inside their own skins, or drown along with their island homes, then yeah, you will need to build high walls a-bristle with guns to keep them from coming to you.

https://www.tni.org/en/publication/global-climate-wall

Though the climate emergency is new, this dynamic is an old one: as societies become more unequal, the ability of elite minorities to suborn the political process to benefit themselves at everyone’s expense grows. The more they do this, the more unstable society becomes.

Elites understand this. That’s why billionaires are buying bunkers in New Zealand. It’s why Silicon Valley VCs compare anti-billionaire sentiment to Kristallnacht, painting themselves as beleaguered victims, the last minority that it’s okay to hate. (Paging Mike Godwin, Mike Godwin to the white courtesy phone).

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/01/26/266685819/billionaire-compares-outrage-over-rich-in-s-f-to-kristallnacht

The wealthy are obsessed with risk-hedging. Elite philanthropy is a hedge: a way to make obscene inequality seem palatable. If you’re careful, you can make your name synonymous with art galleries, museums and hospitals and not, say, depraved indifference to human life in the relentless pursuit of billions beyond measure or use.

Or, at least, you can do that for a while. Eventually, reality catches up with you. The Louvre takes the Sackler family name off its paintings. The Whitney follows. Your family name becomes synonymous with murder, not generosity.

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/10/winners-take-all-modern-philanthropy-means-that-giving-some-away-is-more-important-than-how-you-got-it/

Reputation-laundering is Plan A.

Disappearing into a luxury bunker to LARP the Masque of the Red Death is the last resort.

In between the two is “guard labor.”

At a certain point, the most cost-effective way to keep guillotines off your lawn isn’t endowing hospitals, it’s building machine-gun turrets.

Here’s where the “debt” part comes in. The more guard-labor you hire, the more societal debt you incur: destabilizing and discrediting institutions and creating vast, traumatized cohorts with nothing to lose.

Redistribution stabilizes society over the long term, creating a sense of mutual obligation and shared destiny.

Wealth-hoarding and guard-labor *destabilizes* society over the long term, with ever-larger populations convinced that society has nothing to offer them, even as their homes, lives and families are destroyed by policies that benefit the rich at the rest of our expense. (Paging Joe Machin, Joe Manchin to a white courtesy phone)

People who worry about “maxing out the national credit card” fighting the climate emergency are running up far more insidious forms of debt: social cohesion debt and climate debt. Every day we fail to address the climate emergency is a day that we doom more people to being traumatized climate refugees with no reason to accept a social contract or heed society’s laws.

Societal debt and climate debt accrue compounding interest, and they multiply each other. When emergency strikes — when a zoonotic pandemic sweeps the globe — institutions that have discredited themselves by carrying water for pharma giants struggle to convince people to heed their advice. The pandemic gets worse, throwing our politics into chaos and tanking the economy, incinerating much of the political will for meaningful climate action.

So the amount that rich states are willing to spend on “border security” is inseparable from the amount they’re willing to spend on averting the climate emergency.

And the joke’s on them. As Poe taught us with The Masque of the Red Death, our species has a shared destiny. It takes an act of will (or perhaps an Ayn Rand novel whose pages are all stuck together) not to see this.

For a fantastic case-study in the fallacy of guard-labor as a substitute for good policy, check out Naomi Klein’s interview with Olamide Olaniyan in The Tyee.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2021/10/22/Naomi-Klein-Stage-Before-Breakthrough/

Klein lives in Canada, where she’s a professor at UBC’s new Center for Climate Justice.

Canada is the epicenter of the guard-labor/good policy tradeoff. Its leader, Justin Trudeau is, to quote Klein: “somebody who likes campaigning more than governing and is better at giving the speech than enacting the policies.”

Trudeau gives off a lot of cuddly vibes, but his unwillingess to enact good policy combined with his deep authoritarian roots are a catastrophe in the offing. Canada needs good climate policy: not only is the country a world-leader in carbon emissions, it also exports the world’s filthiest oil, extracted from the tar sands, and it is the global headquarters of the world’s most savage and unrepentant mining operations.

Back in 2019, Trudeau marched with Greta Thunberg, demanding a change to Canada’s climate policies. It was the ultimate Trudeau moment: the literal Prime Minister of Canada marching against the policies he, himself, had enacted.

Oh, Justin.

https://www.news18.com/news/world/canadas-justin-trudeau-to-march-with-teen-climate-activist-greta-thunberg-2324165.html

Now, to be fair, Trudeau doesn’t get to govern the way he’d like, because he has a minority government. But Trudeau’s minority partners aren’t Tories who are pulling him away from climate justice — they’re NDP, pulling him *towards* planet-saving, humanity-saving policies.

When Trudeau called unnecessary, snap elections earlier this year, it was a bid to win a Parliamentary majority, one that would free him from having to listen to anyone else when he governs.

Such a majority would allow him to continue to claim to be an environmentalist, while continuing to assure the tar sands gentry that “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.”

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/894872131944

It would let him continue to claim to be an environmentalist, while rescuing the world’s deadliest oil pipeline with a $4.5b public bailout.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55773243

Trudeau understands that the price of climate inaction is guard labor. By any measure, he is an authoritarian. This is a leader who fired his Attorney General to spare Canada’s most corrupt corporation from prosecution for its continued collusion with the world’s worst dictators:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-wilson-raybould-attorney-general-snc-lavalin-1.5014271

He’s the party leader who whipped his caucus to vote for Bill C-51, a warrantless mass surveillance bill, while they were in opposition. Trudeau claimed the move was needed to avoid looking soft on terrorism just prior to an election, and promised a repeal. That “repeal” arrived years late — and it left behind the most grotesque and over-reaching elements of the bill.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjzk94/the-trudeau-government-peels-back-bill-c-51-mostly

Remember when Trudeau tweeted that Canada would welcome the refugees Trump was terrorizing, then refused to end the “Safe Third Country” agreement that would actually enable those refugees to come to Canada?

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/monitor/safe-third-country-agreement-must-end

Trudeau’s spin machine make a big deal out of his political legacy: he is the son of the legendary Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the PM who gave Canada its own Constitution. But if we’re going to discuss the Trudeau legacy, let’s not forget that Trudeau the Elder also imposed martial law on Canada, sending the secret police to raid a wide swathe of dissident groups.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/23/wmat-o23.html

If Canada is going to run up a climate debt, it’s going to have to spring for a spiralling guard-labor bill. Because Poe was a prophet and the Masque of the Red Death is a warning: there is no wall high enough to keep disaster out.

As Klein says, last summer’s wildfires didn’t just wipe out forests and towns — they also created waves of *domestic* climate refugees: homeless, traumatized, bearing Canadian passports.

Border security won’t insulate the nation from defaulting on climate debt. It just delays the reckoning and makes the default infinitely more painful.

Because weak institutions that no one trusts are not going to be able to respond to that default. As Klein points out, Hurricane Maria only killed 30 people, but then 3,000 more died “because of a failed health-care system and a failed electricity system and a failure of care in the months that followed.”

The debt pearl-clutchers are right: We *are* saddling our children and grandchildren with a bill they won’t be able to pay. But that bill doesn’t come from minting the money we need to save our species and civilization from the emergency on its doorstep — it comes from the false economy of skimping on climate and buying guard labor instead.

Image:
Cameron Strandberg (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fire-Forest.jpg

CC BY:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

chirpsy:

RAINBOW SCARABBEETLE

X X X X X X X X

mostlysignssomeportents:

The NSO Group are among the world’s most notorious cyber-mercenaries; they’re an Israeli firm under UK/EU private equity control (the owners have previously threatened to sue me and other journalists for reporting on the company’s ownership structure).

The company claims to be a “lawful interception” supplier, helping democratic, human-rights-respecting governments to spy on terrorists. Their extreme secrecy helps them sell this tale, but thanks to a group of academic human rights researchers, we know better.

For years, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab — a group of tech-savvy human rights defenders — have helped civil society groups defend themselves against cyber-threats from oppressive states. Don’t let the “cyber-threats” part fool you: digital surveillance is the prelude to mass arrests, disappearances, torture, and murder. It’s thanks to Citizen Lab that we know the truth about the NSO Group.

The truth, then: NSO isn’t in the counter-terrorism business. Its signature weapon, a devastating surveillance tool called Pegasus, has been used in at least 45 countries, including some of the world’s most brutal autocracies.

https://citizenlab.ca/2018/09/hide-and-seek-tracking-nso-groups-pegasus-spyware-to-operations-in-45-countries/

It has been widely deployed against human rights workers and journalists — more than 50,000 people have been attacked with NSO’s weapons:

https://www.occrp.org/en/the-pegasus-project/

There is no target too petty or insignificant for NSO’s customers. For example, NSO weapons were used against Mexican anti-sugar campaigners, and their young children:

https://citizenlab.ca/2017/06/reckless-exploit-mexico-nso/

The NSO Group’s intimidation tactics don’t stop with legal threats against journalists. After Citizen Lab broke a string of NSO Group stories, it was targeted by ex-Mossad “private security” mercenaries working for the same firm that did Harvey Weinstein’s black-bag operations:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/world/black-cube-nso-citizen-lab-intelligence.html

Wherever we find brutal autocrats, we find the NSO Group. Their tools were part of the Saudi royals’ plot to murder and dismember the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and were used again in a failed attempt to blackmail Jeff Bezos into ending the Washington Post’s investigation into the slaughter:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v74v34/saudi-arabia-hacked-jeff-bezos-phone-technical-report

The Saudi royals are a major NSO customer, and NSO tools like Pegasus are key to helping their secret police track down dissidents for detention, torture and murder.

The Saudi state doesn’t always know who those dissidents are, but they know which journalists they talk to. That’s why they used NSO Group’s Pegasus malware to hack the New York Times’s Ben Hubbard.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/insider/hacking-nso-surveillance.html

The technical forensics linking NSO surveillance to the hacks against Hubbard’s Iphone can be found in Citizen Lab’s new “Breaking the News” report:

https://citizenlab.ca/2021/10/breaking-news-new-york-times-journalist-ben-hubbard-pegasus/

Despite the damning evidence, the NSO Group insisted that its tools were not behind the attack, claiming that “contractual reasons and restrictions” made that impossible. It’s the same excuse the company gave last July when a consortium revealed 50,000 uses of its malware:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

NSO Group insists that its weapons are sold under the condition that they only be trained upon terrorists, thus whenever we discover them being used against journalists or dissidents, it can’t possibly be their weapons.

Last July, Edward Snowden published “The Insecurity Industry,” rebutting this claim:

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/ns-oh-god-how-is-this-legal

Snowden’s article reminded us that commercial surveillance and state surveillance can’t be disentangled. Companies like the NSO Group are legal because state actors depend on them, so any attempt to rein them in gets clobbered by spy agencies who lean on lawmakers to halt legislation.

According to Citizen Lab’s forensics, Hubbard’s Iphone was compromised with a “zero-click” exploit — a security vulnerability that could be exploited without any user interactions. These are the scariest kinds of security defects, since there’s nothing you, as the owner of an Iphone, can do to defend yourself against them.

Apple has patched that bug, thankfully, but it’s certainly not the last defect that will creep into the Iphone’s operating systems (indeed, similar defects might lurk in current versions). Apple often (and rightfully) boasts about its security prowess, but as this incident demonstrates, Apple alone can’t be trusted to secure its devices.

Schneier’s Law tells us that “anyone can design a security system that works so well that they themselves can’t think of a way of breaking it.” As with other forms of knowledge-creation, security is an adversarial process, requiring transparency and peer-review to validate its conclusions. There is no security in obscurity.

Apple has a managed process for security researchers, paying bounties in exchange for following a proscribed methodology, including restrictions on the timing and manner of disclosures. This is a great idea, but it’s not enough. As we see with the NSO Group hacks, Apple’s process misses defects that put its customers in mortal danger.

For obvious reasons, companies aren’t good stewards who gets to criticize their products, and how. It’s not that it’s impossible to report on a defect in irresponsible ways, but companies have an unresolvable conflict of interest that disqualifies them from deciding what constitutes “responsible” criticism.

Which is why it’s such bad news that companies — including Apple — have used legal intimidation to control the conduct of security researchers. Most recently, Apple attacked Corellium, a tool that allows independent security researchers to investigate the inner workers of Apple’s software to uncover defects.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/17/1032113/apple-says-researchers-can-vet-its-child-safety-features-its-suing-a-startup-that-does-just-that/

(Apple lost the suit, thankfully)

The NSO Group and other mercenaries don’t care whether Apple approves of their tactics. They will find and weaponize every error, and sell those weapons to monstrous tyrants. We can’t afford to let companies’ commercial priorities trump their users’ right to know about defects in their products.

Rather than directing its fire against security researchers who find and disclose its bugs, Apple should follow Whatsapp’s lead and sue the NSO Group for exploiting its technology:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x5nnz/nso-employees-take-legal-action-against-facebook-for-banning-their-accounts

It should terminate the accounts — personal and commercial — associated with NSO Group employees and executives and permanently bar them from using its services.

Last year, I published Attack Surface, the third novel in the Little Brother series, in which I tell the story of Masha, a young woman who works for a company like the NSO Group until she has a crisis of conscience.

At the time, I ran a series of virtual panels (“The Attack Surface Lectures”), exploring the themes in the book. The first one, hosted by the Strand, featured Citizen Lab founder Ron Deibert and EFF’s Eva Galperin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlORdWC3g3E

(here’s the audio)

https://ia801807.us.archive.org/27/items/asl-politics/Politics%20and%20Protest%20with%20Eva%20Galperin%20and%20Ron%20Deibert.mp3

Attack Surface just came out in paperback:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757517/attacksurface

My local bookstore, Dark Delicacies, has signed copies in stock and I drop by regularly to personalize them:

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Cory_Doctorow_-__Attack_Surface_HB_%26_TPB.html#/

Last year, I ran a Kickstarter campaign to produce an indie audiobook (outside of Audible’s DRM walled garden), read by Amber Benson. It was the most successful audiobook crowdfunding campaign in world history!

For the rest of this month, I’m selling an audio bundle featuring the audiobooks for all three Little Brother titles (read by Kirby Heyborne, Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson) for $30 (normally $70!).

https://sowl.co/uqT2G

13th-crew:

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt from this story from Earth Island Journal:

Long ago, the European brown bear roamed Scotland. So did herds of elk. Wolves traversed the islands, walruses populated the rugged coasts, and sea eagles soared over the moorlands. Birch, hazel, pine, and oak trees regally crowned throughout Scotland’s landscape. Woodlands, in fact, covered much of the country.

Scotland lost its bears to hunters and habitat loss by the tenth century. It lost its elk a few centuries later. The country’s last known wolf was shot and killed in 1743. The last sea eagle eggs were taken by an English vicar in 1916 and the last adult sea eagle was shot and killed in 1918. Walruses rarely make appearances along the coast. By 1900, woodland covered only about 5 percent of Scotland’s land area. Scotland today is nothing like Scotland was several centuries ago.

Activists, though, have planted seeds — literally and figuratively — to change that. To return the country, as much as it can be, to the vibrant natural home that it once was: one full of foxes and fescues; beaver and bees; capercaillies and cloudberries. To return it to a place that supports the species still present in the landscape, and then slowly reintroduce lost species over time.

Enter the Scotland Rewilding Alliance (SRA). The SRA, formed in 2019, is a collaboration of over 20 like-minded organizations that share a mission to enable rewilding at a scale new to Scotland. To not only conserve what little natural habitat remains in Scotland, but to expand it. Member organizations, such as Trees for Life, Woodland Trust Scotland, Rewilding Britain, Cairngorms Connect, South Uplands Partnership, Open Seas, and others, are asking the government to make Scotland the world’s first “rewilding nation” before Scotland hosts the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November by committing to a nationwide rewilding effort.

A Call for the World’s First Rewilding Nation

speciesofleastconcern:

redwineand12gaugeshells:

roald-ragin:

roald-ragin:

henpilled:

robin-hood-for-freedom:

cutthegordianknots-deactivated2:

insanemanor:

insanemanor:

duncanhynes:

NSA Key Words

Waihopai, INFOSEC, Information Security, Information Warfare, IW, IS, Priavacy, Information Terrorism, Terrorism Defensive Information, Defense Information Warfare, Offensive Information, Offensive Information Warfare, National Information Infrastructure, InfoSec, Reno, Compsec, Computer Terrorism, Firewalls, Secure Internet Connections, ISS, Passwords, DefCon V, Hackers, Encryption, Espionage, USDOJ, NSA, CIA, S/Key, SSL, FBI, Secert Service, USSS, Defcon, Military, White House, Undercover, NCCS, Mayfly, PGP, PEM, RSA, Perl-RSA, MSNBC, bet, AOL, AOL TOS, CIS, CBOT, AIMSX, STARLAN, 3B2, BITNET, COSMOS, DATTA, E911, FCIC, HTCIA, IACIS, UT/RUS, JANET, JICC, ReMOB, LEETAC, UTU, VNET, BRLO, BZ, CANSLO, CBNRC, CIDA, JAVA, Active X, Compsec 97, LLC, DERA, Mavricks, Meta-hackers, ^?, Steve Case, Tools, Telex, Military Intelligence, Scully, Flame, Infowar, Bubba, Freeh, Archives, Sundevil, jack, Investigation, ISACA, NCSA, spook words, Verisign, Secure, ASIO, Lebed, ICE, NRO, Lexis-Nexis, NSCT, SCIF, FLiR, Lacrosse, Flashbangs, HRT, DIA, USCOI, CID, BOP, FINCEN, FLETC, NIJ, ACC, AFSPC, BMDO, NAVWAN, NRL, RL, NAVWCWPNS, NSWC, USAFA, AHPCRC, ARPA, LABLINK, USACIL, USCG, NRC, ~, CDC, DOE, FMS, HPCC, NTIS, SEL, USCODE, CISE, SIRC, CIM, ISN, DJC, SGC, UNCPCJ, CFC, DREO, CDA, DRA, SHAPE, SACLANT, BECCA, DCJFTF, HALO, HAHO, FKS, 868, GCHQ, DITSA, SORT, AMEMB, NSG, HIC, EDI, SAS, SBS, UDT, GOE, DOE, GEO, Masuda, Forte, AT, GIGN, Exon Shell, CQB, CONUS, CTU, RCMP, GRU, SASR, GSG-9, 22nd SAS, GEOS, EADA, BBE, STEP, Echelon, Dictionary, MD2, MD4, MDA, MYK, 747,777, 767, MI5, 737, MI6, 757, Kh-11, Shayet-13, SADMS, Spetznaz, Recce, 707, CIO, NOCS, Halcon, Duress, RAID, Psyops, grom, D-11, SERT, VIP, ARC, S.E.T. Team, MP5k, DREC, DEVGRP, DF, DSD, FDM, GRU, LRTS, SIGDEV, NACSI, PSAC, PTT, RFI, SIGDASYS, TDM. SUKLO, SUSLO, TELINT, TEXTA. ELF, LF, MF, VHF, UHF, SHF, SASP, WANK, Colonel, domestic disruption, smuggle, 15kg, nitrate, Pretoria, M-14, enigma, Bletchley Park, Clandestine, nkvd, argus, afsatcom, CQB, NVD, Counter Terrorism Security, Rapid Reaction, Corporate Security, Police, sniper, PPS, ASIS, ASLET, TSCM, Security Consulting, High Security, Security Evaluation, Electronic Surveillance, MI-17, Counterterrorism, spies, eavesdropping, debugging, interception, COCOT, rhost, rhosts, SETA, Amherst, Broadside, Capricorn, Gamma, Gorizont, Guppy, Ionosphere, Mole, Keyhole, Kilderkin, Artichoke, Badger, Cornflower, Daisy, Egret, Iris, Hollyhock, Jasmine, Juile, Vinnell, B.D.M.,Sphinx, Stephanie, Reflection, Spoke, Talent, Trump, FX, FXR, IMF, POCSAG, Covert Video, Intiso, r00t, lock picking, Beyond Hope, csystems, passwd, 2600 Magazine, Competitor, EO, Chan, Alouette,executive, Event Security, Mace, Cap-Stun, stakeout, ninja, ASIS, ISA, EOD, Oscor, Merlin, NTT, SL-1, Rolm, TIE, Tie-fighter, PBX, SLI, NTT, MSCJ, MIT, 69, RIT, Time, MSEE, Cable & Wireless, CSE, Embassy, ETA, Porno, Fax, finks, Fax encryption, white noise, pink noise, CRA, M.P.R.I., top secret, Mossberg, 50BMG, Macintosh Security, Macintosh Internet Security, Macintosh Firewalls, Unix Security, VIP Protection, SIG, sweep, Medco, TRD, TDR, sweeping, TELINT, Audiotel, Harvard, 1080H, SWS, Asset, Satellite imagery, force, Cypherpunks, Coderpunks, TRW, remailers, replay, redheads, RX-7, explicit, FLAME, Pornstars, AVN, Playboy, Anonymous, Sex, chaining, codes, Nuclear, 20, subversives, SLIP, toad, fish, data havens, unix, c, a, b, d, the, Elvis, quiche, DES, 1*, NATIA, NATOA, sneakers, counterintelligence, industrial espionage, PI, TSCI, industrial intelligence, H.N.P., Juiliett Class Submarine, Locks, loch, Ingram Mac-10, sigvoice, ssa, E.O.D., SEMTEX, penrep, racal, OTP, OSS, Blowpipe, CCS, GSA, Kilo Class, squib, primacord, RSP, Becker, Nerd, fangs, Austin, Comirex, GPMG, Speakeasy, humint, GEODSS, SORO, M5, ANC, zone, SBI, DSS, S.A.I.C., Minox, Keyhole, SAR, Rand Corporation, Wackenhutt, EO, Wackendude, mol, Hillal, GGL, CTU, botux, Virii, CCC, Blacklisted 411, Internet Underground, XS4ALL, Retinal Fetish, Fetish, Yobie, CTP, CATO, Phon-e, Chicago Posse, l0ck, spook keywords

PLA, TDYC, W3, CUD, CdC, Weekly World News, Zen, World Domination, Dead, GRU, M72750, Salsa, 7, Blowfish, Gorelick, Glock, Ft. Meade, press-release, Indigo, wire transfer, e-cash, Bubba the Love Sponge, Digicash, zip, SWAT, Ortega, PPP, crypto-anarchy, AT&T, SGI, SUN, MCI, Blacknet, Middleman, KLM, Blackbird, plutonium, Texas, jihad, SDI, Uzi, Fort Meade, supercomputer, bullion, 3, Blackmednet, Propaganda, ABC, Satellite phones, Planet-1, cryptanalysis, nuclear, FBI, Panama, fissionable, Sears Tower, NORAD, Delta Force, SEAL, virtual, Dolch, secure shell, screws, Black-Ops, Area51, SABC, basement, data-haven, black-bag, TEMPSET, Goodwin, rebels, ID, MD5, IDEA, garbage, market, beef, Stego, unclassified, utopia, orthodox, Alica, SHA, Global, gorilla, Bob, Pseudonyms, MITM, Gray Data, VLSI, mega, Leitrim, Yakima, Sugar Grove, Cowboy, Gist, 8182, Gatt, Platform, 1911, Geraldton, UKUSA, veggie, 3848, Morwenstow, Consul, Oratory, Pine Gap, Menwith, Mantis, DSD, BVD, 1984, Flintlock, cybercash, government, hate, speedbump, illuminati, president, freedom, cocaine, $, Roswell, ESN, COS, E.T., credit card, b9, fraud, assasinate, virus, anarchy, rogue, mailbomb, 888, Chelsea, 1997, Whitewater, MOD, York, plutonium, William Gates, clone, BATF, SGDN, Nike, Atlas, Delta, TWA, Kiwi, PGP 2.6.2., PGP 5.0i, PGP 5.1, siliconpimp, Lynch, 414, Face, Pixar, IRIDF, eternity server, Skytel, Yukon, Templeton, LUK, Cohiba, Soros, Standford, niche, 51, H&K, USP, ^, sardine, bank, EUB, USP, PCS, NRO, Red Cell, Glock 26, snuffle, Patel, package, ISI, INR, INS, IRS, GRU, RUOP, GSS, NSP, SRI, Ronco, Armani, BOSS, Chobetsu, FBIS, BND, SISDE, FSB, BfV, IB, froglegs, JITEM, SADF, advise, TUSA, HoHoCon, SISMI, FIS, MSW, Spyderco, UOP, SSCI, NIMA, MOIS, SVR, SIN, advisors, SAP, OAU, PFS, Aladdin, chameleon man, Hutsul, CESID, Bess, rail gun, Peering, 17, 312, NB, CBM, CTP, Sardine, SBIRS, SGDN, ADIU, DEADBEEF, IDP, IDF, Halibut, SONANGOL, Flu, &, Loin, PGP 5.53, EG&G, AIEWS, AMW, WORM, MP5K-SD, 1071, WINGS, cdi, DynCorp, UXO, Ti, THAAD, package, chosen, PRIME, SURVIAC

So basically, anyone who has ever used Google.

I’m half tempted to just copy paste this entire list into Google

junk data is extremely important

Would you like to know more?

There’s a nifty extension called “TrackMeNot” that sends junk queries out for you. You can tell it whether or not it can use spooky keywords like above or not, as you choose. Every little bit helps!

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

French oil giant Total knew that its fossil fuel extraction could contribute to global warming as early as 1971 but stayed silent about it until 1988, according to a new study.

Research published today in the journal Global Environmental Change, based on internal company documents and interviews with former staff, found that personnel “received warnings of the potential for catastrophic global warming from its products by 1971.”

Total – which this year rebranded as TotalEnergies – “became more fully informed” about climate change in the 1980s and “began promoting doubt regarding the scientific basis for global warming by the late 1980s”. The company publicly accepted climate science in the 1990s but promoted “policy delay or policies peripheral to fossil fuel control”, the authors found.

The research – which has sparked the hashtag #Totalknew on social media – follows similar revelations about ExxonMobil and Shell in recent years which exposed how companies were aware of the impact of their emissions on the climate as early as the 1980s.

Today’s study also finds that ExxonMobil “coordinated an international campaign to dispute climate science and weaken international climate policy, beginning in the 1980s” through the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (IPIECA).

“These revelations provide proof that TotalEnergies and the other oil and gas majors have stolen the precious time of a generation to stem the climate crisis”, climate justice campaign groups 350.org and Notre Affaire à Tous said in a joint statement.

French Oil Company Total ‘Knew About Global Warming Impact in 1971’, Study Finds

rudydesouza:

mosertone:

Two dema (ghost) performers during a ceremony - Merauke, Papua, Indonesia, circa 1910. The mask on the left represents a dog, while the one on the right a fish. © Leiden University.

albarrancabrera:

Albarran Cabrera   —–   Instagram

The Mouth of Krishna

2019, #902 Cyanotype emulsion on gold

thevaultoftheatomicspaceage:

rjzimmerman:

albarrancabrera:

“What is photography for? In what situations? In answer to whose desire to see?  To see what? In order to do what? When? Is it really about seeing something or about doing something else through a photograph?  What else?  Something with others or with ourselves?”
- Lyle Rexer, “Ways of Waiting”

We are happy to announce that our new monograph is finally available:
“The World’s First Photobook was Blue” 📘

Editors: @irastehmann, @themthemthemthem and @ibasho___gallery
Writer: @lylerexer
Designers: @studio_des_signes
Printing house:@robstolk.amsterdam
Thank you all!

We wanted to create a book not about what we do or how we do it, but why we do it. A book without a beginning or and end, without a specific cover (that is why this book has three), and where the text talks about why we photograph and not about the images per se.

The title is a nod to Anna Atkins, the binding a nod to Brassaï and the entire book is a homage to this deceptively simple but really complex medium which is photography.

cryptonature:

The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance.

video link

research-and-development:

video showcase: “Farmers Manual at Cafe Oto (2015)” by Heather Blaire

guided mediation, but with loud noises. i like the lights.

punkaralho:

piglii:

piglii:

hey real quick can anybody help me find this image that I’ve seen before here on tumblr. it looks like this

the button doesn’t necessarily say “Elucidate the Rapture” but it does say something that’s kind of lengthy and has religious connotations. the woman pushing the button has an expression of indescribable smugness. there might be other buttons on the machine (?) she is pressing.

FOUND IT

This is hilarious

foone:

My latest project is a custom set of keyboard caps

rjzimmerman:

This is a strange story….creatures sort of “coming to life” (i.e., hatching) after a monsoon creates a pond where they’ve been waiting to emerge for a long time. Imagine if these were big things with sharp teeth………

One of the triops — a small, three-eyed crustacean — from the ball court pond at Wupatki National Monument in Arizona. (Image credit: L.Carter/NPS)

Excerpt from this story from Live Science:

Following a torrential summer downpour in northern Arizona, hundreds of bizarre, prehistoric-looking critters emerged from tiny eggs and began swimming around a temporary lake on the desert landscape, according to officials at Wupatki National Monument.

These tadpole-size creatures, called Triops “look like little mini-horseshoe crabs with three eyes,” Lauren Carter, lead interpretation ranger at Wupatki National Monument, told Live Science. Their eggs can lie dormant for decades in the desert until enough rainfall falls to create lakes that provide real estate and time for the hatchlings to mature and lay eggs for the next generation, according to Central Michigan University.

Triops’ appearances are so uncommon, that when tourists reported seeing them at a temporary, rain-filled lake within the monument’s ceremonial ball court — a circular walled structure 105 feet (32 meters) across — the monument’s staff weren’t sure what to make of the critters.

Following a monsoon in late July, “We knew that there was water in the ball court, but we weren’t expecting anything living in it,” Carter said. “Then a visitor came up and said, ‘Hey, you have tadpoles down in your ballcourt.’”

At first, Carter wondered if toads, which live in underground burrows during the dry season, had emerged during the wet spell to lay eggs. To investigate, she went to the ballcourt, which was originally built by the Indigenous people at Wupatki.

“I just scooped it up with my hand and looked at it and was like ‘What is that?’ I had no idea,” Carter said. But then, she felt an inkling of familiarity; Carter had previously worked at Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona, and recalled reports of Triops there. “And then I had to look it up,” she said.

Hundreds of three-eyed ‘dinosaur shrimp’ emerge after Arizona monsoon

thevaultoftheatomicspaceage:

Airship, Morvern, Argyll, Scotland,Designed by Roderick James

carvalhais:

Thinking about wholes and parts in this way is a key component of good old-fashioned art appreciation theory. A work of art is a whole, and this whole contains many parts — the materials out of which it’s made being just one of them. We could include the interpretative horizons of the art’s consumers, for example, and the contexts in which the art materials were assembled — a highly explosive concept, as we saw earlier. In this way it’s obvious that there are so many more parts than there is whole. In an age of ecological awareness there is no one scale to rule them all. This means that art and art appreciation won’t stay still, in the way that a lot of art theory (for instance in Kant) wants. And in the absence of a single authoritative (anthropocentric) standard of taste with which to judge art, how we regard it is also about how wholes are always less than the sums of their parts. A work of art is also a transparent bag full of eyes. There is something inherently weird, even disgusting, about beauty itself, and this weirdness gets mixed back in when we consider things in an ecological way. this is because beauty just happens, without our ego cooking it up. The experience of beauty itself is an entity that isn’t ‘me’. This means that the experience has an intrinsic weirdness to it. This is why other people’s taste might come across as bizarre or kitschy. Morton, Timothy. Being Ecological. London: Pelican Books, 2018.

afutureworththinkingabout:

I’m Not Afraid of AI Overlords— I’m Afraid of Whoever’s Training Them To Think That Way

by Damien P. Williams

I want to let you in on a secret: According to Silicon Valley’s AI’s, I’m not human.

Well, maybe they think I’m human, but they don’t think I’m me. Or, if they think I’m me and that I’m human, they think I don’t deserve expensive medical care. Or that I pose a higher risk of criminal recidivism. Or that my fidgeting behaviours or culturally-perpetuated shame about my living situation or my race mean I’m more likely to be cheating on a test. Or that I want to see morally repugnant posts that my friends have commented on to call morally repugnant. Or that I shouldn’t be given a home loan or a job interview or the benefits I need to stay alive.

Now, to be clear, “AI” is a misnomer, for several reasons, but we don’t have time, here, to really dig into all the thorny discussion of values and beliefs about what it means to think, or to be a mind— especially because we need to take our time talking about why values and beliefs matter to conversations about “AI,” at all. So instead of “AI,” let’s talk specifically about algorithms, and machine learning.

Machine Learning (ML) is the name for a set of techniques for systematically reinforcing patterns, expectations, and desired outcomes in various computer systems. These techniques allow those systems to make sought after predictions based on the datasets they’re trained on. ML systems learn the patterns in these datasets and then extrapolate them to model a range of statistical likelihoods of future outcomes.

Algorithms are sets of instructions which, when run, perform functions such as searching, matching, sorting, and feeding the outputs of any of those processes back in on themselves, so that a system can learn from and refine itself. This feedback loop is what allows algorithmic machine learning systems to provide carefully curated search responses or newsfeed arrangements or facial recognition results to consumers like me and you and your friends and family and the police and the military. And while there are many different types of algorithms which can be used for the above purposes, they all remain sets of encoded instructions to perform a function.

And so, in these systems’ defense, it’s no surprise that they think the way they do: That’s exactly how we’ve told them to think.

[Image of Michael Emerson as Harold Finch, in season 2, episode 1 of the show Person of Interest, “The Contingency.” His face is framed by a box of dashed yellow lines, the words “Admin” to the top right, and “Day 1” in the lower right corner.]

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Read the rest of I’m Not Afraid of AI Overlords— I’m Afraid of Whoever’s Training Them To Think That Way at A Future Worth Thinking About

moji:

TYPEFACE 　　TYPEFACE2 　　TYPEFACE3 　　TYPEFACE4

ambigram 　　Bibliothek　　　Metamorphose　　　活字合金

jacket　　Calligraphy　　　power of words　　　キネマ文字

furiousgoldfish:

How to spot a smear campaign:

• Victims’s “crimes” will be enlarged, and even if they’re small missteps, they will be treated as if only the worst person on the planet would do such a thing
• Accusations against the victim will always be a reach, aka, they did ‘this little thing’ but it actually means they’re a racist/murderer/genocide supporter/fascist/have blood on their hands, even when the person’s actions never conformed to those crimes
• All and any actions of the victims will be misenterpreted in the worst possible way, anything the person does will be taken as an offense and intentions will be read as hostile and manipulative, regardless of how clear they are
• All victim’s actions will be taken out of context; ie, victim said something cruel to someone, but they take out the context of the victim being abused, threatened, tortured, forced into defense mode and finally attacking out of desperation to defend themselves and get free
• The victim will commonly get provoked into giving a bad reaction, (anyone gets defensive if they’re accused of the crimes they never did, or simply triggering insults until they snap), and the reaction will become the new ‘proof’ that the victim is in fact, evil and guilty
• A lot of pressure will be put on you to react 'correctly’ to the smear campaign; if you don’t accept to demonize this person at once, you’re getting scrutinized, shamed for your lack of morality, told that you support all these horrid things and that you are just as despicable
• You will notice a trend of people ganging together based on their demonization of the victim; they will set a standard where you’re accepted and welcome if only you also will demonize and hate this person, and if you don’t, you’re blocked, cast out, and accused of causing harm
• It will feel very easy to accept to demonize this person, and going against it will feel risky, like going against the grain, doubting the word of the many and risking being demonized yourself.
• The smear campaign continues all the way until the victim is chased out of the community and denied a voice, even if the victim commits no further crimes, awful things will be said about them, their past 'misdeeds’ continually brought up, until the victim is commonly believed to be worthless, and becomes completely isolated, scared of society and alone
• There will be no limit to what is considered okay to do to the victim of a smear campaign; even if the victim is accused of minor bad behaviour, it will become okay to threaten, insult, shout slurs, trigger, provoke, humiliate, manipulate, and repeat any kind of abusive behaviour to the victim, all because 'they’re bad so they deserve it’.
• People leading the smear campaign will switch between being 'extremely grossed out and enraged’ to showing absolute joy and satisfaction when they find a new reason to demonize and smear the victim. People truly horrified of someone’s actions do not get a leap of joy when a new disaster happens, they’re not beside themselves to abuse the perpetrator all over again.
• It will never, ever be acceptable to show any mercy to the victim. Forgiveness is out of the question, trying to understand them is out of the question. Even reading or listening to what this person is saying will be banned and forbidden, unless it’s for humiliating purposes. They will be shown as absolutely irredeemable, and associating yourself with them as evil and unforgivable. You will be instructed to block or unfollow or report the person based on what you’re told, without any significant proof.

Do not fall for smear campaigns. If a large amount of people all agree that a person is the worst, but their story is exaggerated, out of context, sounds fictional, and doesn’t show any proof, and the people switch from being enraged to eager, doubt it. Participating in a smear campaign will help the abusers isolate and abuse someone, and you do not want to be a part of it. They will also smear anyone who stands up to their abuse, so you’re helping the abusers to create a place where pointing out abuse gets you cast out of the community.

awlwren:

prorochestvo:

Esther scroll in fish-like case, Eastern Europe, 19th century, The Jewish Museum, London

[id: a fish made of silver, with a scroll unrolled from its belly - the other edge of which is also silver with fins attached. The scroll has a justified block of text in unpointed Hebrew square script.]/end id.

rjzimmerman:

I am sitting here, indoors, in our Palm Springs house. The neighbor’s landscapers are out there with their fucking leaf blowers, which are gas-powered notwithstanding a city ordinance banning gas-powered blowers. It’s maddening. But not just here….back in Illinois, same thing. I hate those things.

Excerpt from this Wall Street Journal story:

Welcome to fall, which means one thing: leaf blowers.

The leaf blower is to suburban life what the 3:30 a.m. rave in the short-term-rental apartment upstairs is to city life. They happen. They are completely out of your control. They make you want to commit murder.

To be fair to leaf blowers, there are lots of things that make noise in the suburbs. Lawn mowers, garbage trucks, generators and Joe, the old guy down the street with the jacked-up Dodge Ram 1500 Hemi with a Flowmaster Super 10. They all cause a certain amount of country-style agita. But no other suburban noisemaker has the ability to infuriate as quickly and thoroughly as a leaf blower can, even if your local noise ordinances restrict their use to the hours between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Gas or electric, it makes little difference. Both are loud—up to 100 dB at 50 feet, or the equivalent of a chainsaw. The gas variety has the added benefit of belching exhaust fumes all over the neighborhood. And they are hellishly ubiquitous in the ‘burbs.

Is there a sound in the world more annoying than that of a leaf blower? It’s basically a gas- or electric-powered mosquito attached to the world’s largest megaphone, and the mosquito was already designed to produce the single most annoying sound in the world. Yet, mankind has managed to amp up, to an excruciating level, what nature had already made unbearable. Thanks, Mankind.

In addition to the volume of noise it makes (the window that can block the sound hasn’t been invented), the leaf blower is an auditory water torture. First, it’s ON at an ear-breaking, entirely too-close range, getting louder, then softer, then louder then…OFF. Is it done? Can I turn the TV back on or resume my telephone conversation? Can I relax—ON! EVEN LOUDER THAN BEFORE! As long as this torment continues, all other life activities cease as you wait and wait for it to be over…then wait for it to begin again. You’ll be mentally exhausted by the time the final leaf is blown.

Here’s Why Leaf Blowers Are Evil Incarnate

video link

Witness the majesty of moths taking flight at 6,000 frames per second

(via aeon)

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt from this story from Vox:

Has the climate movement failed?

It’s hard to look at the world at this moment and not conclude that the answer is yes. Despite all the activism, despite all the protests, despite all the warnings, the world is still in many ways hostage to the fossil fuel industry.

A new book by Andreas Malm, a professor of human ecology at Sweden’s Lund University, asks a simple but perplexing question: Given the stakes, why hasn’t the global climate movement become far more radical than it is?

It’s a fair question. If we as a species were serious, if we really believed what we already know about climate change, we would be doing everything humanly possible to shift course. And yet we’re not. Even the most ambitious policy proposals on the table, with little chance of passing, are scarcely sufficient. This is the starting point of Malm’s book, and if you follow his logic it leads to some conclusions you may find uncomfortable.

He says it bluntly: We should “[d]amage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.” For Malm, we have a choice: Destroy the property that’s destroying the planet, or sacrifice the Earth on the altar of that property.

Malm’s book — it’s titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline — is obviously meant to provoke. But embedded in the provocation is a morally serious challenge to how we think about, and act on, the crisis humanity faces. And to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how I feel about it. For instance, I think his summons to violence vastly overstates our ability to “control” such violence once it’s unleashed. I’m also less confident in the strategic utility of violence (even if it’s limited to the destruction of property, as Malm recommends) considering the enormous blowback that might result from it.

The case for a more radical climate movement

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

The future of forests is a grim one—too grim for some of us to bear. By 2030, 75 percent of redwoods will disappear from some of their coastal California habitats. In some climate scenarios, almost none of the namesake species in Joshua Tree National Park will exist. Sea level change is creating ghost forests all along the Eastern Seaboard — already, less than a third of New Jersey’s Atlantic white cedar habitat remains.

Like humans, forests have always migrated for their survival, with new trees growing in more hospitable directions and older trees dying where they are no longer best suited to live. The problem now is that they simply can’t move fast enough. The average forest migrates at a rate of roughly 1,640 feet each year, but to outrun climate change, it must move approximately 9,800 to 16,000 feet — up to 10 times as fast. And in most habitats, the impact of highways, suburban sprawl, and megafarms prevents forests from expanding much at all. Forests simply cannot escape climate change by themselves.

Back in 1992, forest geneticists F. Thomas Ledig and J.H. Kitzmiller coined the term “assisted species migration” in a seminal study in the journal Forest Ecology and Management. Since then, hundreds of biologists and geneticists like St. Clair have been studying how best to move forests in advance of their looming destruction. To do so requires a complex set of mapping and experiments—understanding, for instance, what climate trees are best suited to grow in, what region will most closely resemble that same climate in, say, 50 years, and what adaptations best ensure that a tree will take root and flourish, build symbiosis with the soil fungi, and not end up a mere matchstick awaiting the next megafire.

St. Clair is something of an assisted migration evangelist, a firm believer that we need to move tree populations, and fast, if we want to keep apace. But due to bureaucratic logjams and a fervent commitment to planting native species, there’s very little assisted migration in the United States — unlike in Canada, where the practice has been adopted with more urgency in recent years. St. Clair and other Forest Service scientists are working to transform assisted migration from a mere research subject to a standard management strategy in our vast, imperiled public lands.

Can we move our forests in time to save them?

zzzze:

Gertrud Arndt (German born Poland, 1903-2000)

Masked Self-Portrait (No. 16), 1930

Gelatin silver print

archatlas:

The Art of Hiroshi Yoshida

Hiroshi Yoshida was a 20th-century Japanese painter and woodblock printmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the shin-hanga style, and is noted especially for his excellent landscape prints. Yoshida travelled widely, and was particularly known for his images of non-Japanese subjects done in traditional Japanese woodblock style.

mostlysignssomeportents:

Writing in Wired, Institute for Local Self Reliance researcher and anti-monopolist Ron Knox gives a thorough, important account of how music industry monoplization resulted declining revenue for artists, even as the industry itself has reaped greater profits.

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-big-music-needs-to-be-broken-up-to-save-the-industry/

Importantly, Knox describes how concentration has come to every link in music’s supply chain, from radio to recording, streaming to live performance. The monopolists who dominate these sectors fight fiercely between each other, but no matter who wins, artists lose.

Let’s go segment by segment. Two thirds of all North American music comes from three labels. The labels grew through anticompetitive mergers: giant companies, awash in investor cash, bought out mid-sized, successful labels, turning them into subdivisions of the Big Three.

The more concentrated the labels got, the worse they were for everyone. They spent the nineties and naughties price-gouging record companies, pocketing hundreds of millions from an illegal price-fixing conspiracy. The fines they paid were smaller than the profits they reaped.

But at least they distributed music. Today, the struggling physical record store industry — a network of passionate music sellers who serve the most intense music fans — find themselves getting “record shipments” that turn out to be boxes of random stuff like cough syrup (!).

That happened when the Big Three all piled their distribution into a single company, the monopolist Direct Shot Distributing. As Direct Shot started to fail, its operations descended into chaos, and record stores started to receive boxes of random consumer packaged goods.

It was bad news for the non-monopolized, music-first record stores, but it barely registered for the Big Three labels — today, they buy an average of two new acts every day.

The labels don’t make money from selling records, of course. They get their money from streaming.

Streaming is also massively concentrated, gathered into the hands of just a few companies: Spotify, Apple, Youtube, Amazon — with the notable exception of Spotify, the industry is dominated by companies that also monopolize other sectors.

Monopolies are good to these companies. Spotify’s market-cap doubled during the pandemic — the market values its 150m subs (twice as many as subscribe with Apple) at $50b. The major labels get $1m/hour from streaming. 99% of their artists see $25/year in streaming royalties.

Spotify may be the biggest streaming service, but it’s not the lowest-paying. Youtube — a Google division, whose unsuccessful attempt to launch an in-house video service convinced it that it had to buy someone else’s success — drives the worst bargain.

Spotify uses its industry dominance to extract heavy fees from the labels — creaming 30% of the total revenue generated by a typical track. Big Three monopolists with fat margins can absorb this. Indies? Not so much.

Spotify’s market cap growth is in part due to the new ways it’s come up with to shake down the labels — a variety of tactics that all boil down to one thing: payola. Spotify will sell labels pop-up ads, placement in “radio” algorithms, and access to “Discovery mode.”

Like all forms of payola, Spotify’s rate-card is a way for monopolists to edge out indies, buying their way into your ear-holes. I’m sure that the Big Three would rather keep the bribes they pay to Spotiify, but the consolation prize is pretty sweet.

If the Big Three are the only ones who can afford to buy access to Spotify’s audience, then creators are driven to sign with them, and have less bargaining leverage when they negotiate their deals.

Spotify, meanwhile, can consolidate its gains by driving up those fees, pitting labels against each other in a bidding war for access to listeners. This effectively drives down the royalty rate Spotify pays, because every new track will have to buy in to get any reach.

Spotify talks a good game about how it uses big data and machine learning to pick the songs you hear, but increasingly, the algorithm is getting far less compute-intensive, a simple sort-by-highest-bidder system you could operate from a laptop running Windows 3.1 and Excel.

In theory, streaming losses can be made up with touring. Acts who attain digital popularity can charge access at the door to clubs and other venues. The only problem is that live performance is also a monopoly business.

The 800lb gorilla there is Livenation, a division of the ticket monopolist and notorious arm-breakers Ticketmaster — spun out of Clear Channel, the monopolist that we now know as Iheartradio.

Livenation parlayed its access to the capital markets to buy out $1b worth of venues and promoters, before being acquired by Clear Channel for $4.4b in 2005. Today, it’s a division of Liberty Media, consolidated with Ticketmaster, Pandora, and Siriusxm.

What goes around, comes around: Liberty’s private equity owners are in the process of buying up Iheartradio, re-merging all of Clear Channel’s spinouts into one giga-monopolist.

The conglomerate already coerces artists to book exclusively in its clubs and using its ticketing, starving independent venues. Add 850 terrestrial radio stations to the mix and it will choke off all the oxygen that independent venues, promoters and ticketers rely on.

Liberty didn’t buy all these companies because it’s passionate about music and wanted to ensure artists got a fair shake. By rolling up the entire live music/radio supply-chain, it bought the power to extract vast sums from musicians, and to keep rivals out of the market.

Well, not all competitors. Lollapalooza co-founder Marc Geiger raised tens of millions for “Savelive,” a new would-be monopolist that offered to “rescue” live music venues in exchange for a 51% stake in them.

Savelive illustrates an important point about the nature of monopolies: they beget more monopolies. Consolidation in the labels meant that only the largest streaming companies could negotiate a sustainable rate.

But consolidation in radio drives consolidation in labels — and many of the indie radio stations that survived the first wave of consolidation were picked up cheap by Iheartradio once monopolistic streamers ate their lunch.

This is a pattern across the whole entertainment industry: bookstore mergers and big box retailers drove consolidation in publishing; that was accelerated by consolidation in online ebook and physical book retail.

It’s not limited to the entertainment sector either. As David Dayen describes in his essential book MONOPOLIZED, hospitals didn’t start consolidating until the pharma industry underwent a wave of brutal mergers and started gouging for drugs.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

Hospital consolidation led to gouging insurers, leading to a wave of insurance consolidation. Today, nearly every part of the health industry is monopolized, from pharmacy benefit managers to medical labs.

The only parts of the supply chain that doesn’t monopolize — that can’t monopolize — are the ends of the chain: the people who work in the system, and the people who use it.

Monopoly punishes doctors and nurses and other health workers — and it punishes patients.

It punishes writers and publishing workers, and it punishes readers.

It punishes musicians and independent venue owners, and it punishes listeners.

When every part of the supply chain gets so monopolized that it can’t easily be squeezed by any other part of the supply chain, these giants turn on us — the workers and users of the system. We, the atomized and fragmented, cannot resist the squeeze.

But as Knox writes, the tide is turning. After 40 years of waving through anticompetitive mergers in the name of “efficiency,” the DoJ and FTC are under new management, with two-fisted trustbusters like Lina M Khan at the helm.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

This new cohort of monopoly fighters reject the “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust (the idea that monopolies drive prices down and are therefore good for society), going to war against the hegemonic orthodoxy that began with Ronald Reagan.

https://doctorow.medium.com/epic-v-apple-d3e59893b4f3

The new antitrust is surging, with bills in the House and Senate, executive orders from the White House, regulatory proceedings at the DoJ and FTC, and an interagency-cabinet coordination committee that ties it all together.

This new antitrust promises workers and users of monopolized industries a better alternative than rooting for one giant to beat another in hopes that they will drop a few crumbs for the rest of us to enjoy.

Creative workers don’t have to choose between Big Tech and Big Content based on their assessment of which monopolist will abuse them the least. Instead, we can root for antimonopoly, for giant-slaying, and the right to self-determination.

The most important immediate step towards that future is blocking new anticompetitive mergers, like Sony’s bid for AWAL, or Liberty Media’s use of a $500m SPAC to go on a vertical monopoly shopping spree.

The agencies have the power to stop these. They should. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

But ending anticompetitive mergers won’t get us out of that hole: most industries (from beer to cheerleader uniforms to wresting to eyeglasses) are already monopolized.

The new trustbusters — and the ILSR — want to use antitrust law to break up these conglomerates. I think that’s right: vertical monopolies will always engage in self-dealing to the detriment of independents, workers and customers. Break. Them. Up.

But breaking up is hard to do. When the DoJ tried to break up IBM, the company’s lawyers outspent the entire DoJ antitrust division, every single year, for twelve consecutive years, and in the end, it escaped breakup.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. IBM escaped justice because Reagan was elected and neutered antitrust. And even though it remained intact, it was never the same — for one thing, it decided that it was too risky to make its own PC OS.

IBM knew that antitrust enforcers were very suspicious of tying software to hardware — so it tapped a couple of hacker kids, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, to sell it DOS, from their new company “Micro-Soft.”

Unfortunately for all of us, antitrust enforcement only declined after that, so IBM was able to return to its monopolistic ways, and Microsoft escaped from antitrust scrutiny after a mere seven years in regulatory hell.

Antitrust enforcement can sap monopolists of the will to power, as they become increasingly concerned that their actions will attract aggressive legal reprisals.

Think of how Apple “lost” the Epic lawsuit but still “voluntarily” rescinded its heretofore hard rule against apps providing links to web-pages where you can use third-party payment processors to make purchases.

As monopolists lose their nerve, space opens up for all kinds of pro-worker, pro-user interventions, far beyond those afforded by traditional antitrust.

Next year, Beacon Press will publish THE SHAKEDOWN, a book I co-wrote with Rebecca Giblin about the monopolistic corruption of creative labor markets and how creative workers, regulators and fans can resist it.

The Shakedown catalogs the ways that monopolization of investment, distribution and sale of creative works allows entertainment companies, Big Tech, and major retailers to shift an ever-larger share of the creative industry’s revenues from workers to themselves.

More importantly, we identify tools beyond breakups that we can use to de-monopolize the industry — things we can do right now, without having to wait for the conclusion of an antitrust suit that might run for decades.

Take reversion rights: many copyright systems allow creators to take back their rights after a set period (35 years in the US). This lets artists who signed bad deals — before they were proven successes — to resell their catalog or extract reparations by threatening to.

But reversion is really hard to do, and 35 years is way too long. Only an handful of creators — even those with valuable catalogs that could be renewed through reversion — ever manage it.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/06/backsies/#take-backs

Congress (and other legislatures around the world, including Canada, where this is likely to come up in the new Parliament) could fix reversion: make it easier to do, and make it available after a shorter period — say, 14 years.

And what about those bad contracts? The “freedom to contract” has always been subject to limits, where some clauses are deemed unenforceable “as against public policy” or because they are “unconscionable.”

With the entertainment sector consolidated into just a couple of states, state legislatures could act to void the most abusive clauses — for example, clauses that allow labels to claw back royalties indefinitely to recoup (often inflated or fictitious) “expenses.”

Our book explores dozens of these kinds of ideas, from co-operatives to trade unions; better accounting practices and direct arts subsidies; radical interoperability and collective licensing; minimum wages for creative labor and collective bargaining.

None of these are replacement for reducing the size and power of conglomerates throughout the supply chain, but all of them are interventions we can make as the power and nerve of conglomerates declines, changes that will hasten that decline and open more space for breakups.

And all of them are applicable, to a greater or lesser extent, to helping workers and users of all the other consolidated industries, from health care to cheerleading.

For example, expanding California’s ban on noncompete clauses would help fast-food workers nationwide — because today, fast food employers are the most aggressive abusers of noncompetes.

That means that a fried chicken cashier earning the tipped minimum wage can’t quit to work at a burger joint across the street for a $0.25/hour raise. Creative workers aren’t the only ones suffering from monopolization — we’re not even the worst off.

But by definition, creative workers have a platform. We reach people. We have the potential to help form the kind of unstoppable coalition that we’ll need to reverse the generations of oligarchic, post-Reagan consolidation.

You may have heard about how Danish McDonald’s workers earn $22/hour and get six weeks’ paid vacation and sick leave. That didn’t come about because McDonald’s was required by law to pay it.

It was worker solidarity that did it. As Matt Bruenig writes, McDonald’s initially refused to sign the voluntary “hotel and restaurant” collective agreement. So its workers went on strike.

https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-denmark/

Now, if McD’s workers had struck alone, they’d probably have lost. But Danish law allows for sympathy strikes — that is, it allows workers in other parts of the supply chain to take industrial action to support their sisters and brothers who are striking.

When the McD’s workers walked out in 1989, sixteen other sectoral unions joined them. They didn’t just help picket at leaflet in front of McD’s restaurants!

Dockworkers wouldn’t unload McD’s shipments. Printers wouldn’t print their cups and placemats.

Builders downed tools on McDonald’s construction projects. Typesetters wouldn’t set the McD’s ads in the daily papers. Truckers wouldn’t deliver to McD’s restaurants. Food industry workers wouldn’t produce the drink syrups, fries and other inputs to the McDonald’s kitchens.

McD’s caved.

Now, as Bruenig points out, these kinds of sympathy strikes are illegal in the US, but it’s a mistake to think that workers don’t have power because sympathy strikes are illegal — rather, sympathy strikes are illegal because workers don’t have power.

Workers across all sectors face the same kinds of monopolistic exploitation. Workers across all sectors have a common enemy (literally, thanks to “common ownership” where companies like Vanguard and Berkshire Hathaway hold significant stakes in almost every major company).

With a shared cause, shared tactics, solidarity and a renewed sense that we can do more than root for the giant we think will mistreat us the least, creative workers and their sisters and brothers in every sector can reverse generations of losses.

That’s why the new antitrust matters — because it is an assault on the consolidation that gives all industries the power to shift money and other forms of value from workers and users to a small elite of investors.

dailyoverview:

Farmland plains meet the Nebraska Sand Hills just north of Lexington, Nebraska. This unique region, which covers roughly 20,000 square miles (51,000 square km), contains mixed-grass prairies and grass-stabilized sand dunes. Average elevation here gradually increases from 1,800 feet (550 m) in the east to nearly 3,600 feet (1,100 m) in the west, as the sand hills approach the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

See more here: https://bit.ly/39fWR9k

40.864476°, -99.743275°

Source imagery: Maxar

oatmilkcore:

“Greetings to the Universe in 55 Different Languages”, a poem arranged out ofmessages from the Voyager spacecraft

thevaultoftheatomicspaceage:

fuckyeahfluiddynamics:

The Venus’s flower basket is a sea sponge that lives at depths of 100-1000 meters. Its intricate latticework skeleton has long fascinated engineers for its structural mechanics, but a new study shows that the sponge’s shape benefits it hydrodynamically as well. (Image and research credit: G. Falcucci et al.; via Nature; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

Read the full article

softrobotcritics:

*Maybe.

https://www.hackster.io/news/go-with-the-flow-1afc9b3e85c0

The main FlowIO module has up to five pneumatic ports, with each port capable of inflation, vacuum, release to atmospheric pressure, pressure hold, pressure sense, and flow-rate variability actions. An Adafruit Feather Sense development board with an nRF52840 system on a chip provides processing, GPIO pins, and a number of sensors (inertial measurement unit, altimeter, light sensor).

A pump module comes in three different sizes, depending on the pressure requirements of the project it supports. Each version comes with two pumps, a custom driver board, battery, and a 3D printed enclosure — only the pumps and batteries differ between versions.  This module connects to the main module with a four-pin magnetic connector and a pair of silicone tubes….

fuckyeahfluiddynamics:

This wild photograph shows a goose flying upside down with its head turned 180 degrees in a behavior known as whiffling.  (Image credit: V. Cornelissen; video credit: Flightartists Project; via Colossal; submitted by jpshoer)

Read the full article

dailyoverview:

Loosdrecht is a town of roughly 8,600 inhabitants in the North Holland Province of the Netherlands. It is known for its lakes, the Loosdrechtse Plassen, which attract thousands of tourists each year. Surrounding these lakes are hundreds of peat polders — low-lying pieces of reclaimed land protected by dikes, around 4,000 of which exist in the Netherlands.

See more here: https://bit.ly/2VlTDxS

52.200556°, 5.115222°

Source imagery: Maxar

aiweirdness:

Image recognition with an AI that:

1. Can only choose from the options I give it, and

2. Assumes that one of the options is the right answer.

New AI Weirdness post!

thevaultoftheatomicspaceage:

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt from this story from Patagonia:

In my various travels, I’ve often noted that if a country has trees, children will climb them. (The only place this appears not to be the case is in cities like New York and London, where the law forbids it, as do neurotic parents. I recently overheard a mother in Rockefeller Park shout at her daughter, who was scaling a tiny Macedonian pine, “You get down out of that tree. You’re going to get all sticky, and I don’t want to hear none of it!”) Despite the inherent dangers, many children regard the branches of a tree as a haven rather than a terror, a realm apart from the terrestrial, adult world. The psychologist J.O. Quantz theorized in 1897 that over the course of “a few thousand generations,” during which humans climbed into trees to escape predators and find sustenance, we evolved to regard trees as “natural protectors.”

Increasingly, the roles are swapped: we are the protectors of the trees (as well as their greatest predators). So it is fitting that, when all other forms of protection fail, climbing a tree remains our last means of saving it from being cut down. The act of “tree-sitting”—camping out high in a treetop as a means of protest—began in New Zealand in 1978. To protect against the logging of the Pureora Forest, home to sacred totara trees and rare kōkako birds, protestors followed the example set by Edward Abbey (whose The Monkey Wrench Gang had appeared just three years earlier) and resorted to disruptive pranks and stunts, but in the gentlest ways they could devise. First they attempted to block the logging road by planting native tree seedlings across it. When that failed, an activist named Stephen King (no relation to the author), who was known as the “barefoot botanist,” free-climbed up into a totora tree and strung up a wooden pallet high in the branches. He and five allies, including his 12-year-old brother, lived in the treetops for about a week. Ingeniously, they revealed their location only to reporters, but remained hidden whenever loggers were nearby, so the loggers never knew which tree they were in, and therefore couldn’t cut down any trees without fear of killing them. A public outcry ensued, and the logging was called off.

Why We Sit in Trees - Patagonia

softrobotcritics:

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/33/e2026833118

Many small organisms produce ultrafast movements by storing elastic energy and mediating its storage and rapid release through a latching mechanism. The mantis shrimp in particular imparts extreme accelerations on rotating appendages to strike their prey. Biologists have hypothesized, but not tested, that there exists a geometric latching mechanism which mediates the actuation of the appendage. Inspired by the anatomy of the mantis shrimp striking appendage, we develop a centimeter-scale robot which emulates the linkage dynamics in the mantis shrimp and study how the underlying geometric latch is able to control rapid striking motions. Our physical and analytical models could also be extended to other behaviors such as throwing or jumping in which high power over short duration is required.

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aestheticsmut:

cryptonature:

“If you write out the basic facts of trees, but framed as technology, it sounds like impossible sci-fi nonsense. Self-replicating, solar-powered machines that synthesize carbon dioxide and rainwater into oxygen and sturdy building materials on a planetary scale.”

— Jarod Anderson / www.cryptonaturalist.com

fuckyeahfluiddynamics:

Resonance is a phenomenon that is both familiar and somewhat mysterious. It takes place when a system is excited near its natural frequency. In this case, we’re seeing a mechanical resonance that’s driven by sound waves near the glass’s natural frequency.  (Image and video credit: The Slow Mo Guys)

Read the full article

video link

The Claw

100% Deadstock

Not available for sale

dailyoverview:

There are upwards of 800,000 lakes in Russia’s Sakha Republic, many of which are found clustered in its northeastern corner. Sakha, also known as Yakutia, is the most expansive subnational entity in the world, covering nearly 1.2 million square miles (3.1 million square km) – an area almost equal in size to India. About 40% of the republic is north of the Arctic Circle and covered by permafrost, which keeps many of its lakes frozen for 9-10 months of the year.

See more here: https://bit.ly/2CYX8R1

69.052056°, 159.818972°

Source imagery: Maxar

aiweirdness:

Gallery of failed unicorn cakes

This CLIP+diffusion method is great at some things but unicorn cakes are a challenge.

“Unicorn cake with golden horn and rainbow sprinkles”

ALT

“Unicorn cake with golden horn and rainbow sprinkles” using template image.

ALT

“Unicorn cake, photorealistic”

ALT

“Unicorn cake, cryengine”

ALT

“Unicorn cake, artstation HD”

ALT

Please, if you use diffusion-guided CLIP to generate a better unicorn cake, tell me how you did it.

chrisfriel:

270821

archatlas:

Stephen Doyle’s Poetic Book Sculptures

Stephen Doyle describes his interconnected book sculptures as “miniature monuments, testaments to the power of language and metaphors of imagination.” Featuring angled scaffolding and interlocking constructions that appear to grow directly from the bound pages, the sprawling sculptural forms that comprise his Hypertexts series are unruly and enchanting reimaginings of how information is communicated.

astrodidact:

This Shaman Caterpillar is doing its very best to tell you to stay the fuck away.

mostlysignssomeportents:

Belarus is “Europe’s last Soviet dictatorship,” a country ruled by Alexander Lukashenko, an absurd authoritarian caricature who once had a one-armed man arrested for clapping:

https://loweringthebar.net/2013/01/one-armed-man-arrested-for-clapping.html

Lukashenko’s brutality is absurd, but it’s no joke. Belarus has a terrible human rights record: it’s a corrupt land of secret disappearances and torture (it’s also my heritage: my grandfather was born in Nowy Swerzne, Belarus).

Lukashenko is a clown, but he possesses the administrative competence to avail himself of high-tech surveillance — a decade ago, he was already using mobile carriers’ records to obtain lists of every person who attended anti-government demonstrations.

https://charter97.org/en/news/2011/1/12/35161/

But as the saying goes “any weapon you don’t know how to use is your enemy’s.” Lukashenko’s regime is highly digitized — and badly secured. Earlier this year, hacktivists called the Belarusian Cyber Partisans announced that they’d obtained a huge trove of government docs.

The trove includes the identities of police informants, government officials’ personal information (including spies), recordings from the state’s widespread wiretapping program, and footage from security cameras and drones.

Now, these documents are starting to trickle out. As Ryan Gallagher reports for Bloomberg, the authorities are starting to freak. The head of the Belarusian KGB made a special TV broadcast to blame the breach on foreign spies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-24/belarus-hackers-seek-to-overthrow-local-government

The leaks expose Lukashenko officials to liability in the International Criminal Court when and if the regime finally falls. The leaks are being promoted by BYPOL, a dissident group of former Belarusian cops who resigned en masse after last year’s rigged election.

They’re especially incensed to learn that Lukashenko’s spies were wiretapping cops (including senior cops), and planning violent suppression of peaceful protesters — actions that made the cops look particularly bad.

While there are parallels between the Cyber Partisans and other hacktivist groups like Anonymous, Gabriella Coleman (who literally wrote the book on political hacktivism) told Gallagher that this represents a new level of hacktivist activity.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9373852/the-anonymous-ghost-in-the-machine/

Gallagher spoke to a Cyber Partisans spokesperson who claimed the group’s membership was 15 people: 304 intrusion specialists with the rest serving as data-analysts. The members are said to work in Belarus’s tech industry.

There’s lots more to come in this breach — they have 1–2 million minutes of wiretap audio alone.

Lukashenko’s hold on power has never been more fragile. Even by low global standards, his government seriously bungled covid respnse.

Last year’s protests over obviously rigged elections saw massive waves of protest that only swelled in the face of brutal repression and mass arrests. Senior military officers publicly burned their uniforms in protest.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/14/shock-doctrine/#walkaway

Dozens of riot cops dropped their shields and switched sides, embracing protesters as brothers.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/14/europe/belarus-protests-riot-police-intl/index.html

Coleman told Gallagher that she had never seen hacktivists operating as skilfully as the Cyber Partisans “except in the movies.” It’s true that Belarus’s indomitable and creative opposition seem to be ripped from fiction.

Last year, I wrote that the protests bore a resemblance to the climax of my 2017 novel Walkaway.

https://craphound.com/category/walkaway/

The current breach triggered lots of email from people who say it reminds them of the plot of my 2020 novel Attack Surface:

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/

But I didn’t “predict” this — instead, I observed the same tactics being used by other opposition movements as the Cyber Patriots, and, like them, thought about how they might evolve.

Just as my 2008 novel Little Brother was inspired by the whistleblower Mark Klein, who revealed the NSA’s mass surveillance program — official lies about this also inspired Snowden’s decision to reveal more NSA secrets.

I didn’t “predict” Snowden — instead, we were both paying attention to the same underlying phenomena. And while it’s easy to get discouraged about the ways that tech is used as a force for oppression and control, examples like this remind us of its liberatory potential.

The mission of technological self-determination isn’t motivated by blind faith that more tech leads to more human rights — rather, it’s the dual understanding that unless we seize the means of computation tech will be a terrible force for oppression.

But that also, wrestling control over the technology that enables us to form groups and coordinate their actions has powerful potential for human thriving. This isn’t crude optimism, rather, its motto is, “This will all be so great…if we don’t screw it up.”

mostlysignssomeportents:

This past weekend in the Financial Times, Kim Stanley Robinson ponders the nature of the current climate emergency, trying to capture the “structure of the feeling” of our current moment.

https://www.ft.com/content/ff94df96-b702-4e01-addd-f4253d0eecf6

In 2020, Robinson published an astonishingly good, optimistic and furious novel about the climate emergency, “The Ministry For the Future,” whose goal was imagining what that “structure” feel like if we actually averted the end of civilization.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#ksr

What’s that mean? It’s going beyond, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It’s easy to imagine the end of capitalism — I’ve written many postcapitalist worlds. The hard part is writing the ending of capitalism — the actual transition.

Robinson’s MINISTRY is conflicted on this score. On the one hand, he describes spectacular acts of violence — say, terrorists knocking every private jet out of the sky — but never shows us what it’s like to be in one of those jets, or what it’s like to pull the trigger.

Now in the FT, Robinson tries to imagine a less bloody transition. We can tell that something is going to give: the pandemic, the fires, the floods and extreme weather events. Something is going to rupture.

Robinson makes a virtue of this sense of impending crisis. WWI, he says, sandbagged the world — the seemingly stable world order shattered in a matter of moments. As bad as it was, it was worse for being a surprise, for catching us all flatfooted.

By contrast, WWII was visible on the horizon for years, this impending doom that everyone saw coming — that people might have done something about. They tried — the League of Nations — but in the end, the crisis couldn’t be averted.

For Robinson, the climate emergency is a WWII kind of emergency, and the Paris Accord is our League of Nations — thought whether it will enough to blunt the emergency is a great unknown.

Robinson lays out the problem. The world’s petrostates — America, Canada, Russia, Australia, Saudi, Norway, etc — need to be bribed or coerced or shamed or convinced not to murder us all in order to make a couple trillion before the music stops.

It’s a wicked problem, and in a fundamental sense, it’s a monetary problem. A market system can’t solve this. Re-engineering the world’s infrastructure to decarbonize it is all costs, no profit. Stranding fossil fuel assets is market poison.

The market inescapably misprices existential risk: “The market systemically misprices things by way of improper discounting of the future, false externalities and many other predatory miscalculations, which have led to gross inequality and biosphere destruction.”

Saving the planet is not high-yield. Building a “planetary sewage system” to “retrieve and disposing of the waste we’ve been dumping into the atmosphere” is a money-loser: “no one actually wants thousands of billions of tons of dry ice.”

Despite the looming disaster, Robinson is bullish on the 89 large central banks’ Network for Greening the Financial System and its “climate scenarios,” which seriously contemplates reorienting the planet’s productive capacity to climate mitigation.

https://www.ngfs.net/en/ngfs-climate-scenarios-central-banks-and-supervisors-june-202

He says that the pandemic taught us that, despite national borders, we’re a single species on a single planet with a single, shared destiny. And he says that the vaccines showed that “science is powerful.”

Given the power of science and the possibility of “carbon quantitative easing” (a possibility that owes itself to the collapse of deficit hawkism after the 2008 and 2020 stimuluses, which had many defects, but didn’t trigger runaway inflation), Robinson sees cause for hope.

“The time has come to admit we control our economy for the common good. Crucial at all times, this realisation is especially important in our current need to dodge a mass-extinction event. The invisible hand never picks up the cheque; therefore we must govern ourselves.”

Image:
Thomas Hawk
https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/37406127610/

CC BY-NC:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

riczike2:

womenofnoise:

Margaret Watts-Hughes - Welsh scientist, inventor, and musician. She is possibly the first true noise artist, predating Luigi Russolo by a couple of decades. In the late 1800s, she created multiple musical instruments and manipulated her singing voice by using them. Margaret was truly ahead of her time and probably would have fit in better in today’s scene.

fuckyeahfluiddynamics:

I may never get tired of drone videos of sheep herding. They are mesmerizing to watch and full of so many characteristics of flow. Like a compressible fluid, the herd squeezes together as it passes through a gate, then spreads and decreases density as it reaches the pasture. (Video credit: L. Patel; via Colossal; submitted by Florian T. and Matevz D.)

Read the full article

creepyexperimentz:

chrisfriel:

200821

zzkt:

https://github.com/anishathalye/neural-hash-collider

GitHub - anishathalye/neural-hash-collider: Preimage attack against NeuralHash 💣

https://github.com/roboflow-ai/neuralhash-collisions

https://github.com/anishathalye/neural-hash-collider

GitHub - anishathalye/neural-hash-collider: Preimage attack against NeuralHash 💣

Charybdis

video link

roguetoo:

Roland TR808 TV Commercial

thevaultoftheatomicspaceage: