Wk 41 - Notes and Links
Wk 41 - Notes and Links
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Ten things in the news
‘Our school is based on inclusion’ but not for people with your taste in music.
History Teaches that Constitutional Reforms Come in Waves. We May Be Approaching One Now.
How AT&T helped build far-right One America News
Libertarian paradise city funded by tech billionaires makes enemies quickly and easily. Big corp vs. little town duke it out over water rights. This sounds like a bad episode of the A Team. Hey, didn’t Henry Ford try something like this?
Canadian private security companies wrought havoc in Afghanistan.
Hill describes Putin manipulating Trump by offering or withholding compliments, a manoeuvre she said was more effective with this president than getting dirt and blackmailing him would have been. Speaking of Trump: He is threatening the GOP. ‘Get behind me and my messaging or I will destroy you.’
Had money stolen? The odds are it’s in London.
Amazon copied products and rigged search results at least in India, documents show. One assumes that once the game is perfected, it will be done in G7 countries.
CIA admits China, Pakistan intelligence services are hunting down their informants
CCTV footage reveals that bystanders intervene in 9 out of 10 public conflicts
This week in data
Dark energy, the mysterious force that causes the universe to accelerate, may have been responsible for unexpected results from an experiment, deep below Italy's Apennine Mountains.
New UVA Study Finds Correlation Between Lynchings and Confederate Monuments
Study: People from religiously conservative US areas and countries are more likely to disapprove of homosexuality, abortion and pornography. Conversely, Americans from conservative religious areas are also more likely to search for these topics.
US reaches record high of more than 96,000 drug overdose deaths in a 12-month period. I wonder if that counts ivermectin?
Load up the website This Person Does Not Exist and it'll show you a human face, near-perfect in its realism yet totally fake. Refresh and the neural network behind the site will generate another, and another, and another. The endless sequence of AI-crafted faces is produced by a generative adversarial network -- a type of AI that learns to produce realistic but fake examples of the data it is trained on. But such generated faces -- which are starting to be used in CGI movies and ads -- might not be as unique as they seem. In a paper titled This Person (Probably) Exists (PDF), researchers show that many faces produced by GANs bear a striking resemblance to actual people who appear in the training data. The fake faces can effectively unmask the real faces the GAN was trained on, making it possible to expose the identity of those individuals. The work is the latest in a string of studies that call into doubt the popular idea that neural networks are "black boxes" that reveal nothing about what goes on inside.
This week in science and tech
“Hacker X”—the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire—unmasks himself
He was hired to build a fake news op but now wants to put things right.The world of scientific publishing is vast, varied, and beset by fraud, bias, negligence, and hype... 'I am neurodiverse and have major issues with understanding empathy due to my condition.' Well, that makes it all okay then...
Facebook bans, sends cease-and-desist letter to developer of Unfollow Everything extension. Unfollow Everything gets rid of your entire newsfeed, something highlighted as an addictive factor in keeping people on the service.
To ward off accusations that it helps terrorists spread propaganda, Facebook has for many years barred users from speaking freely about people and groups it says promote violence. The restrictions appear to trace back to 2012, when in the face of growing alarm in Congress and the United Nations about online terrorist recruiting, Facebook added to its Community Standards a ban on "organizations with a record of terrorist or violent criminal activity." This modest rule has since ballooned into what's known as the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, a sweeping set of restrictions on what Facebook's nearly three billion users can say about an enormous and ever-growing roster of entities deemed beyond the pale. [...] The Intercept has reviewed a snapshot of the full DIO list and is today publishing a reproduction of the material in its entirety, with only minor redactions and edits to improve clarity. It is also publishing an associated policy document, created to help moderators decide what posts to delete and what users to punish.
With fewer chips, automakers are prioritizing high-markup vehicles, offering fewer deals. The result has been a boon for automakers.
More reasons to watch the blood pressure: your brain won’t age as fast , according to new research from The Australian National University.
There will soon be no more ads denying climate change on Google
This week in listening pleasure
The Flamethrowers captures the punch-you-in-the-mouth energy and sound of right-wing talk radio. Host Justin Ling takes us from the fringe preachers and conspiracy peddlers of the 1920s to the political firestorm that rages today. With humour and candour, Ling examines the appeal of broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh, who found a sleeping audience, radicalized it, and became an accidental kingmaker — culminating in the election of Donald Trump.
Wake of Corrosion, an audio drama set in a USA gripped by a nameless horror, probably with grippy things…
This week in viewing pleasure
Discussing a UK’s university mandating 'privilege guilt admission’
Physicist explains why she learned to stop worrying and LOVE the flat earthers, homeopaths, and users of horse dewormer
4 Movie Tropes That Become Insane If You Swap Genders
Check out this cinematic masterpiece.
How to make clotted cream in a crock pot.
The dark side to Hollywood’s view of male bodies: the average man's body in films is gassed up on steroids. This is what boys see as normal.
Why 007 constantly gets re-invented. Will he survive the scorched earth of the current film? Time will tell.
Weird News
Dumb criminals
Ferndale pastor with 8 DUI arrests accused of trying to kill deputies with car
Aliens ‘tampered with nuclear weapons’ and could spark WW3, warns ex-US military chief. Presumably heavily medicated and in treatment ex military chief.
A federal grand jury is investigating a retired cop who allegedly was on the payroll of the local drug kingpin, framed people for crimes they didn't commit, and exploited and terrorized Black residents ...for decades.
Slow movers in what lane?
Michael Flynn refutes QAnon claims that he worships Satan.
This guy stood for office under the PPC banner in the recent federal election.
Haha. No, that’s not how this works. Why are you sweating?
Headlines
Ontario man calls 911 because he's stuck in traffic and has to go pee
Sex doll lost to 'Great Brighton Bin Disaster' as strikes continue
A tepid dystopia
Texas school administrator: If teachers have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also have a book with an opposing perspective
Delta Airlines claims peoples' Instragram photos belong to them. Time to take pictures of your butt.
Having successfully tested his antivax hypothesis of not taking a Covid-19 vaccine, flat-Earther now has a front row seat to see from the heavens to test his hypothesis on whether or not the Earth is flat
A MAGA pastor who falsified his military credentials announced his candidacy for Senate
This is why "see something, say something" is inherently flawed. It presumes knowledgeable and competent people. The problem is that there is no cost to the person who freaked for being obviously wrong, wasting public resources and having an innocent person detained for hours. This reminds me of the time when musician (and model airplane enthusiast) Vance Gilbert was kicked off a flight for reading a book about WWII airplanes or the economist suspected of being a terrorist because he was doing math.
People watching
I wonder if Shatner will get the Overview Effect from his space travel, depending upon how high up you consider the start of space.
This Instagram Account Spreads Awareness About What People With Chronic Illnesses Go Through Every Day
Stories of bad bosses and the employees who fought back. Also, people recall the silliest reasons they got sacked.
Can men be thought of as victims of sexual violence? Sure, why not? Okay, how about the victims of women?
University of Sussex backs professor in free speech row: students shouldn't "just expect to hear their own thoughts reflected back at them".
No more slut shaming Steinbeck.
The Greeks never used the word xenophobia. The term was invented in the 19th century.
Post of the week
Told to fake it until you make it. Still faking it 8 years in. I have no clue what I’m doing.
I’ve been working in finance for 8+ years. Spent my first 4 years as a financial analyst and I literally provided no value or learned anything, just bullshitting my way through poorly made excel slides made by others. I then spent 4 years in a client facing but technical role in regards to derivatives and I swear I still have no clue how the stuff works.
I just started a new job with much better pay as for a competitor of the previous bank, and I got roped into doing a presentation for C levels about my thoughts on the market given my background. I just finished it an hour ago, and I honestly think they picked up on how little I know. It must have seeped through my nervous bullshit.
I don’t know how any of this works. It would be hilarious if I didn’t have a wife and kid depending on me.
I’ve gotten to this point by checking Wikipedia 10 min before meetings, and then buying people beer on a company card. I know nothing and one day I will be found out and blacklisted.
I’ve had every opportunity to learn, but I’ve paid zero attention to anything for the past 15 years and it’s catching up to me. What should I do? I’m in my 30s and I have no clue how I got here, I feel like I’ve just tumbled head first through life with no control or direction.
Quotes found on-line
It takes a lot of balls to golf the way I do.
Can someone teach me how to speak in authentic frontier gibberish?
When a billionaire dies who inherits their senators?
Sometimes when I'm going on a date a very good looking person who I'm not ready to have sex with yet, I will make sure to not shave important areas in order to guarantee that I don't slip up and fuck them right then and there. Sometimes you gotta self-handicap the horny and put a limit on yourself. My friends and sisters do this also. Legs are the most common. Some of my comrades have failed and went for the cactus fuck, and some are with said cactus aficionados to this day.
Did you ever find Bugs Bunny attractive when he put on a dress and play a girl bunny?
N ursing is ultimately about providing care, not caring. You don't have to like your patients to be a good nurse. Your feelings belong to you, the hospital can't buy or dictate that.
Sometimes I see goats just chilling in the sun and I know those smug bastards are mocking my inability to make my own vitamin C.
The last thing I want to do is hurt you; but it’s still on the list.
Putin made American conservatives mistrust every single one of the country's institutions, including the Center For Disease Control during a pandemic. The rivalry between the left and right has been bad for decades. I love that he's made conservatives believe the kind of bullshit this post is about over the fifth estate. Now they only listen to the most dubious journalistic outlets. It's wild.
"They're using my pronouns, but they're also using sarcasm and finger quotes, isn't there some way to have them arrested or something?"
"They're using my pronouns, but they're also using sarcasm and finger quotes, isn't there some way to have them arrested or something?"
Risk for electrolyte disturbances, as evidenced by being full of shit
All the average voter wants is to be paid less than £10 an hour and to die in a nuclear fireball
I used to work as a wine waiter in a golf club. One time I worked their annual meeting. They had three classes of membership: youth, junior and adult. The Junior membership was for 16-21 but cost the same as adult. There was a proposal to abolish the junior membership. Some old duffer stood up and made a speech about how they shouldn't do this as "all young people are communists and they'll tear down this institution." Ah yes, I remember that bit in "The Condition of the Working Class in England" where Marx says "the revolution will start in the main lounge bar of Walmley Golf Club."
Personally I disagree with the whole idea of entropy, not my style
Left my wife to cook tea for the family for the first time in months as I'm not feeling well and she's rustled up fish fingers and boiled cabbage. Our house smells like a soviet hospital.
Sometimes I wonder if those giant shortbread cookie tins ever contained cookies, or if these have always contained sewing supplies.
I hold my balls, not in a sexual way or anything, I just hold them like Indiana Jones holding a rare artifact.
Masseuse is not the preferred nomenclature. Massage Americans. Please
Just came back from my first visit to The Great Beyond, would not recommend
Xanadu will, in time, be considered a major film
But if we hold Trump accountable maybe Republicans will be unwilling to work with us in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation
Man or woman, taking a bra off is likely to be one of the high points of your day.
I was sacked once for not wanting to by a raffle ticket at Christmas. It was for a good cause, but I didn’t want to enter on this occasion. Apparently that was rude, and didn’t really fit in with the culture they were trying to promote. I was in my probation period. And so I was let go. Every prize was meat donated by a local butcher. I’m vegetarian.
Is there a safe space to mourn your boobs after weight loss
I reminded him that in 8 days I'd be setting a group of men armed with sledgehammers and anger management issues lose on whatever of theirs was still on my property.
There is a reason why they require clinical hours for med school. I worked at an urgent care clinic as an MA during the height of Covid. I feel like they make you do clinical hours so you learn just how fucking stupid people are.
All men naturally crave fucking herons as part of the human condition
You know that sound a dog makes before barfing?
Well thanks for reminding me this is a thing! Where do I send my therapy bill?
Have you considered staring into a different abyss?
People on Facebook proudly posting about how they e dragged themselves to the gym despite suffering from a "horrible cold". It seems we've learned nothing from this past 18 months.
Adults who don't like/eat vegetables/fruits are literal children and I will never trust their decisions
I'm all for body positivity right up until it includes my body.
Thank you for explaining the word “many” to me, it means a lot.
I just had to go through mandatory diversity and inclusion training at work (all employees had to). I will comply, smile and wave and happily indulge whatever mental issues a coworker might be experiencing and utilize exquisite new pronouns that didn't even fucking exist a few years ago, just so I don't lose my job. But if they ever know what I'm truly thinking I'd be fucked...
What if there were no hypothetical questions?
The word "analysis" comes from the root word *anal* and the Greek *ysis* which means "to pull numbers from"
It's the Great Culling; for far too long our advancements in science have insulated the stupidest among us from natural selection, and now mother nature is having a field day.
Eating junk food is so common that when people start eating healthy it’s instantly labeled as dieting.
Gary was very concerned with loss of personal freedom. He is now locked in the ICU with Corona.
There’s nothing more un-American than voter suppression.
Don’t you hate it when someone answers their own questions? I do.
I came back from vacation and was made head of HR ‘or else’. I’m threatening to quit.
My wife told me to stop impersonating a flamingo. I had to put my foot down.
There's a significant part of America that's desperate to go the African Warlord route.
This world values children, not childhood - Bioshock Infinite
I put my grandma on speed dial the other day. I call it insta-gram.
What I see is that you've imposed a copyright symbol on a diagram of a water molecule. Although why water would be copyrighted in 1923 escapes me.
Blazing Saddles couldn’t be produced as a movie in 202. The actors would look at the script and pass out.
I'm Catholic by heritage, but not practice, and my 7th Day Adventist MIL has in the past told me my people are "devil worshipers”. Which is funny because I'm actually pagan but she doesn't know that.
These people have half the processing power of a Super Nintendo
My underwear line showed through my leggings for a second and my husband needed smelling salts
Let us be clear: censorship is cowardice. ... It masks corruption. …it teaches, and accustoms one to the use of force against an idea, to submit thought to an alien “other.” But worst still, censorship destroys criticism, which is the essential ingredient of culture. - Pablo Antonio Cuadra
When life gives you melons, you might be dyslexic.
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