@pluralistic
Love the photo! My wife is a fiber artist and she’s created boro-inspired work (along with many other styles). I can’t wait to show her your photo.
It's the start of a long weekend and I've found myself with a backlog of links, so it's time for another linkdump - the eighteenth in the (occasional) series. Here's the previous installments:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
“[t]he LAPD is not expected to like the existence of ‘Fck the LAPD’ merchandise. But their sole remedy is to not do things that result in people wanting to buy and wear ‘Fck the LAPD’ merchandise.” That may be difficult, he conceded, “[b]ut I promise you it would still be easier than trying to get a court to rule” that these shirts are infringing.
In "The Scorpion and the Frog," a trusting frog gives a scorpion a ride across a brook, only to be stung to death by his passenger upon arrival. The dying frog gasps "why?" and the scorpion replies, "I am sorry, but I couldn't resist the urge. It's my character":
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
We we can help ourselves. In states with muscular Right to Repair laws, we don't need Samsung's permission to keep our phones out of the landfill. Technicians no longer need to be "authorized" to access parts and diagnostics. Samsung may be a prisoner of its enshittificatory impulses, but with the right regulations and competition, we no longer have to tolerate them.
I have been a published writer since I was 17, and never in all those years have I encountered worse editorial suggestions than the automated ones generated by Microsoft Office365.
The service providers have an incentive to protect their deliverability reputation from bad actors who might turn off tracking to avoid detection. So the tracking is about monitoring the email sender. I would say smaller service providers are better positioned on this one.
@dphiffer@mozilla@themarkup I can appreciate this; I run my mail over Mailman for this reason. It's very primitive, but at least it just delivers the email I enqueue, rather than inserting trackers in it.
A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
> Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers?
Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen's story, ten years on:
It's not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The crash of 2008 imparted many lessons to people who were only dimly aware of finance, especially how complexity was a way of disguising fraud and recklessness. That was really the first lesson of 2008: "financial engineering" is mostly a way of obscuring crime behind a screen of technical jargon.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Here's an underrated cognitive virtue: "object permanence" - that is, remembering how you perceived something previously. As Riley Quinn often reminds us, the left is the ideology of object permanence - to be a leftist is to hate and mistrust the CIA even when they're tormenting Trump for a brief instant, or to remember that it was once possible for a working person to support their family with their wages:
I was at the Wayback Machine's launch party, and right away, I could see its value. Today, I make extensive use of Wayback Machine captures for my "This Day In History" posts, and when I find dead links on the web.
The Wayback Machine went public in 2001, but Archive founder @brewsterkahle started scraping the web in 1996. Today's post graphic - a modified Yahoo homepage from October 17, 1996 - is the oldest Yahoo capture on the Wayback Machine:
And so is the Internet Archive, which makes the legal threats it faces today all the more frightening. Lawsuits brought by the Big Five publishers and Big Three labels will, if successful, snuff out the Internet Archive altogether, and with it, the Wayback Machine - the only record we have of our ephemeral internet:
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Depending on how you look at it, I either grew up in the periphery of the labor movement, or atop it, or surrounded by it. For a kid, labor issues don't really hold a lot of urgency - in places with mature labor movements, kids don't really have jobs, and the part-time jobs I had as a kid (paper route, cleaning a dance studio) were pretty benign.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: