Qanon is so popular because there are so many real-life conspiracies

Cory Doctorow: Social media isn’t particularly great at persuasion. But it is excellent at finding small, diffuse groups that are receptive to a message, and targeting those groups.

That’s great if you’re a refrigerator business looking to find people who are shopping for a refrigerator. It’s even better if you’re an LGBTQ kid in a small town, looking to find community.

It’s not so great for society if you’re looking to organize people who might be inclined to believe that a Presidential candidate is operating a child rape ring out of the basement of a popular Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

The reason people are inclined to believe in conspiracy theories is that so many of the trends destroying the US and planet are, in fact, conspiracies:

The opioid epidemic was a conspiracy between rich families like the Sacklers and regulators who rotate in and out of industry. The 737 crisis was caused by Boeing’s conspiracy to cut corners and aviation regulators' conspiracy to allow aerospace to regulate itself.

Senators conspire to liquidate their positions ahead of coronavirus lockdown, well-heeled multinationals conspire to get 94.5% of the “small business” PPP fund, Big Tech conspires to fix wages with illegal collusion while fast food franchises do the same with noncompetes.

And how different is Pizzagate from the real life of Richard Epstein? Also, Donald Trump may not technically be a serial rapist, but he’s certainly a serial sex abuser.

Additionally, conspiracies often make people feel at home, and provide them with status.

And now two points that are mine and by me:

The people profiled in the recent Atlantic piece about Qanon seem lovely. I don’t want any of them making public policy because Qanon is bonkers. But I’d be happy to have any of them as my neighbors and friends.

Also, as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m deeply immersed in ancient Rome now, and Qanon reminds me of the mystery cults that thrived in the first century One of those cults became Christianity. So maybe Qanon will go away soon, but don’t bet too much on it.

Also on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic: Dr. Seuss coronavirus parodies, including “Oh, the Places You Won’t Go.”

And a Hong Kong ice cream shop is selling tear-gas flavored ice cream, which one customer says is far too tear-gas-like, which reminds me of the Monty Python “Crunchy Frog” sketch.

Former newspaper editor is now a homeless blogger

The New York Times: Rick Jackson, 54, was top editor of The Herald-Times, Bloomington, Indiana. He got laid off “in the parking lot next to the paper’s headquarters. He was also told he would have to vacate the apartment in the same building, where he had been living for 10 months.”

Unable to go to the newsroom, Mr. Jackson started a blog. He called it The Homeless Editor….

He’s living in a Motel 6 now.

Mr. Jackson, who has covered homelessness, said on his blog that most homeless people are not those “who sit on the streets of all our major cities.” Rather, he wrote, “the homeless crowd are much more like me — a person who doesn’t have a single address to call home.”

Jackson is now looking for work. He hopes to stay in journalism.

“There’s something about being in a newsroom where I feel like I’m wrapped in a warm quilt,” he said. “It’s where my home is.”

New Christopher Pike "Trek" series in the pipeline. SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!

Hollywood Reporter : CBS All Access is doing a new Star Trek series, based on the adventures of the Enterprise under Captain Christopher Pike, with Anson Mount returning as Pike, Ethan Peck as Spock and Rebecca Romjin as Number One.

Also in the pipeline: New seasons of Discovery and Picard, an animated series, “Lower Decks” – I think I read elsewhere that will be a comedy – another Discovery spinoff, Section 31, starting Michelle Yeoh, and a younger-skewing CG-animated series for Nickelodeon.

With all that and The Orville, it’s a good time to be a Trekkie

Losers who use “loose” when they mean “lose.” Makes me lose my shit.

Excitement during the pandemic.

I like that it’s a professional model. Don’t want to use the AMATEUR equipment.

The Saga of Michael Flynn – Politics doesn’t permit nuance. Either Michael Flynn is a hero or a traitor. Either the Justice Department investigation was entirely justified or it was a witchhunt.

Rumors that some horror movies are cursed become their own kind of curse for the people who make those movies

The Curse of The Curse – Great episode of the Imaginary Worlds podcast: filmmaker Jay Cheel talks about his new documentary series “Cursed Films,” which explores why people think movies like The Exorcist, The Omen, and other horror films were cursed – targeted by demonic forces. Also, special effects artist Craig Reardon and director Gary Sherman separate fact from fiction with the alleged Poltergeist curse. And theologian Brandon Grafius, author of “Reading the Bible with Horror,” describes horror’s Biblical connections.

Thoughts following my my first-ever at-home haircut

  1. I had long, thick hair when I was a young man and I miss it. For years I’ve wondered if I would look good with long hair today, even though my hair is extremely thin now.

Social distancing gave me an opportunity to find out; I went far longer than usual between haircuts.

The answer is that I look terrible with long hair. I am back to number two clippers all over, for good.

  1. For years I have thought that I could just give myself a haircut, or have Julie do it for me, and save us some money. How hard can it be to cut my hair with number 2 clippers, all over?

Turns out it’s actually pretty hard and I will be going back to a professional barber as soon as it is healthy to do so.

  1. I have long luxurious ear hair and Julie did not want to trim it out of concern for injuring my ears. It looks awful. But on the other hand it helps keep my AirPods securely in place. 📓

Help Garry Armacost, a Vietnam vet, fight cancer and VA bureaucracy

Garry Armacost, was wounded fighting for his country in Vietnam. Now he’s in the fight of his life, against cancer and the bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Garry is a big, cheerful, quiet 75-year-old who lives in San Diego. He needs cancer surgery for his survival. The surgery is complicated, long, done robotically, and requires sophisticated post-operative care.

Garry has had bad experience with post-operative care at the VA, which proved nearly fatal in 2012. Fortunately, Garry’s son, Chris, is a doctor, and arranged for the head of urology at Sharp Memorial to do the surgery.

But the VA has refused the transfer because they don’t want to cover the cost.

“What price do they put on Garry’s life? Apparently not much,” Garry’s wife, Linda, writes in a Facebook post. “We have called, argued, pleaded, tried to talk with the Director, to no avail. We’re wondering if these will be our last days together. It didn’t need to come to this.”

Garry was wounded in Vietnam, and earned a purple heart. He came home, raised a family, and worked a long career for various railroads in the Northeast. He is now retired and lives with his wife, Linda, in San Diego. Linda is active in local Democratic Party politics, which is where I met her.

Please help Garry and his family. If you have any ideas on who to contact and otherwise how to influence the VA to give him the treatment he needs, let me know and I’ll pass the word. You can contact me directly at mitch@mitchwagner.com.

If you work for the VA or know someone who does, please put in a word to get Garry’s transfer approved. Contact your Congressional representative and apply pressure.

Share this post far and wide on social media.

The VA needs to be held accountable to provide care, not just for Garry, but for every veteran. They were there when we needed them – now we need to be there for them, when they need us.

“It may not work for me," says Garry, “but hopefully another vet will have a better outcome.”

🌕📓

Julie gave me my first rona haircut. Fine job and I still have all my ears!

Little Richard, Rock Pioneer Who Broke Musical Barriers, Dead at 87 – He pioneered rock and roll’s gender-bending flamboyance, throat-shredding vocals, and piano-pounding rhythm.

In the years before his death, Little Richard, who was by then based in Nashville, still performed periodically. Onstage, though, the physicality of old was gone: Thanks to hip replacement surgery in 2009, he could only perform sitting down at his piano. But his rock & roll spirit never left him. “I’m sorry I can’t do it like it’s supposed to be done,” he told one audience in 2012. After the audience screamed back in encouragement, he said — with a very Little Richard squeal — “Oh, you gonna make me scream like a white girl!”

My Facebook profile recently got upgraded to support formatting text: Bold, italic, blockquotes and hyperlinks. I haven’t seen an announcement or news on this. Dave Winer has been — rightly — insisting on the importance of this for years. Makes Facebook ever so slightly more usable and less Internet-hostile.

Today (and yesterday) on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic –

Armed Michigan voters are escorting their state reps to work to protect them from swastika-brandishing white terrorists.

A good-guy hacker wrote a script to flood Ohio’s snitchline where employers are supposed to report workers who refused to come in over coronavirus fears, so those workers can be denied unemployment benefits. Ohio doesn’t have vaccines. effective therapeutics, sufficient ventilators, or adequate PPE/disinfectant, but it has a snitchline.

In a real incident very similar to Lord of the Flies, the kids were very nice to each other and built a lovely little village in the 15 months they were stranded.

By the time we arrived, the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination."

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer.

Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits.

US public health officials are unenthusiastic about contact-tracing apps. Contact-tracing is extremely effective, but it requires an army of people and lots of shoe leather.

Volcano gods demand workers:

“Re-opening” isn’t about saving ordinary workers and earners. You can’t save someone by infecting them with a deadly disease. In a world without contact-tracing, therapeutics, tests, PPE, santizing products, etc, more contact means more risk of illness and death.

“Re-opening” is about saving investors: the 1% who constitute the major shareholders in large firms whose calculus goes like this: “30% unemployment means that for every worker who dies on the job, ten more will apply to take their place.”

I think I will suggest to Julie that we should watch “The Andromeda Strain” tonight.

Not the 2008 remake. I hear that was fine. But it lacks the glorious microfilm-and-mainframe futurism of the 1971 original.

Wilford Brimley was only 48 when he appeared in “The Thing” and 51 in “Cocoon.”

I learned about Brimley’s age in “The Thing” when I myself was 48. That freaked me out a bit. “I’m as old as Wilford Brimley?!”

Roaming ‘robodog’ politely tells Singapore park goers to keep apart – A roaming robot dog built by Boston Dynamics is politely telling people in Singapore parks to enforce social distancing.

“Let’s keep Singapore healthy,” the yellow and black robodog named SPOT said in English as it roamed around. “For your own safety and for those around you, please stand at least one metre apart.

“Thank you,” it added, in a softly-spoken female voice.

Google unifies all of its messaging and communication apps into a single team – A good move. Google has multiple redundant messaging apps. I don’t use any of them because (1) I don’t have time to sit down and figure out what’s what and (2) I’m not going to invest in yet another Google service that Google will then turn around and kill.

I was burned by Google+ and Google Reader, and I saw what happened to Buzz and Wave. So, not going to try to kick that football again.

Now I’m curious which book it was and what was the so-called virtue signaling?

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

The TSA is being sued for hoarding 1.3 million N95 masks: The agency isn’t even using them, while other federal agencies. like the VA, “go begging for PPE for high-risk workers….

Use of America’s airports have fallen by 95% and the TSA has asked most of its screeners to stay home. Those screeners that are working are wearing surgical masks, as they have not been trained to fit N95 masks.

One Minnesota TSA manager tried to donate his mask to that state’s department of health but was unable to do so.

America is united in favor of keeping quarantines going: “The tiny minority who’d benefit from the premature re-opening of businesses (large shareholders in large corporations that might survive such a blunder) want the rest of us to throw ourselves in the volcano to appease the economy gods.”

Strong antitrust enforcement begat Unix, which is the basis for “almost every computer you use today.”

Wechat spies on non-Chinese users.

Hidden doors disguised as bookshelves I thought about doing that for my home office and one day I just might. I’d make it look like the entrance to the Batcave in the 1966 Batman, complete with the door-opening switch hidden in the bust of Shakespeare.

The first Google account you sign in to is set as the default account. This was driving me nuts until I figured it out.

Everybody alive today will be somewhat germophobic the rest of their lives. Like the way my parents' generation, who grew up in the Depression, were always frugal in at least some ways.

[Several years ago]
JULIE: “What is ‘mansplaining?'”
ME:
ME: “This is a trick, isn’t it?”

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

++ Alvim Corrêa’s beautiful, bleak illustrations from the 1900 French edition of HG Wells' “War of the Worlds.”

++ Lobbyists are lobbying for big financial bailouts for … themselves. After ensuring that the bulk of previous bailouts went to fat-cat businesses who don’t need the money, lobbyists want their turn at the trough.

++ Either we sacrifice landlords and banks to save businesses and jobs, or we lose the businesses and jobs and take the landlords and banks with them.

++ Chef Itsuo Kobayashi has done beautiful paintings of every meal he’s eaten for 32 years.

++ An appeals court says Miami jail doesn’t need to provide soap, making waiting for a hearing into a possible death sentence, and encouraging the spread of coronavirus, not just in prison, but to the population at large.

++ Ohio has a snitchline for bosses whose employees won’t go back to work, so those workers can be denied unemployment benefits. Great way to increase the death toll, Ohio!

‪I am hosting a video conference for dozens or hundreds of people this evening so of course today seemed like a good day for me to get my first shaving cut in years. And it was a big one. My bathroom this morning looked like the Texas chainsaw massacre.‬

The grocery store was nearly out of our favorite brand of cookies, Tate’s.

Lots of gluten-free cookies left, though.

I guess people are all if I’m gonna be dead in month fuck it I’m having gluten.

We watched the first episode of “Rome” last night. Polly Walker is va va va voom. I am attracted to smart, sexy auburn-haired women who can have me put to death.

We may be dramatically overestimating China’s capabilities – David Ignatius on The Washington Post – We may be making China seem more capable than it actually is, as we did with the supposedly unstoppable Japanese economy of the 1980s and the US/USSR “missile gap” decades earlier.

The Washington establishment needs an existential foreign threat.

Over on Twitter, I’m suggesting to @MikeElgan that he might want to consider moving to micro.blog.

I did some research in the autumn and concluded that micro.blog is the ONLY blog platform out there that doesn’t require significant fiddling and configuration. Which is sad for the blogosphere.

I mean, you can do a great deal of fiddling and configuration on micro.blog if you want to do that. But if you just want to type stuff and post photos, then micro.blog is your only option.

That is an awful lot of Rome

Yesterday I read some of “Storm before the Storm” a history of the fall of the Roman Republic, by Mike Duncan, and “Silver Pigs,” the first in the mystery series by Lindsey Davis about Marcus Didius Falco, a private detective in Imperial Rome. I’ve read that series before but I’ve forgotten most of it so it’s nearly new to me.

I finished re-watching “I, Claudius” Sunday — that’s the fourth time I’ve seen that. Maybe give it another go in ten years?

I listened to the “I, Podius” podcast, which is about “I, Claudius” — possibly the final episode of that, although there seems to be some unfinished business, so there may be at least one more episode.

I bookmarked a few articles about the historical accuracy of “I, Claudius,” for later reading.

Julie expressed some interest in rewatching “Rome,” the mid-2000s HBO series about the rise of Julius Caesar and the Roman Civil Wars.

Also, a few weeks ago, Julie and I watched “Hail, Caesar,” a Coen Brothers comedy about the making of a Golden Age Hollywood movie about Julius Caesar, featuring George Clooney. Julie didn’t care for it but I loved it; I still have 37 minutes to watch.

“Storm Before the Storm” is the earliest chronologically, covering events in the second century BCE. Then comes “Rome,” 1st Century BCE. Then comes “I, Claudius,” later in the 1st Century BCE through the early and mid 1st Century CE. Then comes “Silver Pigs,” a couple of decades after “I, Claudius,” in the late 1st Century CE. Finally, “Hail Caesar” comes along almost 1900 years later, around the time the books “I, Claudius” and “Claudius the God” were published, with the movie-within-the-movie covering the events of the early part of “Rome.”

It’s all the same universe, like the Marvel superhero movies. 📚📺📽📓

One year ago today I saw possibly the most ridiculous example of security theater I have ever witnessed

A young woman ahead of me at airport security was walking with a cane and had a “boot” on her foot – a removable enclosure to immobilize an injured foot.

The security guy asked her if she could walk without the cane, and take off the boot, and put them through the security scanner. The security guy was nice about it; he said if taking off the boot and walking without the cane caused any discomfort at all, she should just leave them on.

The woman said no no no that’s all right and she sat down in a chair and wrestled the boot off, and then hopped through the scanner.

It occurred to me, watching, that this was security theater in the purest form. This exercise was completely unnecessary. I bet if you asked this woman why she was going through this exercise, she would have looked surprised and said, why, it’s the rules. And you have to follow the rules, right?

This woman was given a choice of whether she had to send her stuff through the scanner, and she chose to do it , even though the purpose of this exercise is not supposed to be empty obedience. It’s supposed to be catching terrorists. And this woman knew better than anybody else that she was not a terrorist, and therefore would have been perfectly safe strolling through security without any screening at all!

I don’t say this to criticize the young woman, who seemed perfectly nice and just trying to be accommodating, or the security guy, who was also very nice and just trying to do his job.

I wrote the preceding in my journal a year ago. Re-reading it now, I see that I was wrong then. The purpose of security theater isn’t security. It is empty obedience.

You may well ask, holy crap, Mitch, when did you become such a paranoid conspiracy theorist? I ask myself that sometimes. 📓

📺 I have finished watching I Claudius, for the fourth time. I now realize why I didn’t have any memory of the last episode. It is because the episode is weak, bleak and uncomfortably incesty.

I just want a professional haircut. I realize this is literally the smallest problem in the universe compared with the sacrifice others are making, often unwillingly.

I’ve discussed the matter with my wife, who is going to have to do the deed, and we’ve mutually agreed that I should have 100% of my pre-existing ears when the process is done.

The Hollywood Vigilante

Actress Marisol Nichols, star of the TV series “Riverdale,” is a real-life vigilante, hunting down sex predators.

Erika Hayasaki on Marie Claire:

Nichols dresses the part in case a perp glimpses her through the window. She’s 46 but, waif-like and five foot four with a hoodie over her head and a bedsheet draped across her shoulders, can pass for a teenager. Or she might wear her long, dark hair matted and put on a beer-soaked Mötley Crüe T-shirt, and suddenly she’s a young junkie mom prostituting her kid. She can play madam or victim.

On this morning, she wears a black baseball cap backwards, a black V-neck T-shirt, and bell-bottom jeans. She carries a pack of American Spirit cigarettes. She could be anyone. Most of these guys, she says, are “wimps.” Cowards. Sick men who want to take advantage of a girl. She remembers one sting in which she played a trafficker who sets up child sex parties. The target was 38, looked like a real estate agent or something, probably in a fraternity in college. “Looking the guy in the face,” she says, got her in her gut. “These guys look like normal people. And you’re pretending that you just happily and eagerly set up children for them to have sex with.” Nichols kept her cool throughout the interaction, but she adds: “To watch his eyes”—the way they lit up at the mention of an underage kid—“you want to kick him in the balls and beat the hell out of him.”

Jesus.

“Having no plan is the plan! … Plans are for commies and the Danish. Here we do it fast and loose and dumb and wrong, and occasionally we have a man who manufactures pillows come to the White House to show the president encouraging texts. It all works!” – Dave Eggers: Flattening the Truth on Coronavirus

As a newly self-employed person, I’m learning that the weekend is a thing you schedule. My most recent weekend was Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m planning my next one for Friday and Saturday.

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

++ The pandemic could make Big Tech our permanent overlords

++ Hospital CEOs are making millions while slashing health care worker salaries and hours, announcing layoffs and furloughs. “The average hospital CEO gets $3.1m/year. The average nurse gets $75k.”

++ Workers at Wired Magazine are forming a union.

++ How open source has failed: The focus should be “on protocol documentation … in a cloud-based era, real software freedom comes from being able to make compatible clients for existing servers, and compatible servers for existing clients.” That’s in addition to legal protections against monopoly practices.

The traditional antitrust world did not permit firms to attain dominance through mergers with major competitors, catch-and-kill buyouts of nascent startups, or vertical monopolies where companies that owned platforms competed with the companies that used them. [But these] rules were heavily nerfed by Reagan, then further eroded by every administration since."

Larry Ellison Reveals His Big Data Battle Plan To Fight Coronavirus In Partnership With Trump White House

Billionaire Larry Ellison has turned the Hawaiian island of Lanai into a luxury health resort, and plans to use it to save the world. Philanthropy, he said, is the definition of unsustainable. Profit is sustainable.

He “is tackling three sets of complex issues on the island: the global food-supply chain, nutrition and the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources.”

Ellison also distances himself from Trump, saying he has worked with every President.

AWS engineer Tim Bray resigns from Amazon following worker firings – Bray quit Amazon in protest over the company firing vocally critical employees. Bray was an Amazon Web Services VP and distinguished engineer, who previously did stints at Google and Sun.

“… remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised,” he said. “The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people…. "

He adds: “I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?”

Inspired by a conversation with Mike Elgan yesterday, I’m going to do Facebook a lot less for a while.

The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson went off the grid in mid-March, rafting down the Colorado River. He returned into a new world. He sees Covid-19 as a precursor into crises yet to come – chiefly global warming – and finds reason for hope.

Possibly, in a few months, we’ll return to some version of the old normal. But this spring won’t be forgotten. When later shocks strike global civilization, we’ll remember how we behaved this time, and how it worked. It’s not that the coronavirus is a dress rehearsal—it’s too deadly for that. But it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel.

What’s coming? Droughts, food shortages, electrical outages, storms, floods.

Imagine what a food scare would do. Imagine a heat wave hot enough to kill anyone not in an air-conditioned space, then imagine power failures happening during such a heat wave…. Imagine pandemics deadlier than the coronavirus. These events, and others like them, are easier to imagine now than they were back in January, when they were the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling…

Right now we’re hearing two statements being made. One, from the President and his circle: we have to save money even if it costs lives. The other, from the Centers for Disease Control and similar organizations: we have to save lives even if it costs money. Which is more important, money or lives? Money, of course! says capital and its spokespersons. Really? people reply, uncertainly. Seems like that’s maybe going too far?”…

Even though our economic system ignores reality, we can act when we have to. At the very least, we are all freaking out together. To my mind, this new sense of solidarity is one of the few reassuring things to have happened in this century. If we can find it in this crisis, to save ourselves, then maybe we can find it in the big crisis, to save our children and theirs.”

What The U.S. Might Learn From China’s Approach To COVID-19 – New York Times health and science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. points to China as a model of how to stop a fast moving pandemic in its tracks.

China is not to blame for this virus. They didn’t release it on purpose, or accidentally from a lab. And they didn’t cover it up. The mayor of Wuhan covered it up and when Beijing found out about it they chastised him hard, forced him to apologize on national TV, and took swift, decisive action.

Chinese people were required to take mandatory testing and if they were positive, they were immediately taken away, separated from their families, and put in gymnasium-style hospitals where they slept on beds separate from each other, were tended by workers in PPE and – when they recovered – set free and home. It’s harsh but not cruel and it got the pandemic under control.

China has committed numerous awful crimes against its own people, but this was not one of those cases, McNeil notes. Quite the opposite; the Chinese government is demonstrating leadership and doing the right thing.

The US’s more wishy-washy approach is going to stretch out for years and cost many, many unnecessary deaths. This doesn’t mean autocracy wins; World War II teaches us that free societies can beat autocracies when those free societies have a national will and strong, intelligent leadership (rather than the current Republican Party).

Boy raises a hammer during a solidarity rally for the 42,000 miners on strike in the Zonguldak coal fields in Turkey, November 1990. via

Wearing a mask is for smug liberals. Refusing to is for reckless Republicans. – Mask-wearing and other pandemic protections have become political virtue-signaling.

Good article, but I think it overstates the polarization. Most Americans recognize that the current situation is both unsustainable and necessary.

The people ranting about rights and Communism are lunatics. A tornado doesn’t care about your property rights when it knocks down your house.

The U.S. Needs Way More Than a Bailout to Recover From Covid-19 – We need a new New Deal to fix structural problems with the US economy that long predate the current crisis.

If we want to restart the engine that made this nation a superpower, we need to do something big. I mean really, really big: defeat-the-Nazis, land-a-man-on-the-moon, invent-the-internet big.

By my college pal Barry Ritholtz (and by “pal” I mean we talked a few times and said hello).

Funniest work videoconferencing misadventures

When videoconferencing meetings go wrong, you get to see flossing, naked husbands and more.

… I could tell both his dogs were barking frantically but couldn’t figure out what the rest of the noise was, and I was concerned. “Are you OK?” Deep sigh. “We have a parrot, and the parrot has learned to call the dogs. He waits until the dogs come in the room and then imitates my wife. When the dogs can’t find her, they lose their minds.”

Today on Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic

Pluralistic: 02 May 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

++ The mistrust epidemic

The pandemic isn’t the only disease that’s annihilating our society: alongside of it, there is an epidemic of mistrust in institutions and a growth in conspiricism, a panic to save yourself and let everyone else fend on their own.

Blaming Big Tech for the collapse in trust and commonly held truth is backwards: Big Tech’s bigness is en effect, not a cause, of the corruption that made our institutions so untrustworthy.

++ Prisons, meat packing plants and nursing homes

Coronavirus outbreaks are concentrated in three places: Prisons, meat packing plants and nursing homes – industries that are built on treating people cruelly, like disposable components.

“Public health has always known the truth. The care of the most margnialized members of society is important for fighting infectious diseases.”…

… the GOP’s emphasis has been on shielding employers whose employers or customers die of coronavirus due to unsafe conditions. These industries are designed to run in unsafe ways and can’t conceive of operating safely.

++ Contact tracing apps could be worse than useless.

Too many false positives and false negatives. It’s like those security warnings you see on websites that are so noisy that everybody just clicks past them and ignores them.

An exposure-notification app that forgets to notify you when you’re at risk AND often notifies you when you are not at risk becomes a worse-than-useless frippery, as well an expensive boondoggle and distraction.

And security defects in those apps could literally increase a population’s exposure to terrorism, crime, election fraud and authoritarian governments.

However, contact tracing can be useful and safe, with the right precautions.

++ Ticketmaster sold a $500M stake to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who ordered the murder, torture and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

++ And a hopeful note from Kim Stanley Robinson.

ME (1 month ago today): “How is it April already? This situation has been going on a long time!”

ME (seemingly minutes later): “How is it May already…. ?”