As Restaurants and Stores Reopen, What’s Safe? – Are haircuts, going back to work, eating in restaurants, and visiting friends and relatives OK? Experts lay out the options.
Microsoft and AWS exchange poisoned pen blog posts in latest Pentagon JEDI contract spat – Microsoft and Amazon’s fight over the $10B DoD JEDI contract enters the pissing contest stage.
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.
House GOP urge Trump against supporting additional funding for state and local governments – Republicans see coronavirus as an opportunity to overthrow elections in states like California and Illinois, by forcing those states to go bankrupt and appointing Republican judges to run them.
James Carville Warns Trump: Your ‘Grifter’ Campaign Aides Are Lying To You — “Trump is getting fleeced by members of his own campaign who know he’s going to lose reelection but won’t tell him for one simple reason: they’re trying to make money off the campaign.”
Now I’m curious which book it was and what was the so-called virtue signaling?
It's true: I am contractually obliged to offer at least three instances of virtue signalling in the first chapter of any book I write. If I don't I'm in violation of my contract. Also, two instances of political correctness and at least one subliminal tract on the virtues of soy. pic.twitter.com/MEYSSHnr6M
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) May 7, 2020
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.
Supreme Court throws out convictions of New Jersey officials in Bridgegate scandal – Political corruption is legal. That’s literally what the Supreme Court said. Unanimous ruling. Even the liberals went along with this bullshit.
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.
Parking Lots Have Become a Digital Lifeline — Without home internet access and with libraries and cafes closed, people are driving to parking lots to get on Wi-Fi.
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.
On Twitter, @mat asks: “With the benefit of a couple of months of hindsight, what was your best preparing for a pandemic move?"
I replied:
Stocking up on toilet paper. It wasn’t forethought – we routinely buy that kind of thing in bulk and prior to lockdown was when we were due to replenish.
OTOH, I needed a haircut even BEFORE we went into lockdown.
Interesting thread.
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.
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.
Sadly, those of you who need to hear this the most are too stupid to realize I'm talking directly to you. #johncleese #stupid #people pic.twitter.com/TdpO6nBvgc
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) April 21, 2020
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."
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 Scientists Who Won’t Give Up on the Warp Drive — Dozens of engineers and physicists are trying to do the impossible, develop a means of moving faster than the speed of light. They see it as an interesting thought experiment that could shed light on the boundaries of physics — and maybe more.
School bus converted to mobile, full-time off-grid home. And it’s a really NICE home too.
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.”
Welcome to your work-from-home dystopia: Employers are using spyware to monitor remote employees' work at home, requiring workers to leave their cameras and microphones on at all times. Surveillance software on employee computers monitors every keystroke, takes screenshots every few seconds, and tracks every email, message, the music employees listen to while working, and records facial expressions.
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.
John Belushi reportedly visited the set of “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” on the day he died. He wanted to work on his William Shatner impression.
For those of you who are not Trekkies, that was the one with Ricardo Montalban rocking the daring decolletage.
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.”
Airplane Mode – For grounded frequent flyers, this web page replicates the experience of being on a long flight and staring out the window. Via Mike’s List @mikeelgan
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.
Monty Python, 1976 via
1956 kitchen design (flooring). via
July 1973 via
Zenith portable radio advertisement, 1956 via
Me, deciding to take advantage of pandemic downtime: “Yeah, 220, 221, whatever it takes."
Covid-19 is 9.5-44x more fatal than seasonal flu — Scientific American — Flu deaths are counted in a misleading, grossly inflated manner, as compared with how Covid-19 deaths are counted.
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…. ?”
We watched the latest episode of “The Good Fight” last night. I liked it. I would’ve liked it more if the stinkers hadn’t given away a major plot point in the previews.
The main storyline of this season seems to be about a mysterious Memo 618. However, the previews told us what Memo 618 is. Feh. 📺
The Invisible Man – Today, Explained podcast: Where in the world is Kim Jong Un? Vox Journalist AlexWard says the rotund North Korean leader is probably not dead, might be very sick, and that North Korea’s leaders are watching the US, West and Western news media carefully to see how we react when we think he might be dead.
Also, Kim Jong Un is EXTREMELY obese. He merely looks chubby on TV – testimony to the power of loose-fitting dark clothes. And he’s a chain-smoker. Kim Jong Un was huffing and puffing to keep up with Trump.
Biden’s Campaign of Isolation – The New York Times Daily podcast: Joe Biden is campaigning from his basement, struggling to attain visibility while Trump commands the spotlight. This might be good for Biden.
URL for the micro meetup? I did not see that advance registration was required!
In the Republican solution to the Trolley Problem, the top priority is saving the trolley.
Ernest Hemingway supposedly wrote a six-word short story: “For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”
Didn’t happen. The story about Hemingway is apocryphal, appearing first in “Papa,” a one-many play about Hemingway by John deGroot, which debuted in 1996.
However, something very like that ad appeared in real life in a Tucson newspaper in 1945.
A former prosecutor dismantles Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Biden.
It just didn’t happen. She’s lying.
I’m hosting a “town hall” style Zoom meeting next week and I’m looking for a guide to doing such a thing. Anybody with experience willing to walk me through the process? We’re talking about seven or 8 speakers and maybe 100 attendees or more.
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic
++ “Swedish covid death rates soar above neighbors': “Do nothing” is not doing something.”
++ “Financial services workers dying for junk mail: Broadridge workers denied PPE, sick leave.”
++ AMC: “We will never show another Universal movie”: The feds are dismantling the monopoly regulations that broke up the Hollywood studio system. Soon we will have a few companies owning all the cable companies, movie studios and movie theaters. That’l be financially disastrous for anybody who works on or consumes Hollywood products.
They died for junk mail: Six workers died of COVID-19 at a Long Island, New York, warehouse for a company that prints and mails financial documents.
The company, Bainbridge Financial Solutions, pressured employees to avoid taking sick days, and delayed distributing PPE.
Coronavirus Kills Six Workers at Broadridge Warehouse
Thanks, Cory!
Last night, Julie and I watched the first episode of “Tales from the Loop,” an anthology series on Amazon Prime about the people in an Ohio smalltown where everybody works at some kind of paranormal research facility.
The episode was long on visual style and mood, short on actual story.
I’m not inclined to watch it again.
On the other hand, Julie likes it and I don’t dislike it enough to not watch another episode with her. So I’ll give the show at least one more try.
Even the fact that the show is apparently set in the 70s or early 80s was not enough to pull me in. 📺
Congress Concierge Health Clinic Quietly Gets Funding Boost — Congresspeople who reject government healthcare for the people — including Rand Paul and Nancy Pelosi — enjoy the finest government healthcare themselves.
Underrated Netflix gems to add to your must-watch list — I’ve added most of these to the watchlist.
Since when does Looper do real articles, btw? I thought they were pure clickbait.
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic
++ Cigna health insurers are telling investors they’re looking ahead to a great year, even while the health insurance lobby group is begging for a handout from Washington.
++ Damien Patton, co-founder of Banjo, a “grifty” AI surveillance startup that works with police, is a convicted Ku Klux Klan terrorist.
As a 17-year-old, Patton “was a Nazi skinhead who once helped a KKK leader stage a drive-by shooting that ‘sprayed bullets’ into a synagogue.” He was active in the Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Patton was the wheelman for a Klansman who fired a TEC-9 into a Nashville synagogue, and then was smuggled out of state by another Klansman….
His testimony included this phrase: “We believe that the Blacks and the Jews are taking over America, and it’s our job to take America back for the White race.”
Patton says he no longer believes those things to be true, and he sincerely regrets his youthful actions and beliefs.
Banjo “has conned the state of Utah into giving it access to state’s surveillance feeds with the promise of fighting crime using secret methods that Utahans (and independent reviewers) aren’t allowed to understand.”
++ In other surveillance news: NSO Group is a cyber-arms dealer that helps “the world’s most despicable dictators” commit crimes against humanity – including the Saudi murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.
At least one NSO employee used National Security Agency tools to stalk a woman he knew personally. He broke into NSA offices in the United Arab Emirates. This practice is so common that the NSA has a cute nickname for it, LOVEINT.
++ After the British Empire conquered the world and looted cultural artifacts, the British Museum, is claiming copyright over images of those artifacts. I’m planning to steal my next-door neighbor’s lawnmower and then claim copyright on pictures of it.
++ The medical debt collection industry is going strong during the pandemic. Victims include a nurse who is borrowing gas money to get to work because all of her pay is being garnisheed.
++ 68 pieces of advice from Kevin Kelly on his 68th birthday. Includes:
- Always demand a deadline,
- “Being able to listen well is a superpower” (I’m working on listening and am getting better at it. Previously I was just “waiting to talk.")
Also:
Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.
And:
Before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear, and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.