- Move: Leaving the Twitter dumpster fire? The Guardian explains Mastadon.
- Read: Why are R campaign emails getting marked as spam? They send too many to anyone who signs up for ANY list. So, yeah. Spam.
- Listen: In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Malcolm Gladwell released his reading of a chapter on a similar abuse of vulnerable people by those in power: The British Army versus the Catholics of Northern Ireland. Those who have power should not abuse it.
- Watch (and weep): A satire on GoFundMe as the #1 source of American health care.
- Listen: Are elections biased in favour of running for office rather than actually doing the job?
- Watch: At this point in the video (building a boat), the boatbuilder mentions “it’s been a good week. When we get faster, then we can knock off at 3pm.” It struck me that such a system strongly encourages workers to get more efficient, teach each other, etc. whereas the office system of “9 to 5” gives no such incentive. Why bother to work smarter if all you get is more work in the “working day?” Now I see where bullshit jobs come from. Related: Hunter gathers worked less and with more variation — another reason why we (their descendants) hate office “regularity.”
- Amazon is turning into the monopolist nightmare predicted by many, first with using other sellers’ data to push their own products (since 5+ years) and now with advertising EVERYWHERE on the platform (making it mostly useless, IMO). Time to find another “store”.
- Watch this discussion of the Ship of Theseus, i.e., what gives a boat identity if you replace all its planks?
- Listen: You should wash your clothes in cold water… with the right soap
- Read: “…because of how people actually use Twitter, the lines between “comedy club” and “town square” and “room full of monetizable user data that drive advertising revenue” aren’t always apparent.” Related: “From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality. That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.“
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