Clubhouse’s Inevitability


Hamsterkauf! Coronazeit! There’s a German Word for Your Pandemic Experience.


This morning.


Blue beads in the tundra

“In the 1400s, craftsmen in the city-state of Venice traded with people throughout Asia. The beads might have traveled in a horse-drawn cart along the Silk Road eastward toward China. From there, “these early Venetian beads found their way into the aboriginal hinterlands, with some moving to the Russian Far East,” the authors wrote in their recent paper.

After that great journey, a trader may have tucked the beads into his kayak on the western shore of the Bering Sea. He then dipped his paddle and made passage to the New World, today’s Alaska. The crossing of Bering Strait at its narrowest is about 52 miles of open ocean.”


Disney’s Recycled Footage & Animated Doppelgangers


BBC: `Spy pixels in emails have become endemic`



Dominion Voting Systems sues Giuliani for $1.3bn over baseless election claims


A heartbeat away… isn’t that what they say? If that would happen Sweden, my home country, would look even worse on this list.


The Most Notable Lies of Donald Trump’s Presidency



The Covid-19 mRNA vaccine (David Goodsell)


The Trump campaign’s last stand


United States v. Google

“In other words, Google can enjoy the natural fruits of being an Aggregator, it just can’t use artificial means — in this case contracts — to extend that inherent advantage.

[…]

Aggregators have powerful justifications for their dominance. That, though, is why the real question is a political one: are we as a society comfortable with a few big companies having such an outsized role in our lives? If the answer is no, the ultimate answer will not be through the courts, but through new laws for a new era. Anti-aggregation, not antitrust” (Ben Thompson).


Eddie Van Halen dies of cancer aged 65

🎸 🌋

R.I.P.



Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun


The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free” (Nathan J. Robinson).


The European Model

Europe, through regulations like GDPR and the Copyright Directive, along with last week’s court decision striking down the Privacy Shield framework negotiated by the European Commission and the U.S. International Trade Administration (and a previous decision striking down the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles framework), is splintering off into an Internet of its own.

This Internet, though, feels like the worst of all possible outcomes. On one hand, large U.S. tech companies are winners, at least relative to everyone else: yes, all of the regulatory red tape increases costs (and, for targeted advertising, may reduce revenue), but the impact is far greater on would-be competitors. To put it in allegorical terms, the E.U. is restricting the size of the castle even as it dramatically increases the moat” (Ben Thompson).


Falun 1743


Gradually, Then Suddenly

What’s going to be newsworthy by the end of the year is not technology companies saying they’re embracing distributed work, but those that aren’t. Those who thought this couldn’t work have been forced by the pandemic to do it anyway, and they’ve now seen that it’s possible” (Matt Mullenweg).


Full Employment

But none of this stuff is insurmountable – it’s just hard. We CAN do this stuff. If you were wringing your hands about unemployed truckers, good news! They’ve all got jobs moving thousands of cities inland!

It’s just (just!) a matter of reorienting our economy around preserving our planet and our species.

And yeah, that’s hard, too – but if “the economy” can’t be oriented to preserving our species, we need a different economy.

Period” (Cory Doctorow).


The TikTok War


Anti-Pseudoscience Advocate Anne Borden King Has Cancer, and Now Her Facebook Feed Is Full of Pseudoscience Cancer ‘Alternative Care’ Ads

Facebook is a criminal enterprise fully and knowingly complicit in all of this — from the spread of bigotry to the spread of pseudoscience.

Conversely, legitimate advertisers are abandoning Facebook because they want nothing to do with any of this. To remain on Facebook is to be complicit by association” (John Gruber).