Proof of the value of looking beyond the most base layer of news.

The base layer of news is what shows up in fly-in chyrons an pop-up ads. Great to get under the fold, but its worth acknowledging how much of modern media is now just the front page of the New York Post.

most people who aren’t into technology probably don’t know what the steam deck is

Idk about that. Steam is a wildly popular platform and regularly markets the SteamDeck to its user base.

Higher education is all about close-mindedness and conservatism after all.

In a capitalist economy, higher education is about maximizing profit.

By hiding their ties, they can deny, delay, and depose anyone who prints statements to the contrary.

One would have thought the administrators at MIT would also be smart

Shutting the door on public inquiry is a long term play that involves a little short term pain. But nobody is going to remember this headline in another news cycle or three.

Admins are banking on BDS falling down the memory hole like so many other failed civil rights initiatives.

HelloChinese is a little better on content and a lot better on not being an annoying ad machine.

We’ve done it before. Eradicating smallpox, eliminating CFCs to avoid carving chunks out of the ozone layer, globalizing the food supply to curb faminie, building and maintaining an international space station.

It’s relatively easy to forgive debt that’s targeting people with virtually no ability to repay it. You’re not losing money simply because you’ve stopped sending out collections calls and notices to people who have nothing to give you. The fees total appears to have reached this level precisely because so few people were paying it.

a jury had just found him not guilty of the charges that had landed him in the notoriously brutal Harrisburg jail to begin with. After all that time inside, it felt especially insulting for the county to hound him to pay for his own confinement even following his acquittal.

…

“The longer you sat in jail, the more debt you incurred, the more debt your family incurred. People sit there pretrial for one year, two years. It’s so wrong,”

Outright sadistic to set bonds your suspect can’t afford, then charge them for incarceration even after acquittal. These are very nakedly predatory fines, designed to keep certain people in poverty.

Justin Douglas, the Democratic commissioner who scored a shock upset win in 2023 on an uncommon platform of reforming the Dauphin County jail, and who championed the recent debt forgiveness, says that the county was spending about as much, if not more, on collecting those jail fees as it was taking in.

“This is fake debt to begin with, in that we’re never going to recoup $66 million, and it’s comical to think we would,” Douglas told Bolts.

The entire nut of the problem. It’s merely a collections racket. The system exists to do what it does, which is to hound people released from prison into perpetuity.

And much harder to replace you with someone unfamiliar with the problem.

the message went completely over the heads of the people it needed to reach

You had a series of very cynical and deliberately manipulative media coverage of the film which tried to spin it as anything but a climate change movie. And then you had a bunch of “man on the street” pieces intended to make viewers appear stupid.

But the core theory of media influenced economic change is rooted in the idea that a movie can shift people from their profit motives. No oil executive is going to watch a slapstick comedy and decide to shift his business’s core financial model because of a few jokes. No bank executives are going to divest from carbon emitting industries because some Hollywood starlets made fun of them. No senior member of political leadership is going to change how mining permits and environmental regulations are written because Adam McKay posted big numbers at the box office.

The Network didn’t change how Americans consumed their news media. Soylent Green didn’t cause Americans to reconsider our policies on factory farming. Jarhead didn’t cause any military personal to exit Iraq or Afghanistan. The only movie that seems to have really moved the dial on public policy is Idiocracy, the inspiration behind Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s quest to get more IT people to fuck.

What you can end up with is a lot of new hires queued up for the firing line. The “bottom 5%” is, initially, the people in the office who are currently in a slump. But then you bring on a load of fresh new hires who have little experience and a lot of pressure. They burn out fast and become the next “bottom 5%”.

Meanwhile, the more politically and technically savvy learn to survive by creating make-work tasks that look good on performance metrics but do little for the firm as a whole. Their superiors approve, because a team that is constantly appearing busy is more important than a team that’s producing anything of value. So you end up with these little entrenched departmental fiefs, dedicated to making themselves irreplaceable at the expense of the company as a whole.

There’s a ton written on the Sears collapse in the early 00s, where this exact dynamic played out. Managers turned against one another, because stack ranking mattered more than inter-department cohesion or bottom line figures. The company went from a network of high end retailers to a shitty outlet stores over the course of a decade.

Its most aggressive at the higher tiers, because promotions are a tool of employee retention and “flattening” the management stack is a good way of pushing out the experienced, expensive older employees. You’ll also see a lot more outsourcing of department rolls, as C-levels opt for lowest-bidder contractors you can hire/fire inside a business cycle than big teams of veteran staffers who sit on the payroll thick or thin. That means fewer mid-level managers, as the actual process of team management is sent overseas or subcontracted out to temporary management firms.

McDonald Douglas and Yahoo both executed on this strategy back in the 90s to great effect. Stock valuations boomed, because they were able to create the illusion of cost cutting without impacting quarterly revenue. All it cost them was mountains of technical debt. And then nothing bad happened to either company.

Great for creating a lot of churn and quick-fix make-work. Rather than deploying a single comprehensive solution to a persistent problem, just take credit for fixing the symptoms over and over and over again.

Old enough to remember when you could get to the “end of Twitter”, because you’d swiped through all the active posts of the day.

I’m old enough to remember Nintendo suing GameGenie for making the test codes on their games more broadly accessible. And Apple suing indie firms that made 3rd party peripherals for their devices. Don’t forget Microsoft’s unholy war on Netscape Navigator, as they deliberately tried to sabotage the popular third party web browser from working via various Microsoft updates. Hell, I think you can find case law in the 1920s on Ford Motor Company fighting spare parts manufacturers and trying to box them out of the industry. Corporate dinosaurs fighting to keep startups from interfacing with their products is a tale as old as time.

Historically, Facebook/Google/Twitter/et al were focused on integrating with common systems, because they were the underdogs struggling against firms like Microsoft and Comcast who were trying to maintain their Walled Garden. Now they’re kings of the hill, pushing competition off their doorstep.

Its sleazy and toxic and ultimately bad for the industry as a whole. But its nothing new.

Schools, hospitals, and aid convoys that are hijacked and used by Hamas

The “human shields” rhetoric is traditionally used as a reason why you can’t target a militant, not a reason why you can kill a civilian.

Israel has inverted the narrative, both by asserting that a dozen dead Palestinians are justified if one Hamas militant is killed, and by asserting that anyone in proximity to a Hamas militant is a collaborator.

The end result is a free-fire zone, wherein nobody an Israeli bomb or hit squad targets is exempt from the status of “military target”. This is a legal claim that Israel makes independent of international legal courts, and has resulted in the Israeli government being repeatedly sanctioned and threatened with prosecution by those same courts.

So no, they are not

valid military targets under international law

Just the contrary. The IDF is implicated in war crimes by engaging in these rampant and lawless slaughters.

tickets (while important) take a back seat to a rich commit history

I’ve found people who do one will manage the other with ease. But “oops! No ticket” is a canary telling me their commit log is going to be shit.

But honestly, has anyone ever been able to just reach the ticket history and know everything about a project without asking someone?

I’ve been able to find out the status of individual half-finished bugs off a ticket log and work/reassign it quickly. Without a ticket in queue, I’ll either discover the issue has been completely ignored or that multiple people pioneered their own boutique fix without talking to one another.

Do I really need to open a ticket for this

Yes

UNIRONICALLY, ASSHOLE! IT’S THE FIRST THING YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE!!!

Fucking “hey guys, we are bringing in someone from another department and they need to catch up. What’s the project looking like?”

“I don’t know. Nobody wrote anything down and now it’s scattered across six didn’t PCs in various states of dysfunction.”

IT guys think they’re all Michael Jordan right until they get the ball.

All the BRICS have. Brazil just stands out, because its not a country we’ve flagged as “Evil Enemy Run By Inhuman Savages”.

they’re saying these things under their legal names

Facebook has plenty of promotional accounts, stale accounts hijacked by scammers, and straight up fake accounts. Hell, Meta’s been premiering entirely AI generated profiles.

You could be getting N-bombed by a fully automated synthetic personality before too long.

The sad part is we could actually solve this problem, humanity could indeed solve this if we put our minds to it and unified.

Unified? With those disgusting foreigners? The degenerate leftists? The weird religious wackos? The MAGA chuds? The neoliberal shills? The Tankies? The know-nothing hoy paloy? The Epstein-loving bourgeois? The Hollywood sickos? The losers? The haters? The freaks? And some, of course, who I assume are nice people?

There’s a lot of natural social divides that are difficult to surmount. But more frustrating and complicated than that, we have a certain number of scammers and opportunists who will step in and seize the banner of a popular front for self-promotion.

We saw this during OWS, during BLM, during the Climate marches, and during the Tea Party protests. Lots of would-be celebrities simply rush in and start hawking their brands under anything with serious mass appeal. Whether its a Sanders socialism or a Trump fascism or a Buttigieg radical centrism, I regularly see media jammed up with the same clown car of Hawk Tuah Girl promotionals that quickly drown out any kind of serious organizing.

This, combined with the heavy hand of corporate/political censorship that lands on the back of the more sincere and credible activists, disrupts the organic popular movements and obscures them with layer after layer of scam. AI is supercharging the process.

Case in point, any time I say something positive about Gaza or critical of Israel on Bluesky, my mentions fill up with generic 2-day-old accounts showing vaguely Arab-looking profiles asking for donations to relief organizations I’ve never heard of. Organizing in an environment that’s overflowing with these kinds of scams - and, consequently, cultivating a ton of cynicism in the audience - is very difficult.