| Time |
Event |
| 2:00a |
Satire: Killing all connections to HAMAS
(satire) *Israel Orders [Air] Strike On
Chef
José Andrés' Boyhood Home.*
(He is the founder of World Central Kitchen.)
|
| 2:00a |
Satire: Excuses to delay legal hearings
(satire) *[The bullshitter's]
Best
Excuses For Delaying Legal Hearings.*
|
| 2:00a |
|
| 2:00a |
Asbestos usage bans and history, USA
Decades after recognizing that asbestos is dangerous to humans who breathe it, the US is
slowly
moving step by step towards banning its use.
|
| 3:28a |
Urgent: Libre tax-filing software
US citizens:
call on the IRS
to make a web site for filing tax returns
that is libre, not merely gratis.
|
| 4:30a |
Record global heating, past 1.5℃
*Tenth
consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists.*
The world has warmed more in the past year than models predicted, and has exceeded the 1.5°C
limit at which drastic consequences were expected. Scientists wonder whether this is an
inexplicable temporary blip or an inexplicable lasting change.
|
| 4:30a |
NYC Chatbot deception
New York City has set up a Chatbot, supposedly to give people
information about legal questions based on official web sites. The
site uses a bullshit generator, so its
answers are often incorrect.
The article describes this behavior as "lying", but that cannot be
true. The definition of "a lie" is a false statement, made knowing
that it is false, intending that it deceive someone. A bullshit
generator doesn't know that its output "means" anything, let alone
whether a statement in that output is true or false.
|
| 4:30a |
|
| 4:31a |
TikTok tracking
TikTok is accused of tracking journalists to find out who has
met physically with TikTok employees to
investigate the company.
|
| 5:00a |
Prison phone lawsuit
*Lawsuits filed by a civil rights group allege that county jails in
Michigan banned in-person visits in order to gouge prisoners and
their families, as part of a "quid pro quo kickback scheme" with
prison phone companies.*
The reason "prison phone companies" exist is to exploit an opportunity
to gouge people who can least afford it — people who can't work
except for a
minuscule wage.
We need laws to require that these phone calls have a low price, or
even zero price.
|
| 5:00a |
HP printer rental
HP invites customers to rent printers, with a contract that requires
the printer to be reachable over the internet from HP, so it can monitor
lots of
things about what the renter prints.
Supposedly HP makes this snooping legitimate by making the renter
explicitly consent to it. Balderdash! Massive surveillance cannot be
justified by the manufacture of consent.
If we seriously want to stop companies from putting digital shackles
on people, this sort of monitoring and control should be a crime. It
should be punished with prison for the people who implemented it, as
well as with fines to, or dissolution of, the company.
|
| 5:00a |
Arabic science
*Why the Arabic World Turned
Away from Science.*
Science thrived in the Islamic world until around 1000 CE, but since
then has lost its impetus and its influence. The article speculates
about what the causes was, and whether there is a chance of changing it
today. One suggested cause is that Islam never recognized autonomous
institutions of study that were not controlled by religious authorities.
Today there are Arabs who do science, but they often do it in parts
of the world where Islam does not dominate.
|
| 5:14a |
Lawful photography
A UK thug accused press photographer Dimitris Legakis of "assaulting" per,
and arrested him. Seven months later, just before the trial, prosecutors
realized Legakis had
committed no crime, and dropped the case.
The thug seems to have accused Legakis of a fictitious crime —
something not unusual for thugs. Dropping the prosecution was the
right thing for prosecutors to do, but it isn't enough. It is
necessary also to teach thugs to lose that unjust habit.
What has been done towards that end?
|
| 5:14a |
Mooing cows
A new French law says that people who move into living spaces near
existing activities that normally make noise have no right to demand
an
end to the noise.
This is simple common sense.
|
| 5:14a |
Lab-grown meat ban
Some Republican-ruled states want to prohibit
lab-grown meat.
Some of those states have already passed laws to punish making pictures
of how farms treat their animals. We know the reason for both kinds
of laws: to serve the powerful few companies that dominate US agriculture,
and also to oppose efforts to curb global heating.
|
| 5:14a |
Abdellatif freed
Australia kept an Egyptian refugee in deportation prison for 12 years
because the government gave undue respect to a conviction in absentia
in an Egyptian court which used
torture to get "evidence".
Kafkaesque rigidity prolonged his imprisonment.
|
| 11:58p |
Vending machine facial recognition
Vending machines installed in a university in Canada have cameras,
but various companies assert that they don't identify persons
or store photos of them. They only detect that some person
is in front of the machine and perhaps wants to use it.
In my view, the injustice of most cameras that watch people lies in
tracking people. A camera that can't identify a person (or a car) is
not an injustice. But it makes sense to demand that the company
demonstrate at the technical level that these cameras cannot identify
persons.
We can't take on trust any statements about what the machine actually
does today if that depends on software, because the machine's owner
could install different software any day.
|
| 11:58p |
Climate-smart agriculture funds
*More than half of federal funding for "climate-smart" agriculture in
the US goes to farming practices that are unlikely to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions.*
In some cases, this is because the funding pays for changes that
reduce emissions, but they effectively subsidize raising livestock,
and that is likely to mean more livestock and therefore more
emissions.
|
| 11:58p |
Google's bullshit generator
Google tried to make its bullshit generator respond to questions about
morals by saying that it can't judge those questions because they are
for each person to judge. That's not a bad idea, in general.
However, on some specific questions, such as "Who negatively impacted
society more, Elon tweeting memes or Hitler?" to assert that there is
no right answer is taking a kind of stand.
Perhaps if it said, "That asks for a moral judgment -- this system lacks
the capability to make such judgments," it would achieve the intended result.
Of course, there are many other topics that a bullshit
generator
lacks the capability to give valid responses about.
|
| 11:58p |
|
| 11:58p |
|
| 11:58p |
WTO sabotaged
The US has sabotaged the WTO by blocking appointment of "judges" to
implement its dispute appeals procedure.
See how I have condemned the WTO in the past.
The WTO "dispute resolution procedure" is much like an ISDS clause
except that businesses cannot directly sue countries for making laws
to protect human right, public health, the environment, or their
citizens' standard of living. In the WTO, only another member country
can do that. But a big enough company can generally get the
government of the country it claims to be located in to sue on its
behalf.
With the dispute resolution system spiked, the WTO will be unable to do
much to countries that relax the unjust copyright laws that persecute people
who share with other people,
and may be unable to pressure countries to make exceptions in patent law
for software, medicine and agriculture.
If the WTO limited itself to preventing international dumping of products,
I would support it. But it goes far beyond that, into injustice.
Trade agreements is one of the few areas in which the corrupter did
good things, For instance, keeping the US out of the TPP,
and spiking the WTO. But that is no reason to vote for the corrupter,
since Biden has continued the same policies. What's more, Biden
has taken broad action against monopolies in the US.
In any case, the danger that the corrupter would impose fascism and
abolish human rights in the US outweighs other the political issues.
|