Doc Edward Morbius ⭕ @dredmorbius@mastodon.cloud

An administrative announcement.
Motherfuckers.

This One Trick Will Revolutionize Your Use of Social Media: Block fuckwits.

On social media, the advantage is that a large userbase and participation. The disadvantage: it's 99.9999% crap.

What's working for me is to filter ruthlessly. If someone is disruptive, ideological, insane, or crazy-making, I'll block them without thought (I used to agonize over that, I don't any more).

High signal is rare, but odds of missing out by blocking idiots are low.

#BlockFuckwits

https://web.archive.org/web/20180303151553/https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq

My present Recaptcha policy:

Request audio.

Respond "Fuck you Google"

Repeat until access granted, or the joy fades.

Bonus: All audio AI parsing tends to "Fuck you Google".

My current policy for "Cookie Consent" dialogues:

1. Fire up uMatrix and globally block cookies for domain.

2. Fire up uBlock Origin to block element on page.

3. Self-Destructing Cookies for edge case motherfuckers.

Remember, boys and girls and all that lieth betwixt and beyond: FIRST pillage THEN burn!

#privacy #firefox #uBlockOrigin #uMatrix #SelfDestructingCookies #GDPR

"Pseudonyms and anonymity are also an established part of many cultures -- for good reason."

- Alma Whitten, former Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering, Google

The solution to gentrification is to control who reaps the benefits of increased land values.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1173775762568007680.html

#Gentrification #property #seattle

We's IPO doesn't Work

WeWork owner The We Company took a last-minute decision on Monday to suspend preparations for an initial public offering (IPO), concerned that its stock market debut would be snubbed by many investors, people familiar with the matter said.

HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20990081

WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wework-ipo/wework-parent-pulls-ipo-following-pushback-sources-idUSKBN1W12T6

#IPO #WeWork #business

And a via a correspondant:

> The poor have been rebels but they have never been anarchists. They have got more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea on a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' wars.

-- G K Chesterton

Hardly a novel concept, I know:

"The love of possessions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not! They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They even take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule."
-- Sitting Bull (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/683834-behold-the-spring-has-come-the-earth-has-received-the)

"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender."
-- Proverbs 22:7

2/

Law-takers vs. law-makers

This makes a neat mapping between competitive/monopoly market theory (price takers vs. makers), to law and power.

Daniel Markovits ("The Poverty Trap") discusses this at about 50 minutes (roll back to 40 for the preamble) here:
https://media.rawvoice.com/lse_publiclecturesandevents/richmedia.lse.ac.uk/publiclecturesandevents/20190508_1830_theMeritocracyTrap.mp3 (MP3)

There's a 2010 book w/ a title:
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315598475

#wealth #power #inequality #lawMakers #lawTakers #economics #politics

1/

Shakin' like tremelo...

Drop that casette in your Walkman, pop in your earbuds, and rock out.

https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=BZhfFXEMMI4

Metcalfe law's shadow: the risks in a network are proportional to the square number of people connected to the network.

-- pacala @ HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20968859

#networks #MetcalfesLaw #hygiene