Riots and Building Bathrooms - August 2024
The country’s racist rioters run amok, the internet enshitifies further, and work is half done on my new bathroom
Me
Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse
Building A Bathroom
Goodbye old broken bathroom, you were often annoying and usually dirty but until the end, mostly at least worked.
I have dyed my hair in you for the last time.
First day was just breaking down walls to expose pipes.
Second day was replacing the broken stop-cocks, this made more complex with the realization that we can’t disconnect the water for the whole block after all, because that stop-cock is also broken.
😬
Turns out there are two water-inputs into my flat. The mains connection plus also a tank in the roof. Nobody seemed to want to explain why. Something to do with pressure maybe. But if mains-pressure can fill the tank in the roof can’t it also blast my shower?
I guess this is probably why I can safely shower while the washing machine is running. I’ve lived places where the shower would stutter or boil if someone made a cup of tea, but that don’t happen here.
Anyway, both inputs to the flat have broken stop-cocks, plus the one that feeds the whole block is broken. How do you deal with that?
The mains-input stock-cock does actually just-about work if you get enough leverage on it that you nearly break the pipe. So they can close that one, add a new tap after it, then turn it back on.
Now I have two stop-cocks there, only one of which is stuck “on”.
I think with the other one they drained the entire tank then replaced the tap live when it was down to a drip, something like that. I was mostly working. Dunno what was going on. Splashing and swearing.
Heroes frankly, I was suspecting there’d be months of delays while the bankrupt Thames Water postponed replacing the block’s stop-cock.
Then the rest of the week, bathroom broken down more. I’m left with no bath, no cistern. Wall fully removed, many old pipes removed.
Toilet has been removed and the sewer pipe under it dredged. If it had a cistern it might finally flush okay again now! But we can’t know for sure coz it’ll be just flushing by pouring buckets into it till the new one is fitted.
The old pipe there had much much limescale and apparently a trapped flushed plastic bag. Thanks to whoever did that (probably me then I forgot?).
The bath-outlet is pretty high apparently, and the shower-basin will need to be above that height, so they have built a stage on which to place the shower unit.
The big gray tiles are massive, and it turns out also much thicker than the red ones. Didn’t think about that at all when picking ’em.
Builders apparently have techniques for compensating for this depth disparity though so I won’t have indented red stripes.
Apparently these big thick tiles are too big and thick for the tile-cutter too so special equipment is needed.
It is about half done? Hope so. We’re more than half way through the estimated time.
Hopefully by the time of the next newsletter I will not have to sponge-bath and wash my hair in the kitchen sink any more.
Gig
Met up with the old band-mates and had some food and watched some of those new younger bands that they have these days that haven’t become jaded and sour and broken up yet.
In an old 60-year-running venue in south London: The Half Moon.
Apparently it’s fairly well known, but not by me. Never been there before. It’s the very very opposite side of town and nearly 90 minutes journey away.
Missed most of Magerison, who had the coolest looking bass player of the night, but otherwise were properly allotted the warm-up slot I think.
Bowen were symmetric and energetic and among their set played an old Blondie song, despite none of them being anything like old enough to know what it means to have a phone booth across the hall.
They looked great with the two dark-haired guitarists flanking the blonde girl in the middle.
It felt like she was looking at me the whole time.
Is it like those paintings that stare at you wherever you stand?
Did I have a mark on my face?
Was her mum standing behind me?
It was brilliant anyway and I love her now.
If you can figure out how to do that in your show for everyone in the audience then I’d recommend that as a technique.
We finished with “Moody”, surely the most ungoogleable name for a band ever who should sack whoever named them.
She did some good screaming and emoting, and the band had paid attention to choreography nicely, but in a way that my band would have just found embarrassing.
And indeed that did seem to put off my ex-guitarist who complained about them looking too flashy. 😆
Copyrights and AI
One of the things I’m finding myself most conflicted about lately is that I’ve always thought copyright was bullshit, and that the pirates are the only hope to keep our human culture free from the corporations owning and enclosing even the very thoughts in our head.
The pirates will preserve the culture, while the corporates would sooner culture dies so they can sell us new things that they can charge rent on.
But then it’s also the only weapon we have against these big AI machines slurping up all the ideas ever and then belching out mixups of them to drown out all real thought and human feeling on the web.
The machines are born in such copyright debt that they can’t possibly ever repay it, and yet copyright itself is corporate bollocks trying to enclose and commodify human culture implying that ideas could be owned and traded in a market.
I suspect the resolution is that the courts will find, as usual, that whoever has the most money wins. So the corporate machines will be able to read whatever they want, and only the humans will have to pay to read a book.
Which shows indeed, copyright is bullshit, the machines won’t even actually be held to it, because it was always just corporate enclosure not actually anything to do with rewarding artists or fairness.
Still, one path to the utopia where the people laze about eating fruit while the machines tend them is if the world’s courts were to decide that copyright is actually real, not bullshit, and that the machines therefore owe more money to the artists than even exists in the world.
Those corporations would owe collective humanity more money than humanity could ever need.
Stardust
People keep saying that we’re made of stardust just because the heavy elements that we’re made of are forged in stars and supernova.
But the hydrogen in the water that makes up lots of our bodies hasn’t undergone any stellar nucleosynthesis.
So you’re not entirely made of stardust, there’s also some direct big-bang condensate in there too I reckon.
Novel Writing Month
The National Novel Writing Month organisation has apparently said it’s ableist and exclusionary to ban AI generated entries. And that has nothing to do with their sponsor, an AI company.
Wait, what? The National Novel-Writing month is some kind of organisation not just a hashtag?
Next you’ll be telling me the #caturday corporation is thinking of including robot cats.
Politics
Riots
Why does the government say “Stay home, let the cops take care of it”, instead of saying “Gather to show support against these fascists and racists and riotous dupes, outnumber them by hundreds, and party and meet your neighbours and show support?”
Coz in the end that’s what stopped them: Community showing up and saying no.
Do governments who aren’t dictators ever suggest pro-government rallies against opposition nazis?
Why are they not just saying “We are having a defeat-the-Nazis holiday” and giving everyone a day off to be multicultural in the racist’s faces?
I tried some role-play with the AI-bots and best theory we could come up with is that the government are in fact crypto-fascists who have no intention of defeating the right.
Some people had some ideas in the thread.
Macroeconomics
I’m hearing otherwise sensible people say “where is the money coming from” , about a government paying wages to workers.
What?
The same place all our money comes from: the government.
What do you even think money is?
How will we pay for it?
Oh, well, you see there is a bank, and the government owns the bank, and when the government asks the bank to pay a train driver, they add money in the train driver’s account.
That’s how we’ll pay for it.
And you know what happens to the money after the government gives it to the train driver?
They tax it right back at 30%, so that’s a third of it back straight away.
Then the train driver takes his money and spends it on a new bathroom or something, giving the money to a builder.
About 30% of it, at that point, goes from the builder back to the government, because the builder pays taxes too.
What does the builder do with the money? Well, some of it goes to materials, which are taxed. But he has his profit left over.
What happens to that profit? Well, after it’s taxed, the builder might decide to throw a party and feed all his family and friends, he’ll employ cooks! And waiters!
Guess how much tax cooks and waiters pay?
I mean you see where this is going?
The money passes through maybe a dozen hands before it all evaporates in taxes.
You don’t even have to increase tax rates. The current tax-rates already evaporate all the money the government spends back into nothingness within a score or so of transactions.
That “growth” that they say they need before they can keep pensioners warm? That is what the train drivers wages cause. They cause the growth.
Starmer Speech
I don’t really understand what the point of that morning address to the nation was.
Just purely to lower expectations? There was no announcement, no occasion, no event.
Just “Hey fuckos, thanks for the votes, now I’m gonna stomp on you all. Bwahahha! I don’t wan to, it’s the last guy’s fault. But you’re in for so much pain though. Bwahahha”
No reason I can fathom, just a de-motivational speech from a leader: Hey everyone, I promise misery! Moral will not improve!
Maybe he thinks he’s ripping a mask off, revealing the truth of how he’ll govern after the lies during his selection, and the other different lies during the election.
“Under it all I’m even more austeritan and less willing to tax the rich than I revealed, either time! Your poor clods are in for it now.”
10% less support for genocide
See, Labour are completely different to the Conservatives, this is like 10% less support for genocidal wars for a start.
Totally different style of governance.
Releases
Wordcloud Tarot
We find that the one percent have been looting the country blind, while deliberately accelerating a social crisis to use immigrants as a scape-goat.
But it will not work, their plans are exposed, the people don’t like blind hateful rage, and society will unite against fascism.
Watch the show on the website:
Watching
Watched Succession in which Brian Cox plays the aged leader of a corporate media empire and his family are all scheming and backstabbing each other to be the one to take over.
It would seem that taking control of these kinds of corporate machinery is mostly a question of convincing everyone else to back you, including the bankers. The whole setup is a confidence game. Whoever gets the most confidence gets the crown.
And yet why would any of them have confidence in any of the others at all, given that they all betray and scheme against each other all the time?
Engaging to watch them all as they plot and gather support but it’s not the kinda life and I’d want to live at all, not the kind of friends I’d like to collect.
Can you even have love and friendship when the stakes are that high? Kings and courtiers don’t have real relationships, only alliances and strategic affiliations.
Reading
Well, re-read, coz I couldn’t remember if I’d read it or not. Some of the start seemed familiar but I couldn’t remember the end. Maybe I didn’t finish it before? Didn’t have the paperback so maybe I lost it.
It’s a nice story about an orphaned kid going back to the place he lost his parents, and also a brilliant genetic and quantum conundrum of how and why evolution seems to be going into overdrive on that island.
Greg’s great at the nitty gritty of the science and that’s why I love him.
Around the Fediverse
A people’s network owned by the people run for the people without a billionaire or a corporation or a giant robot censor machine.
While the rest of the internet enshitifies at an alarming pace, Fedi is keeping the trolls ostracised and outcast, the corporations unmonetised, and the influencers unable to influence. All through the power of decentralized moderation and open source.
Some cool stuff this month:
Riots
@thewritertype@mastodonapp.uk sends us the official notification:
Please note: the civil war in the UK has been cancelled owing to a massive display of human decency on one side and the other side not showing up.
Who Guards The Guardian?
@ayoub@spore.social gives us a thread about media bias:
If you’re confused by why The Guardian doesn’t seem to know how to cover the far right, lemme tell ya something I learned not long ago.
In 2020 two academics published a paper looking at how The Guardian has been mainstreaming the Far Right. At the core there is one problem (this is my simplification): the conflation of Far Right concerns with ’the people'.
By default whatever the Far Right says has be taken more seriously than anything even left of center (let alone further left) which is also why the Guardian often uses ‘populism’ and ’the far right’ interchangeably.
So these two academics, Aurelien Mondon and Katy Brown, looked at The Guardian’s mainstreaming of the Far Right focusing on three aspects….
…The Far Right is treated as the default ‘people’, or as representing the default ‘people’. It is not the views or experiences of racialised minorities that are platformed…..
Great thread.
Abandon Spotify
@inpc@go.mxtthxw.art is leaving spotify:
It’s official! #Liotia will no longer be on Spotify, Tidal or other streaming services. We’ve been considering this for a while and decided that if Spotify can’t support independent musicians then why on earth should we be paying to advertise their services?
Telling people to ‘check us on Spotify’ is frankly embarrassing.
Check us on radio, check us on Bandcamp/Faircamp/Mirlo/Wavlake etc.
I’m all this time we’ve only earned a few scraps from them, meanwhile PRS, Bandcamp, Mirlo and Wavlake have all paid us considerably more. So in short… Fuck Spotify.
Now all their recordings are *special exclusives*, collectables that you just can’t get on the streams.
The whole underground should go underground, it’s madness giving it away to megacorp without a record contract.
Or with one come to that.
Fired Whistleblower
In May this year, Peter Hendy pressured my now-former employer Systra to sack me by threatening them.
Why did he do this? Because I’d highlighted safety and accessibility issues at Euston station. He is unfit for office and should resign.
Godot
Game engine Godot doesn’t provide games-console versions. Why is that? Coz they are terrible for requiring licensing and legal liability.
@godotengine@mastodon.gamedev.place explains:
Why does the Godot Foundation not provide FOSS console ports?
The short answer:- Legal liability- Disproportionate cost- Open source licensing issues
The long answer: https://godotengine.org/article/about-official-console-ports/
Activitypub Viewer
I saw John Sprlock’s little web-app for viewing the raw activity-pub data, as little “client” as possible:
@js@podcastindex.social explained:
The idea here is to make it a bit easier to see how well the various players in the fediverse support the C2S side of the ActivityPub spec.
You can punch in any ActivityPub discoverable web url or fediverse handle, and BrowserPub will discover and display the underlying AP. …
France’s Election Stolen?
@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes@treehouse.systems analyses:
When I last wrote about the fallout from France’s election this summer, and President Emanuel Macron’s refusal to nominate a Prime Minster from the coalition of left and left leaning parties that gained the most seats in Parliament, many people predicted (and I agreed) that Macron seemed likely to work with the right (including the fascist National Rally and its leader Marine Le Pen) to effectively steal the election.
Perhaps to the surprise of no one, Macron has now done just that and appointed Michel Barnier as PM despite the fact that Barnier’s party gained only 8.3% of the seats in the election.
…
Good analysis.
Links
Things I liked on the web this month.
You can follow the bookmark bot at @linkbot@dalliance.social, or rss at /likes.xml
Weirdo Republicans
• First Dog On The Moon - Cruel Epithet
cartoon about calling republicans weird on account of them being so weird.
Democrats have begun belittling Republicans with a cruel mocking epithet … and they don’t like it!
AI
• 404 Media - Facebook AI Spam Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From, an investigation into Facebook’s spam problem.
• Kurzgesagt - AI, Humanity’s Final Invention? On evolution of intelligence and possible AGI catastrophe.
The first three minutes are a great exploration of how billions of years got us to now. I don’t really know where most people start disagreeing after that. Not sure I disagree at all.
Riots
• Monbiot On Riots Monbiot knows who to blame for instigating riots:
Rather than developing a coherent policy, it chose to keep redefining extremism, to exclude the bigoted elements in its own base and focus instead on environmental protesters and peaceful campaigners contesting the unfolding genocide in Gaza. The police kept warning that the far right was the fastest-growing terrorism threat in the UK, but the government did nothing.
Bitcoin
• Youtube - God Bless Bitcoin A 90 minute documentary film explaining what bitcoin is and why it might be better than government money.
Despite the name, it’s mostly *not* about how much God thinks bitcoin is better. Only a bit of it is about that.
It’s a pretty good summary of the state of the argument. I mean not even-handed of course, it’s very arguing on one side.
The five minutes where they’re explaining why Buddha and Jehovah and Allah all love bitcoin was a bit weird though. Guess you have to speak to people with those delusions from within their own delusional mindset, and there’s a lot of them.
Surveillance Capitalism / Signal
• Wired - Signal Is More Than Messaging I remember being a little worried when Moxie left Signal but I need not have worried because Meridith is well cool. She gets it. She’s hip.
Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong
Self defence against the lands you occupy?
• Craig Murray - End Of Pluralist Democracy Craig Murray on the state crackdown on anti-genocide protestors:
Palestine has the legitimate right of self defence against the illegal occupation.
The occupying power Israel has no right of self defence. That is the plain position in international law. Yet in the UK, it is legal to offer full throated support to Israel’s genocide and to wish that all Palestinians are exterminated.
IDF participants in genocide happily move between Israel and the UK with no legal consequences.
Yet it is illegal to support certain Palestinian organisations when engaged in legal acts of armed resistance.
Video
Two great ones from Real Life Lore this month:
• Real Life Law - The Netherlands is Overpowered
The Netherlands is Over-Powered. They fight the sea, they fight the land, they fight the silicon. They are power.
• Real Life Law - Why Ukraine Suddenly Decided to Invade Russia
Strategy analysis of Ukraine’s counter-attack back into Russia.
• Veritasium - Sound illusions
Veritasium’s video on sound illusions and the methods a brain uses for sound perception is good. Remember first having my attention drawn to those phase-beats when learning to tune a guitar. #video #sound #perception
• Matt Green - What if Elon bought a pub?
Matt Green doing two minutes on “What might happen if Elon Musk bought a pub?” is fun.
• Kurzgesagt - Time Travel Kurzgesagt on time-travel and tachyons and all that.
• 3Blue-1Brown - How might LLMs store facts Deep Learning - YouTube video on Multi Layer Perceptrons, the other layers that aren’t attention layers in a transformer AI like GPT.
• Ian Hurbert’s latest CGI episode.
Ian Hurbert’s latest is like he scripted the whole thing to be as difficult to shoot as possible and then went and excelled at every shot. So beautiful. The only point of that coat can be the make the lighting harder.
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