July 2022 - Blue Dot and Driving and Johnson Resign
The month started with mass resignations and is ending with a new leadership contest. Meanwhile, I started driving again and drove to Blue Dot, the excellent science festival.
Me
Some stuff from my microblog on the fediverse:
So farewell then Johnson you were the worst prime minister until the next one.
Facebook will finally be allowing Oculus headset users to operating without a Facebook account. They will need a Meta account instead. Does that really make any difference?
I went for a drive for the first time in 20 years, and then again a week later
The news is that Facebook’s content moderators are all CIA spooks. Surely that’d be a massive pay cut? unless they are double agents taking a wage from both?
A note on the class war: the class war is stealing the surplus of the wage-earners and monopolizing the ownership and control of group enterprise not some culture war nonsense.
They wanna take TikTok off the app store coz it’s a privacy nightmare but so is the Instagram and Facebook app etc. Is it just a question of which government gets the data? China or the US?
With driving practice done I could drive to Blue Dot, the science festival where I discovered Henge and listened to space men.
Did your school ask you what you wanted to do when you grew up? Were they talking about jobs or how you would allocate your working capital? Is our system capitalism but our schools shilling labouristm?
Today’s digest is a day late coz I spent yesterday mostly doing system administrator upgrade tasks.
Releases
Few shows again this month, but best word cloud tarot show was: Isn’t it hot lately? What’s going on with that?
Reading
The Righteous Mind
Read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt a fascinating exploration of how humans make moral judgements and how they enforce moral guidelines and the group selection that enables it all.
Opening with lots of distasteful moral questions where nobody gets hurt but everyone still thinks it’s wrong anyway, and exploring from there how our judgements are made and then post-hoc justified and the evolutionary pressures that built us that way and the consequences for political debate and convincing argument.
Watching
Umbrella Academy Season Three
What a brilliant show The Umbrella Academy is. Crazy and weird and now in Season 3 they’re in an even more crazy weird universe where their dad adopted some other folks instead. Glad to hear Season Four is on the way.
Links
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Peter Oborne on Boris Johnson As Johnson leads office, Peter Oborne writes about the whole squalid and short premiership: Predatory billionaires in effect bought British politics, securing power and influence in exchange for cash.
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Vsauce’s fascinating video about aging Did people used to get older faster? Fast-paced and interesting video about that question and other questions on time. Great topic-weaving.
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Robin Ince’s Radio Show: Reality Tunnel. A great funny rant on the radio about busy brains and distraction and the modern world. Some or Ince’s best work.
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Captain Disillusion Does Music Videos Strange departure for the Cap, but a great explanation on how he helped make the effects for some videos by some jap pop band. I sometimes suspect his explanations are too terse and steeped in jargon for most people to understand what he’s explaining but that leaves it pitched perfectly for me.
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Honest Government Adverts on the Supreme Court in America Democracy is America is only about 60 year old, and appointed lifetime justices seem to be taking some power. Will America’s democracy last? What the hell does it matter what the founding fathers thought?
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Kunt and the Gang on Richard Herring’s podcast. He’s pretty kind and sweet but also very sweary. Nice to hear a bit of his history.
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How The Pentagon dictates Hollywood storylines by Johnathon Cook If a film has warplanes in it, then those warplanes were on loan from the US armed forces, and they will only do that if it reflects well upon them. Top Gun is US propaganda rehabilitating their war-crimes and acting as a massive recruitment pull.
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Five hours of Lex Fridman talking to John Carmack Fingering John Carmack was the original social media really. Those were the days eh? What a hero.
more…
That’s just the highlights this month, remember you can always see my full public bookmarks at my website and/or follow my link-bot on the fediverse or my RSS feed of interesting links
Around The Fediverse
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@izaya@social.shadowkat.net talks about RSS readers and Youtube “zoomers will literally submit to The Algorithm and never know whether they’ll see things they care about rather than enjoy the simplicity of an RSS reader”
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@ifixcoinops@mastodon.social talks about the kids smart-watch he bought his daughter “So I got her the extravagant $40 V-Tech DX3 smartwatch (it’s more like $55 if you want it in pink or blue, we got her the purple one).
You always expect kids’ tech to be a bit crap, right?
This thing RULES.”
- @atomicpoet@mastodon.social on Facebook’s continuing demise “Meta’s biggest problem is that they can’t acquire their way to success. Not that they haven’t recently tried – the FTC won’t let them.
Here’s one such example…”
- @jalefkowit@octodon.social compares climate change to “The Big Stink” “The stench was so bad that it became known as “the Great Stink.” Parliament, whose halls were right on the river, could not conduct business. The smell in the chambers was so strong that all the curtains were soaked in chloride of lime to try and block it. (It didn’t work.)
Parliament was now faced with a simple, stark choice: do something to clean up the river, or move itself out of London altogether. Members seriously discussed relocating to Oxford and St. Albans, but in the end, they decided to act. Municipal engineer Joseph Bazalgette was authorized to build a network of new sewers, at the then-staggering cost of £3 million”
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@mxtthxw@mxtthxw.art has been working with Liotia to make a song “Liotia’s new single is out on Friday, here’s the video. If it connects please give it a wee boost. Cheers!”
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@hankg@friendica.myportal.social talks about Facebook making it impossible to remove their tracking links “Only way to avoid it is to not use Facebook at all. "