Phillip Winn @pwinn@qoto.org

The Butlerian Jihad used to be, for me, one of the most fantastical elements of the Dune series. Sure, melange enabling interstellar travel and giant worms, but a war fought to prevent anything like computers?

With the rise of generative AI models, I think I see it now. It isn’t that humans fight against the machines, it’s that humans fight against humans to prevent the use of the machines.

I now believe Dune to be among the most realistic science-fiction sagas ever written. It’s about a company strictly controlling a valuable resource that enables transportation, and being willing to do anything at all to preserve their monopoly.

The oil must flow.

#GenerativeAI #AIart #Dune #books #Bookstodon #blog

It’s not Friday, but it is Black History Month, so why wait? Is that a non sequitur? No soap, radio!

Here are some great people to follow:

@stephen Stephen Anfield
@sonyasteele Sonya Steele
@jamieBGN Jamie Broadnax
@zhivi zhivi
@daryl Daryl G. Wright

Follow them because they’re interesting, not just because it’s Black History Month and you feel guilty for how white your Home timelines is. Although if that’s true, you should follow more than just these five people!

With music and jokes and important posts, you can learn, and laugh, and agree strongly that there needs to be more anime awareness in this world. I mean, I chose my avatar for a reason.

#FollowFriday #BlackHistoryMonth #BlackExcellence

Someone On The Internet™ recently pushed back against the idea that the precursors to modern cops in the USA were either “slave patrols” (actually anti-slave patrols) in the south, or union-busters in the north. He had two objections. The first was that the oldest police force in the USA is from Boston, which revealed that he couldn’t even finish reading the “union-busting” part of the sentence, but was so triggered by the words “slave patrols” that he jumped ahead and starting typing his reply. The second was that there were cops in ancient Rome.

This objection does not support his position as well as one might think.

The ancient city of Rome did not, in fact, have a police force like we think of them today, but they did have the “vigiles urbani”, which had two functions: fighting fires and catching runaway slaves.

Yes, that’s right, not just the first cops in the USA, but the cops highlighted as predating them by thousands of years, were also anti-slave patrols. And firefighters.

Oh, and for anyone who thinks it is important that the cops who beat Tyre Nichols to death were themselves Black, the vigiles were themselves slaves under supervision, slaves who spent their time catching other slaves.

What they did not do was investigate crimes. US cops have clearance rates well below 50% for everything but murder, and barely above 50% for murder, but the vigiles were closer to 0% unless you count “trying to run away from being enslaved” as a crime.

If you wanted evidence, you had to gather it yourself. If you needed a witness, you had to grab them and drag them in front of a magistrate yourself, or hire someone to do so. Even the accused, you had to capture and present them to court as well. No wonder, then, that justice was largely available to the wealthy, but not the poor. The poor had to police themselves.

One last point about the vigiles: I’ve mentioned a couple of times that one of their two primary functions was fighting fires. So it’s notable that during the Great Fire of Rome, they spent their time looting rather than trying to fight the fire. Plus ça change, etc.

#ACAB #blog #BlackLivesMatter

@icecubesapp@mastodon.cloud I just typed a very long post on my phone, edited it, reviewed it again, and then in the process of hitting post, accidentally swiped down.

Now I remember why I use Ice Cubes for reading but not posting. 😞

It’s still Black History Month, and there is still so much to learn about our shared history, especially for wypipo like me who grew up missing out.

But hey, maybe you’re busy! February is a short month, but you’ve still got a month’s work to get done, so there’s no time. And yet somehow you’ve got two minutes to read this. Because while there’s never time to sit down and watch a two-hour movie, it’s easy to watch many very-short videos and find out that two hours have passed by. 😜 Good news!

Black History in Two Minutes or so
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsB1WO8xAXzyMz4BihC_6a07RZummkGza

Don’t worry about the list having 86* videos on it, focus on the “two minutes or so” part! Whenever you have a couple of minutes, you can hit play, and if you stop two minutes later, fine. If you stop an hour later or run out of videos, also fine.

(* The list says 92, but [28] is a dupe, and five others are promotion for when the series was nominated for several awards [39, 40, 61, 62, 63])

#BlackHistoryMonth #BlackExcellence #blog

Expedia sure is a well-managed company whose products we all use every day, right? I mean, when you think of well-managed companies, nobody compares to Expedia. It’s the best! All CEOs should aspire to be worthy to just tie the shoes of the CEO of Expedia, and yet I’ll bet most readers can’t name him without searching.

I mention this because it turns out he is the highest-paid CEO in the Fortune 500. He received 2,897 times the median employee salary at Expedia, or $296.2 million.

Today I learned that Expedia also owns and operates a few other names you might recognize from the current decade: Hotels . com, Vrbo, Travelocity (yes, they bought their prime competitor some time ago), Hotwire, Orbitz, eBookers, CheapTickets, CarRentals . com, WotIf, and Trivago, so perhaps they’re doing a little better than your first thought might be.

My takeaway after learning this today is that I need to stop using Orbitz. I think I’ve used Kayak and Trip .com most recently anyway.

So maybe he gets just shy of 300 million because he’s figured out how to avoid triggering anti-trust investigators while eliminating competition via acquisition. Otherwise, it’s hard to imagine how he’s doing any better job that someone paid 1/300th as much.

Almost 3000 times as much as the median employee of this company; it seems bizarre that this is even allowed.

Data comes from the AFL-CIO, chart from Genuine Impact.

#economics #unions