Phillip Winn @pwinn@qoto.org

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

It's Friday! It sure is.

For #FollowFriday during #BlackHistoryMonth, I'm recommending people I follow and find interesting. Today we've got filmmakers, marketers, and nerds, my favorite.

You Five Fantastic Friendly Friday Follow recommendations are:

@hipcinema Nadine Patterson
@NoraBurns Nora Burns
@majorlinux Marcus Summers
@jentrification jenifer daniels
@BigAngBlack Ang Black

Follow them all!

#blog #BlackExcellence

Mastodon's federated nature makes it highly-resistant to takeover by oligarchs, and even more highly-resistant to destruction, but it does have its downsides.

One is localized shutdowns. A very popular mastodon server (mastodon.lol, 17k active) is shutting down completely because the owner is tired of dealing with the messages he's been getting, and doesn't want to pass control to anyone else, since he pledged absolute privacy for existing members. Another popular server (mastodon.au, 6.5k active) announced a shutdown, but has apparently been rescued by someone who is operating it in what he calls "no-new-users mode." In both cases, three months notice was given, and mastodon allows people who move from one server to another to take their following/followers list with them, but not their post/comment history.

So that one is a negative with some positive aspects (90 days notice, partial migration options).

The other is defederation. Again, there are positives and negatives to this. More positives than negatives overall, but definitely negative for me personally. On the one hand, it's very easy to block bad actors at a high level so that individual users need not even be aware they exist. On the other hand, server owners can defederate from any other server at any time for any reason, and there is no recourse or appeal for anyone involved. I happen to be on a server with an admin who seems to rub people the wrong way. While some very active blockers acknowledge that my server shouldn't be blocked on that basis alone, others have decided that since this server's admin doesn't defederate as much as they would like, he should himself be defederated.

It's clear that this server is an edge case for some people. Strict policies against racism and hate speech and so on seem to be enforced, and nobody can seem to point to any examples of bad actors whose accounts haven't been suspended, but the owner insists on using the "academic free speech" label, which is one word longer than a label used by people fond of hate speech, and his attempts to get people to look closer and realize it's a well-moderated server sound suspiciously like the sea-lioning people fond of hate speech frequently engage in.

A more principled person might stand their ground and insist that right is right, and pressuring people into defederating is intolerant bullying, but honestly, if I had known it was going to be such an issue, I'd probably have switched servers before writing and boosting 850 posts, many of which are longer than the maximum length allowed by most mastodon servers.

Now I'm in this spot where, during Black History Month, I'm boosting @mekkaokereke's daily posts about white history, but he doesn't know that, because his server limits mine. I've recommended that people follow him, but I myself cannot, because he is set to approve all followers, and he'll never see my request because, again, his server limits mine. I've posted comments in response to his posts that have picked up some engagement, as people have starred and boosted my comment far and wide, but he'll never know that. In fact, although qoto.org does not actually appear on the hachyderm.io list of *blocked* (defederated) servers, it's clear that server has *limited* mine. That means that I can see his content when others boost it, but he can't see mine unless he follows me, which he won't because he doesn't know I exist.

I noticed just today that one of his recent posts has five responses I can see on my server, including my own, and also has five responses on his server, including one I can't see on my server. His server doesn't list my popular comment, but does list a comment from another server that completely blocks mine.

And that's weird! It's confusing if you don't understand what's happening, and a definite downside that people who probably agree on everything are blocked from seeing each other because of disagreements at some other level out of their control. I do have some recourse: I could switch servers. I probably will someday. But that recourse is not without downsides itself.

I could switch to a single-user instance, and then I would be nobody's mercy. But I would also have to work hard to build up the view I have now, since my local feed would be only me, and my federated feed would reach no farther than the servers I already know about. I could switch to another big instance, but even they don't seem to be immune to shutdowns or defederation, as mastodon.art (8k active) blocking mastodon.social (146k active) demonstrates.

I could have picked a different starting server, but I was told over and over that "it doesn't really matter," and this one has a lot of upsides along with this downside.

Ultimately, the federated web is messy, and I don't think there's a solution that doesn't make things worse for those on the receiving end of targeted harassment. I'd rather deal with this than be subject to the whims of a single owner, but at least I'm aware -- and now you are aware -- that there are some downsides.

#blog #nerdery #mastodon

I think my predilection for reading books the last few years might be the result of how easy it is to track reading books. I spent many hours listening to the History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan, but at the end of it, it was only the fact that I then went on to read his book based on all of those hours that was recorded for posterity.

I finished an audiobook recently, and marked it as completed at Bookrastinating. Then I started a podcast that has been recommended to me repeatedly. If it were a podcast with an unknown number of episodes that went on and on, I might not even think of the two activities as similar, despite both involving spoken audio I listen to in the same personal contexts (mostly during exercise). But this podcast is ten episodes long, with each episode about an hour long, so it is very, very much like starting a ten-hour audiobook.

At the end of these ten hours, I might know more, or be more entertained, or both, but I won't have anything to record the event and look back at later, no trigger for memories in years to come, like I will with the audiobook that preceded it in that personal time slot.

Although I had not actively considered it before starting this post, both the podcast season and the novel are the first entries in a trilogy. At least for now. It might be more likely that the podcast produces a fourth season than the author writes another book in that series, but there are a number of series of audiobooks that go on for many volumes. I count 48 "seasons" of Ed McBain's *87th Precinct* available for me to listen to, for example.

So why is is a seven-hour audiobook a "book," while a ten-hour podcast season is not?

So now it is.

https://bookrastinating.com/book/428813/s/blowback-season-1

It turns out to already be a book on GoodReads, but BookWyrm relies on user-generated content, and I might be the first BookWyrm user to listen to Blowback Season 1, making it my job to add it to the database. If, as I suspect I will, I decide to listen to season 2 later, I'll add that then.

#books #blog #personal #bookstodon #Bookwyrm #Bookrastinating

We are already in the second half of Black History Month, since February is short.

Today, let's visit some more Black people worth following here on mastodon.

@rosanita Rosanita
@airadam Air Adam
@Atmvn Atman
@eosfpodcast Rod Faulkner
@Diva2022 Diva2022

Some humor, some politics, some culture, and some nerdery, there's no consistent agenda here, just interesting people worth following.

#BlackHistoryMonth #BlackExcellence #blog