Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

@Counsel I find that article to be suspect. NBC News is part of a corporation with a vested interest in the status quo. That means that they'll have a strong tendency to give voice to people who argue in favour of the worldview they want to espouse (The "It's not socialism. It's culture and work ethic." thread in that feels very familiar, for example.) and minimize the exposure of arguments which could be harmful to their profit margins.

First, it brushes under the rug the fact that the U.S. is the only country in the developed world that does not have a universal healthcare system, nor paid parental leave or mandatory paid vacation days or various other aspects of "socialism".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/16/u-s-lacks-mandated-paid-parental-leave/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country

Second, it ignores that the U.S. has "socialism" in things like police, fire, and military services in an effort to draw a false dichotomy and support the idea that the U.S.'s current state is the ideal balance of public and private services. (Keeping in mind that the U.S. has roughly a third of the entire world's military spending, and there are tanks sitting mothballed in the desert because "we don't need more tanks" was answered with "but my friends who make tanks want more money".)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Military_Expenditures_2018_SIPRI.png

Third, it argues in favour of free markets... something the U.S. very much does not have because of how entangled big business is in setting government policy so they get unnecessary subsidies and "corporate welfare". (ie. croney capitalism)

For example, the U.S. heavily subsidizes fossil fuel companies (who are some of the most profitable companies in the world) while neglecting subidies for renewable energy, which is a young sector but growing massively as a source of jobs... global warming aside.

Fourth, it points out co-occurrences but doesn't justify its claims that they have causal relationships.

At *minimum*, I'd want to check how representative Mr. Schatz's views are of the scientific consensus rather than taking him at his word because he has a degree.

@Counsel There's a sad bit of trivia surrounding it too:

Frost spent the years 1912 to 1915 in England, where among his acquaintances was the writer Edward Thomas. Thomas and Frost became close friends and took many walks together. After Frost returned to New Hampshire in 1915, he sent Thomas an advance copy of "The Road Not Taken". Thomas took the poem seriously and personally, and it may have been significant in Thomas' decision to enlist in World War I. Thomas was killed two years later in the Battle of Arras.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken

@hrisskar My Internet seems good enough but I'd probably be doing the same (posting quotes) if I didn't have programming projects to fixate on.

That said, I already automated it years ago for a slice of my quotes collection that doesn't need to be automated for sensitive information first. → http://www.ficfan.org/

Sorry I haven't had any new posts. I've been meaning to start adding in some retro-hobby posts in addition to continuing the music ones, but, over the last couple of days, I've been getting carried away trying to clean up a proof-of-concept hobby project to the point where I can post it.

(An experimental Tesseract OCR frontend intended to make it as comfortable and efficient as possible to OCR speech ballons and text boxes in manga and doujinshi and feed them to Google Translate.)

@sir Do you have any plans to expose either an NNTP bridge or a web interface capable of more than just archive browsing?

For the last two decades, I just haven't cared enough to choose "wrestle my Thunderbird into shape" over "decide not to communicate" for mailing lists that weren't available over GMane.

@RyuKurisu @feld

If I'm splitting it into its roots correctly, god-killing.

@hrisskar Yeah. It's so rare, these days, for me to see sci-fi being promoted or bundled which isn't either "dystopia in the future", "contemporary thriller... in spaaaace!" or "the author is clearly trying to craft something that'll get picked up for a movie adaptation".

Where's the sense of wonder and optimism for what's out there?

...and then there's the problem Lost had that this io9 article lays out:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/ringworld-is-a-lot-like-lost-but-theres-a-crucial-diff-5566084

I just got introduced to this great song satirizing the state of online discourse. #music #funny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ToEvz-7trY

@fatboy Thanks. That'll be joining the following ad-related entries in my "The Most Eye-Opening Things I've Ever Read" blog post:

* http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
* http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
* http://www.less-broken.com/blog/2011/11/why-ad-blocking-is-not-moral-dilemma.html
* https://marco.org/2015/08/11/ad-blocking-ethics
* https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2018-03-13/an-overview-of-online-ad-fraud/
* https://blog.zgp.org/notes-and-links-from-my-talk-at-rji/

(The post is at http://blog.ssokolow.com/archives/2014/04/04/the-most-eye-opening-things-ive-ever-read/ if you want to check the unrelated entries.)

@brandon @jellal I *would* sleep in my socks but for two things:

1. My legs get uncomfortable if I leave something elastic gripping them without a break every night, so, if I wanted to sleep in something like socks, it'd have to be footie pyjamas.

2. My body loves to dump its excess heat into my feet... to the point where I'm often wearing matched socks and sandals when others have switched to shoes and shoes when others have switched to winter boots.

I almost forgot today's #filk #music ...my other top favourite:

Pushin' the Speed of Light by Julia Ecklar and Anne Prather.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud6LiVJkwyA

The best way I can sum this story up is "The plight of the young working man, watching everyone else age into oblivion as he lives life aboard a relativistic starship." Very poignant.

I like to contrast it with '39 by Queen, which has a similar theme, but with the main characters being seen as heroes rather than everymen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8kGMfXaFU

@wizzwizz4 @badrihippo Yeah. If I ever run out of more pressing things, I want to write a normalizer which strips out formatting that only applies to spans of whitespace characters (as defined by Unicode).

@eletrotupi Two tips:

1. I use https://github.com/danny0838/webscrapbook/ as a way to archive every page I read.

2. There's a "Save Page Now" form at https://archive.org/web/

@eletrotupi Was it https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html?

@Steve12L I've been slacking on the aesthetics of my desktop, and I turned off compositing for better WM uptime, but here you go.

@dicktripover Also, here's a quote you might find useful:

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered. -- Lyndon B. Johnson, former President of the U.S.

@dicktripover To quote George Carlin, "this is really stupid".

Do they really want to make people paranoid about ever getting a needle for any reason, no matter how sick they are?

My mother already regrets getting my brothers and I fingerprinted in case we get abducted when we had our vaccinations as kids.

An interesting bit of related trivia:

If you have any Star Trek books on your bookshelf written by "L.A. Graf", that's a pseudonym for "Julia Ecklar, Karen Rose Cercone, and (once) Melissa Crandall".

Apparently it's a tongue-in-cheek abbreviation of "Let's All Get rich and famous".

I think I'll also share some of my favourite #filk (sci-fi/fantasy geek folk) #music because it deserves more attention.

Let's start with The Horse Tamer's Daughter, written by Leslie Fish. This ballad, is set in the world of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover and this recording by Julia Ecklar is from an out-of-print album that apparently went for CA$400 at a FilKONtario auction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuGIBX9FGZQ

...with this and Big Iron by Marty Robbins, I learned that I want more ballads.