tripu @tripu@qoto.org

#Covid life: I happen to have #stock in both #IAG (British Airways + Iberia) and in #Pfizer #PFE. So far, my losses from the former (collapse of the travel industry) are way larger than my gains from the latter (announcement of possible #vaccine). 💸

@Demosthenes That's too bad. 😞 I know, from listening to stories from friends and relatives, that parenting mileage varies so much…

To me, being a [not so] new #parent is like being in love, minus the sexual attraction and the intellectual companionship. It's a comparable feeling of devotion towards that new person, and of ecstatic bliss when thinking about them or seeing them laugh.
https://pixelfed.de/p/tripu/174872514013564928

I prefer #ebooks to physical #books. But I definitely prefer physical books to #DRM books.
What a pain in the neck it is to download, manage, authorise, transfer, move and keep that shit! 😠
It's infuriating for a techie like me, let alone for regular users.

I have been saying for a while that we conscious #internet users or techies should be first to adopt, and eager to promote within our personal and professional circles, ethical open frameworks to support #web services and apps via micro-payments (instead of via advertising and surveillance). We already had #Brave. Now we also have #Coil. These are steps in the right direction (although I don't like those all-or-nothing memberships, kind of walled gardens of their own — I would prefer truly open, federated systems).
https://tink.uk/everybody-be-coil/

🇪🇸 #Spain #España
La #BibliotecaNacional libera «más de 30 millones de imágenes para todo uso: El Cantar del #MíoCid, el #Quijote o los manuscritos de #DaVinci, a solo tres clics. Se convierten así en recursos gratuitos para ser utilizados por las industrias creativas y culturales, por editoriales, investigadores, centros educativos… pero también por el público general para cualquier uso, incluido el comercial.»
👏 ❤️
http://www.bne.es/es/AreaPrensa/noticias2020/1027-bne-libera-mas-de-30-millones-de-imagenes-para-todo-uso.html

“Do you have to remind people, on some intermittent basis, of what can happen? And the answer, historically, seems ‘yes’. […] Discover, lo and behold, that, you know, without a police force a man can rape a woman and just walk away. Who knew! …other than all humans in History. Without a police force, the business doesn't have any protection when the mob comes and decides to burn the whole damn thing down. Who knew! — apart from everyone in History. […] The question really is: can they learn the lesson privately or do they have to do it and pull everyone else into their remedial lesson?”

#DouglasMurray, on #EricWeinstein's #ThePortal #podcast. A very inspiring, if also long and at times inscrutable, episode.

https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/1b4a34fc-8ee2-489a-af6a-0a996b89d27b

@gasull
I like the spirit of that. At the same time, I fear that by trying to bend existing law to fix novel problems, we'll be stuck sometimes with bad laws used badly. I guess there's an equilibrium somewhere between those two poles.

The government of #Spain 🇪🇸 is pushing a six-month-long #StateOfEmergency — because, #Covid. Contradictio in terminis. It reminds me of the constant “state of high alarm” under which I lived all my years in the UK and in Japan, a state announced obsessively in the underground, both in London and in Tokyo.
Now that we have smart contracts, we need #SmartLaws: legislation that is passed with programmable checks attached that are objectively evaluated to alter or revoke those laws. eg, a state of emergency ends after one month, or as soon as certain predetermined thresholds are met — whichever happens first.

https://www.reuters.com/article/paypal-cryptocurrency/paypal-to-allow-cryptocurrency-buying-selling-and-shopping-on-its-network-idINL1N2HB14U
#BTC #Bitcoin #crypto

To put #Alphabet's size in perspective:
Its market cap (~$1T) is roughly the same as the GDP of the Netherlands, Mexico, or Indonesia.
It has as much in cash (~$120B) as the whole government budgets of Finland or the United Arab Emirates.
#BigTech #Google