George Segal 1934 - 2021

Brood X

Periodical cicadas will emerge in 15 states and the District of Columbia. This means that billions of cicadas will intersect with tens of millions of people in major metropolitan centers.

This is the only thing I'm looking forward to this year, and I'm not even on the right side of the Pacific.

Yaphet Kotto 1939 - 2021

Mr Kotto was great in everything, but here he is being funny.

Algorithmic

Which brings me back to Australia. It's undeniable that publishers get ripped off by Googbook. Their ad marketplaces are frauds from top to bottom: fake metrics for fake users seeing fake ads, run on bid-rigging and self-dealing.

Publishers that complain about this get slammed: Googbook uses the fact that they have created anticompetitive, vertically integrated cartels to tie a willingness to submit to crooked ad payments to traffic.

That means that publishers who make a stink about being ripped off – or who take measures to prevent leakage of their internal business data – have their traffic switched off. This is possible because regulators permitted vertical mergers between search/social and ad-tech.

This vertical integration is the source of confusion about whether this is a link-tax. The goal of the regulation is to clean up the ad markets, but Googbook use links as a stick to beat up publishers when they don't submit to corrupt ad practices, so links get implicated.

But the regulation's primary levers are transparency: it forces Googbook to disclose which data it harvests from publishers and how it uses it; it forces Googbook to disclose algorithmic changes that will result in significant changes to ad performance.

Just as importantly, it forbids Googbook from using their search/social business to retaliate against publishers who object to bad practices in their ad-tech units.

…

The hope/wish is that all this transparency and guaranteed of non-retaliation might means Googbook ending their market corruption so publishers will get a fair price for their ad-inventory. And if they don't, there's an arbitrator who hears both sides and sets prices.

This is how collective bargaining often works – when you have one side of a deal who has all the power (like a big employer) and a diffuse set of actors who lack power (like workers), an arbitrator hears both sides and hands down a deal that's meant to be fairer.

But of course, this isn't a negotiation between workers and employers: it's a bargain between a cartel of news organizations and a search duopoly. That's not ideal! For starters, it means that the government gets to decide who is a "news organization."

That's ripe for abuse. News organizations are expected to report on the government and the government gets to decide whether they are entitled to participate in collective bargaining with Googbook, which could mean the difference between financial viability and bankruptcy.

Remember, one of the problems this system is supposed to resolve is powerful entities (Googbook) using their power to punish news organizations for complaining about their behavior – governments were in that game long before Googbook came into existence.

And there's another problem: the structure of the Australian news market, which is yet another highly concentrated industry, dominated by a rapacious billionaire who uses his power to manipulate politics: Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch conquered Australian media the same way Googbook conquered the net: through anticompetitive conduct that was waved through by collusive regulators who never met a monopoly they didn't view as efficient.

It's not wrong to say that the only reason this regulation got off the drawing-board is that Murdoch viewed it as a way to shift a few balance-points from Big Tech's side of the ledger to Big Media's side.

Branding

The internet has been kind enough to draw my attention to Jim Henson's hilariously violent coffee ads from the late 50s.

State capture

From the Chaser, A complete list of the Liberal Party’s corruption over the last 7 years, sorted from this longer list of Coalition government "achievements" by tech and media analyst Matthew Davis.

My personal favourites:

Hid a report by the Governor General showing that the government paid twice as much as necessary for new combat vehicles, because such publicity would be bad for the private manufacturer’s future profitability. The company is not even Australian.

Refused to publish the percentage of calls to the veterans’ suicide help line which go unanswered, because that might negatively impact the brand of the private call centre operator.

Refused to release 5 year old taxi receipts to assist in a fraud case, on the grounds that terrorists could use travel information from 5 years ago to help plan an attack against the minister in question.

Prohibited

Why is there a special Toothbrush and Toothwash for Shabbos?

There are four main categories of prohibited melacha related to brushing teeth on Shabbos with a REGULAR toothbrush and REGULAR toothpaste. These issues vary for individual communities and contemporary poskim.

Now, thanks to the new Kosher Innovations™ Shabbos Toothbrush™ and specially formulated Kosher Innovations™ Shabbos Toothwash™, these melachos are avoided, allowing you to brush your teeth on Shabbos according to all opinions.

The melachos are: Sechitah, Chavalah, Memareach and Uvdin D'Chol

Sechitah.

Squeezing liquid out of a solid in which it was absorbed is prohibited on Shabbos. When wet, densely packed nylon bristles of a regular toothbrush are pressed against the teeth, many poskim consider it is as if the water is squeezed out of the bristles and forbid using a wet toothbrush.

The rubber bristles of the Shabbos Toothbrush™ are far enough apart that it is obvious that liquid does not get absorbed into the bristles and is not squeezed out.

Chavalah.

Causing oneself to bleed on Shabbos is prohibited. Sharp nylon bristles of a regular toothbrush can cause gums to bleed.

The soft rounded rubber bristles of the Shabbos Toothbrush™ do not cause bleeding. In the extremely rare case that very sensitive gums bleed even with the Shabbos Toothbrush™, consult your local Rabbi and see your dentist!

Memareach.

Spreading a cream or ointment onto an object used as an applicator to the body is prohibited on Shabbos. Therefore, most poskim prohibit use of regular toothpaste or gel applied to any toothbrush.

Kosher Innovations™ Shabbos Toothwash™ is a concentrated liquid and this prohibition does not apply. We do not recommend using the Shabbos Toothbrush™ with any product other than Kosher Innovations Shabbos Toothwash™ Also, the Shabbos Toothwash™ is certified kosher by the OU.

Uvdin D'Chol.

If a regular activity involves something that one may not do on Shabbos, that activity will be classified as a “weekday activity”. For some poskim who permit the use of a regular toothbrush without toothpaste this prohibition would apply to using one's weekday toothbrush and they require a separate and even distinctive toothbrush for Shabbos.

The Kosher Innovations™ Shabbos Toothbrush™ was designed specifically for Shabbos and not for weekday use, eliminating the issue of Uvdin D'Chol according to all poskim.

Gosh, being religious is complicated.

Infomation about this product and many other interesting kosher gadgets can be found via the link in this design blog post.

DC

This is not a city. It’s an endless maze of low barriers and security zones, a place infinitely cordoned off from itself. Every street is lined with low ugly business-park blocks that modestly announce themselves as the headquarters of some kind of terrible global evil: the International Directorate for Diarrhoea and Diarrhoea-Causing Pathogens, the Alliance for Tearing Small Holes In Mosquito Nets, the US State Department, the IMF. Evil without grandeur: the ground floor of every one of these blocks is always occupied by a CVS or a Peet’s Coffee. You want to eat? Eat this cinnamon swirl; it’s made from corn syrup and chalk. Your only other option is some brassy gloomy den of a hotel restaurant, where greased lobbyists feed their politicians on plates of paler flesh, scorched and braised, with truffles grated on top. Don’t ask what animal this came from. You don’t want to know his name. In the streets, the DC people bustle about: cut-throat mediocrities with suits shinier than their lanyards and foreheads shinier still, visibly humming with satisfaction. I made it! I’m here, in the birdshit trench of despair where Everything Gets Done! It’s good that these people don’t get Congressional representation. They shouldn’t get to breathe. Nothing good can survive in a place like this. Imagine if Slough or Swindon or Milton Keynes were also the nexus of a fanatical empire bent on world domination. Imagine seventy square miles in which the Nazis won the war.

Loves me some invective.

Belief

Sane, sober and alone, any serious professional political journalist knew that this deal would be made and broadly what it would look like. ... Yet absolutely everyone has been pumping out this false narrative of cliff-hanging tension, as have the national ministers of EU states in the EU Council and the Members of the European Parliament.

...

This forcefully reminds me of the run-up to the Iraq War, when I asked an FCO colleague working directly on Iraq how he managed to do his job when he knew full well that Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction. He replied to me that he was an avid player of “Football Manager”; while in the game he really was immersed for hours and the manager of Arsenal, once he left the game of course he knew he was not. Walking into the FCO to work was the same. While in the FCO, he believed Iraq had WMD and acted on that basis; once he left in the evening he did not.

Mungo MacCallum 1941-2020

If they tell us they care about the future but show neither vision nor emotion about it, why should we care any more than they do? We vote without enthusiasm or conviction, and often in the belief that whatever we do will make no real difference; that the ritual is no longer worthwhile. And when we, the people, reject the democratic process, the very spirit of the nation withers and dies.

The only problem with this quote is that it isn't funny; and Mr MacCallum was. Very. This vicious year leaves us with another unfillable void.

Thanksgiving

In 2010, a US air force drone crew watching infrared video of a night-time convoy of Afghan vehicles, as revealed in the transcript of their conversation, thought that warm dots in the trucks they saw on their screens were weapons. In fact, they were turkeys, presents carried by the peasant passengers for their relatives in Kabul. (The trucks were attacked, killing 23 people.)

Triumph

Jesus, Saddam Hussein went out with more dignity than this.

Oh look, here's Thomas Frank, perennial winner of the Ian Malcolm Award for Political Commentary* back in the Guardian again, shouting the blindingly obvious into the howling void.

I have been narrating our country’s toboggan ride to hell for much of my adult life, and I can attest that Biden’s triumph by itself is not enough to bring it to a stop. It will never stop until a Democratic president faces up to his party’s mistakes and brings to a halt the ignoble experiment of the last four decades.

Yeah, well, good luck with that. These are after all the idiots who thought Biden would be good for down ticket candidates, when his whole strategy was to persuade disaffected GOPers to vote against Trump, while cheerfully ignoring the obvious question - why on Earth would they vote Democrat in any other race? And the idiots now arguing the failed campaigns of "centrists" are the fault of the progressives who won. But of course it makes perfect sense to construct a national election strategy around the question of whether it might spook some paranoid ex-Cubans in America's wang.

* It's a statuette of a young Jeff Goldblum in a leather jacket, with the inscription around the plinth: "Boy do I hate being right all the time."