Supreme Court Leaves 230 Alone For Now, But Justice Thomas Gives A Pretty Good Explanation For Why It Exists In The First Place.
Thomas, of all people, wrote a nuanced defense of the principles underlying Section 230.
Mike Masnick at Techdirt:
… there was nothing specific to the social media sites that was deliberately designed to aid terrorists.
“It makes you really appreciate how free we are as a country when you’re hiding under a desk with bullets flying over your head.” The Onion: Americans Describe What It’s Like Surviving A Mass Shooting.
Jamelle Bouie: There is a reason Ron DeSantis wants history told a certain way. DeSantis is continuing a long tradition. Lawmakers in the antebellum South censored textbooks to remove criticism of slavery.
The Four Freedoms, According to Republicans
Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times:
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
It amazes me when I see someone has worked at the same company for 20+ years. I respect that stability.
De-nerding on coffee
A few years ago, I nerded out on coffee-making methods and eventually settled on using an Aeropress for my daily work-juice. Then I went down a rabbit-hole of looking up Aeropress coffee formulas.
There’s an entire nerd subculture of Aeropress enthusiasts, who measure their beans and water to the gram, use a thermometer to measure the weater temperature, and time their brew to the second. They even count the number of strokes they use to stir the coffee before serving.
While I was going through all this, and posting about it on social media, a couple of friends staged an intervention. They are themselves coffee enthusiasts, but they told me I needed to relax.
And I learned that the Aeropress is indeed a very forgiving method of making coffee. Use good beans, grind them at home, measure using a scoop without worrying about the precise weight, use water at about the right temperature, and you’ll be fine. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few years.
In the last few days I let go of the last remnant of my coffee obsessive-compulsiveness. Until a few days ago, I measured the amount of water I used to make coffee. But now I’m just doing it by eye. I have a little Hario insulated coffee server, and I just fill that up with hot water until it looks like it’s pretty close to the top. And it’s fine.
Don’t tell the gang at reddit.com/r/coffee; they’ll ban me for sure.
On YouTube: Unboxing Shakespeare’s First Folio..
Amazing. The books look so new.
I’ve always known Shakespeare was a popular writer in his time, but it’s striking to see this reminder.
Today I learned what a “folio” and “quarto” are.
This is Catfishing on an Industrial Scale
Laura Cole writes at Wired about fake dating sites that employ hundreds of freelancers around the world “to animate fake profiles and chat with people who have signed up for dating and hookup sites…. Often recruited into ‘customer support’ or content moderation roles, they found themselves playing roles in sophisticated operations set up to tease subscription money from lonely hearts looking for connections online.”
These reps, who often work for pennies from developing countries, roleplay as women with incredibly detailed—and fictional—biographies and profiles, messaging men on online dating sites. The reps rapidly toggle through many characters in each work shift, and each operator might roleplay as hundreds of women, all while sitting at laptops in their homes.
As with many sophisticated criminal operations, I am both appalled and amazed at the sophistication.
Quite a lot of nature this morning
This morning, a little after 8, I was on my way home from walking the dog, one street over from the house, and I saw a coyote loping down the street. One of the neighbors, still in her red pajamas and slippers, stood in the street and watched. We chatted about the coyote and where it might live. That coyote has been around lately; I recognize it.
I’m pretty sure that a coyote won’t attack a full-sized adult person. And while coyotes will kill and eat small and even medium-sized dogs if the dog is unattended, I’m pretty sure a coyote won’t attack a dog on a leash accompanied by a full-sized adult person. I need to look into that.
Here are tips for keeping a dog safe from coyotes. I used to have a whistle on a keychain, but the keychain fastener broke a few months ago, and I stopped carrying it with me. I should replace that.
This was only the latest in a series of nature encounters this morning.
When policing the backyard for canine by-product at about 6:30, I heard ducks grumbling in a corner of the garden where we do not usually get ducks. It’s a little fenced-off triangle at the corner of the yard, up against the house, where there are a lot of potted plants. Later, Julie said that’s probably a good place for ducks to nest.
Two minutes later, back inside the house, I saw one of our garden squirrels scuttling around on a big palm tree immediately outside the window.
Two minutes after that, bringing the dog through the garden gate, I saw a skeletal-looking dragonfly hanging still next to the gatepost, about five feet off the ground. The dragonfly was dead and caught in a spiderweb. Somebody had a good breakfast this morning.
And twenty minutes after that, I was at the park and saw two adult Canada geese and about eight goslings, almost on the footpath, much closer than usual. The goslings are half-grown now, with their adult colors. The female and goslings were pecking at the ground. The gander stood by the path and ordered me and the dog to fuck off.
Big Tech is parasitic on the news industry, but click taxing isn’t the answer, says Cory Doctorow, who has four better ideas.
jwz: “Today I learned that Church Molestation Liability Insurance is a thing that exists
You know what’s not a thing that exists? Drag Show and LGBTQ Bar Molestation Insurance. Because drag shows and LGBTQ bars aren’t threats to kids.
Disney Pulls Plug on $1 Billion Development in Florida. Daring Fireball: “Vote for Republicans, they’re good for business.”
Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman on “Succession,” would be outstanding as Random in the miniseries of Roger Zelazny’s “Chronicles of Amber” that’s supposedly coming.
ME: I can drink three strong cups of coffee every day without any negative effects! ALSO ME: I wonder how I got this vicious insomnia, which is getting worse.
Today I learned the phrase “Taco Tuesday” is a registered trademark of the fast food chain Taco John. But Taco Bell is going to court to liberate “Taco Tuesday” for everyone.
Cory Doctorow: The IRS will do your taxes for you (if that’s what you prefer) “After years of expensively purchased delay, Turbotax and its fellow tax-profiteers are losing the fight to make you pay them to tell the government what it already knows.”
Elon Musk: Work from home ‘morally wrong’ when some have to show up (CNBC). Wait til he finds out some people are billionaires while others struggle with poverty.
Cory Doctorow: Rent control works. It keeps housing costs down, doesn’t constrain supply, and sometimes increases that supply.
We need rent control, and we need to build plenty of more housing.
… regular housing for working people. Mr Market doesn’t want to build it, no matter how many “incentives” we dangle. Maybe it’s time we just did stuff instead of building elaborate Rube Goldberg machines in the hopes of luring the market’s animal sentiments into doing it for us.