The back side of Hollywood Squares, 1976 via
Can You Really Hire a Hit Man on the Dark Web?
The dark web is swarming with hitman-for-hire sites, with colorful names like Azerbaijani Eagles and Sicilian Hitmen International Network. They charge tens of thousands of dollars in bitcoin – but they are frauds. They don’t actually kill people.
What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About the Media:
much of the U.S. media still covers elections as if they’re sporting events and that the affluent New Yorkers who run and appear on television networks are not inclined to like him.
Corporate media sees Sanders and Trump as the same, which is wrong.
Trump is “a star of the corporate media who hacked its commercial incentives to his advantage, delivering free lively entertainment to cable networks desperate for programming. … Mr. Sanders wants to remake the media in a new model.”
California’s Gig Economy Is Under Attack.
AB5 is limiting freelancers' ability to work, going far beyond the Uber drivers it was intended to protect.
AB5 is a disaster. Terrible legislation.
Like Cambridge Analytica, “but more nefariously, arguably:" Banjo, an artificial intelligence firm that works with police, used a shadow company to create Android and iOS apps that looked innocuous but were specifically designed to secretly scrape social media.
Cory Doctorow: Europe looks like it may be getting the courage to take on Apple, mandating that consumers have a right to repair their phones
That would be a big threat to Apple’s revenue, as the company depends on customers replacing worn out phones when Apple deems the pocket-fondles are beyond repair.
The Last Alternative: A 1978 Soviet TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov's "The Naked Sun"
Cheesy even by 1978 standards, according to this fellow on Reddit.
On YouTube: here and here and here
I gave it a quick peek and can confirm its cheesiness. It’s in Russian, no subtitles, so I didn’t watch. I don’t speak Russian.
Old age is very different today, when the average lifespan is 79, than at the turn of the 20th century, when it was 49. It’s a new stage of life, like adolescence emerged 70 or so years ago.
An interview with Louise Aronson, author of the book “Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life." From the book description on Amazon:
For more than 5,000 years, “old” has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we’ve made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied.
In the words of Doc Holliday: “I’m in my prime.”
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Coronavirus really is that bad and you should work from home
We watched “Sharpe’s Gold.” I bet the men in the 95th Rifles found Hagman annoying after a couple days. “Enough with the singing,” they said.
How to Tell If You Have the Flu, Coronavirus, or Something Else
I think I had norovirus almost exactly a year ago, after returning from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And I passed the norovirus to Julie. Because you should always bring your spouse a little something when you return from a business trip.
Minnie found a steak-bone on our walk the other day, and I let her carry it home and work on it in the backyard for a while. “What could go wrong?” I thought. It made her so happy.
She sleeps in my office at night, separated from the rest of the house so she doesn’t terrorize the cats. Putting her to bed is the last thing I do before I go to bed myself, and letting her out is the first thing I do when I wake up.
The next morning, when I went into my office to let Minnie out, I found the answer to the question, “What could go wrong?”
Fortunately, she got it all on the mat in front of my desk – bless her! Easy clean-up. And she was SO happy and friendly and affectionate and excited to be let out of my office. I suspect she was partly trying to distract me to keep me from getting angry – not that I would have – and partly she was just relieved, happy, and excited to be out of my office and away from that awful mess.
I left my office windows open the rest of the morning, to air it out. It was some of Minnie’s best work, there.