jwz: “I would like to report an absolutely absurd use of metaphor.”
Truck fire leads to huge pile of trash dumped in front of police station.
If you walked by 17th and Valencia on your way to lunch today, you may have noticed an enormous pile of trash steaming on the road just beyond the police station doors.
— Will Jarrett at the San Francisco Mission Local
The service I use to track of TV and movies to watch, trakt.tv, has been down for two days. They post occasional updates on Twitter. The latest just says their main database crashed two days ago at 7:30 am PT, and they’re working around the clock to fix things. Good luck!
Idea for a crime novel about a man who steals a yarmulke from his male sibling. Working title: “His Brother’s Kipah.”
Contrary to all good writing advice, sometimes I like to use baroque, sesquipedalian language where monosyllabic verbiage will do.
Orphaned neurological implants. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr.
Second Sight, a company that makes ocular implants, sold out to another company that doesn’t want to be on that business, leaving users blind and with crippling vertigo. Not the first time a neural implants company has done this to users.
Medtech startups are like any other startup. “… when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company’s assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.”
The solution: Neural implants should be open hardware, and users should have legally protected right to repair.
Cory:
Opponents of this proposal will say that it will discourage investment in “innovation” in neurological implants. They may well be right: the kinds of private investors who hedge their bets on high-risk ventures by minimizing security and resilience and exploiting patents and user-data might well be scared off of investment by a requirement to make the technology open.
It may be that showboating billionaire dilettantes will be unwilling to continue to pour money into neural implant companies if they are required to put the lives of the people who use their products ahead of their own profits.
It may be that the only humane, sustainable way to develop neural implants is to publicly fund that research and development, with the condition that the work products be standard, open, and replicable
Heavy rain when walking the dog this morning. The dog didn’t like it. Neither did I, but only one of us had a choice about being out there.
A few weeks ago, I was communicating with a 26-year-old colleague, talking about increasing work demands in the face of an oncoming launch. I started to say, “I definitely picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” Then I stopped myself, because I thought she probably hasn’t seen the movie, and doesn’t know about the national panic in the 1970s where kids were supposedly huffing glue to get high.
Enjoyable article about Generation Z’s struggle to adapt to communication style in the office workplace, particularly on Slack and email.
Gen Z came to ‘slay.’ Their bosses don’t know what that means.. By Danielle Abril at The Washington Post.
Gen Z gets rococo and complex in its use of emoji, and they interpret full sentences ending periods as passive-aggressive.
Like every generation before them, they adapt to the older generations’ communication styles. And the older generations adapt to them.
I was standing on the sidewalk outside the pet store tapping on my phone. An old guy walked by very slowly, pushing a walker, with oxygen cannulae in his nostrils, wearing a jaunty Tyrolean hat.
“What did you do before you had those things?” he said.
I didn’t miss a beat. “Stared at the wall.”
He continued walking slowly on, laughing out loud.
— From my journal, this date in 2016.
How the Hospice Movement Became a For-Profit Hustle.
Half of all Americans now die in hospice care. Easy money and a lack of regulation transformed a crusade to provide death with dignity into an industry rife with fraud and exploitation.
— Ava Kofman, with Doris Burke, at ProPublica and The New Yorker.
