noisefridge

I'm curious why you like these so much as titles. Tastes differ, but in my opinion, "A Scanner Darkly" is the only standout winner here.

Without knowing anything of what the story was about, would "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" convey anything important to the reader? Even as a standalone metaphor it's confused: humans don't dream about sheep! There is an old trope of counting sheep to fall asleep, but that's not a dream.

In any case, we're now thinking about sheep, not a noir detective story set in a declining post-biosphere world.

Nice and fun. Have you considered points of interest, photos from open sources like Panoramio or Creative Commons search, links to Wikipedia articles?

Sometimes I get stumped and I also want a picture to explain it

From the other perspective, I’ve also wondered about what it would mean to have a union for international remote employees.

Unions for tech workers are rare but if you’re working for a company with people scattered all over the planet, it’s a massive increase in complexity. I’ve never done any serious organizing, and the companies I’ve worked for have been relatively benign. But after almost ten years in satellite offices or remote work from home, it feels like I’m taking on risks here if I ever get into a dispute.

According to one organizer I talked to, you need to form unions in each country with “recognized units” of a handful of people. At my current company there are knots of employees here and there but we are starting to look like the General Assembly of the UN with one person per country. Then there’s all the varying rules on when the employer has the recognize a union.

Are there any precedents for doing this?

The film The Caine Mutiny helped inspire the 25th amendment to the US Constitution. That's based on a book, so even if you want to narrow it to literature, it still works.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/09/1...

Of course, nothing happens just because someone saw a movie about it. The 25th amendment was also prompted by the assassination of JFK, and the new awesome responsibilities of the US president in nuclear brinkmanship.

But I think literature and especially film are a kind of artificial experience, a memory of something that never happened. And we can start to take steps to realize or avoid those events.

These effects can be subtle, but not that hard to trace. For instance, the police greatly benefit from their nearly universal portrayal as heroes on film and TV. I think you can draw a direct line from that to the massive police budgets you see in North America.

I'm not an expert on MMT, nor a proponent. I don't have a sufficiently informed opinion to say whether it's good or bad.

But, I think what the US government is doing isn't MMT.

MMT proponents seem to be arguing that creating money is good if and only if you ensure it is spent on the right things - like infrastructure. Then you can get net wins for the economy.

According to MMT it's bad if you, for instance, create a situation where institutions, investors, and giant companies have an unlimited supply of dollars that never lose value.

Once again:

Can you describe what sort of evidence would convince you that this movement is a problem, other than the political affiliations and concerns of the organizers, the behavior of people on the ground, the symbols on display, and what actions they are calling for?

Can you describe what sort of evidence would convince you that this movement is a problem, other than the political affiliations and concerns of the organizers, the behavior of people on the ground, the symbols on display, and what actions they are calling for?

Let me steel-man your proposition. I've seen left-wing protests that were organized by people who were rather questionable, and who were far more radical than the average protester. But in those cases, the content of the protest is carefully measured so it's something everyone can support. I assume there are similar affairs on the right. So no, not everyone who attends a protest has identical views with the organizers.

However, it seems to me that even if you ignore every other bit of evidence and try to focus on what it is these protesters want and are actually doing, it's still a problem.

They don't seem to be here to respectfully petition for a change of policies. This is not the loyal opposition.

This is a Facebook conspiracy theory convened to experience itself in person. They're here to flex "ownership" of a national capital, to validate their own delusion that the government is taken over by foreign powers, to call for the literal murder of a political leader, and to goad each other into more and more obnoxious actions.

And? Okay.

The people who started the GoFundMe are Tamara Lich and B.J. Dichter. Neither of them are truck drivers. They are, however, racist conspiracy theorists.

Tamara Lich's Facebook pages were full of Islamophobia, and conspiracy theories about the "Muslim Brotherhood" operating in Canada, and her own personal activism supporting conspiracy theorists. Tamara Lich is also an official of some kind in Canada's "Maverick Party", a very fringe movement advocating for western separatism.

B.J. Dichter is an activist for the similarly fringe People's Party of Canada, and has described the Conservative Party of Canada as "suffering from the stench of cultural relativism and political Islam".

Patrick King is another important figure in organizing the convoy, and he is a Nazi. He promotes the "great replacement theory", minimizes the Holocaust, and argues that Jewish bankers are controlling politicians.

Dave Steenberg is another organizer whose brain has been rotted out by Facebook conspiracy theory, and who fantasizes about COVID mask mandates implementors being hauled before war-crimes tribunals. He's also shared the logo of the Soldiers of Odin, a totally! totally peaceful group that just happens to like Nazi imagery and "patrolling" neighborhoods to keep the wrong kind of people out. (The actual Soldiers of Odin don't seem to be involved, though).

This "trucker convoy" has been condemned by trucker associations in Canada and seems to not really have that many truckers involved (mostly pickup trucks).

Convoy members have been seen with US Confederate flags, Canadian flags with swastikas scrawled on them, Trump 2024 flags, and so on. Stickers, t-shirts, and other merch of Trudeau being hanged are popular. (I'm sure this is just a little political disagreement!)

They've terrorized towns that they've rolled through, sometimes invoking upside-down "sovereign citizen" legal logic, like telling people they're trespassing on public property. Ottawa residents have seen many protests, but everyone agrees this protest is one of the most disorderly and aggressive they've ever seen. Including, apparently, harassing workers at a soup kitchen, of all things.

On social media, videos of non-white Canadians have often been appropriated and taken out of context to imply there is broad support for this convoy among all ethnicities.

There are some non-fascist people who may oppose mandates and show up for that reason. But this all definitely started as a ridiculous grift by nativists, conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and literal Nazis, and it's mostly attracted people with obnoxious attitudes.

Reasonable people

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/sfql2g/nazi_flag_duri...

It's not that surprising when you know the history. This is the founders' second or third try at live chat with media.

At Ludicorp, in the early oughts, they were building a game called Game Neverending. They built a chat feature into that game. Then they added the ability to drop photos into chat. Digital cameras and cameraphones had just become affordable, so suddenly that was the main feature of the game. Flickr had to drop the single live chat window when they became too popular, and then it became a web-based photo sharing community. But they always had plans to bring it back, they just never got around to it. Once Flickr was acquired by Yahoo those plans became even more difficult to realize.

Like many companies in the middle-oughts, Flickr did everything over IRC. When they were acquired by Yahoo, most of them moved to San Francisco, but some employees never left Canada. So it was a distributed, remote workplace the entire time. It was natural to do everything over IRC and add bots and such to help you do things.

When the Flickr founders left Yahoo, they founded Glitch, and it was also quite distributed, half in Vancouver, BC and half in the Bay Area. I'm not sure how they came to build their own sharing-media-in-IRC solution again, but they had the tools to hand.

A fun aside: as Glitch was failing, but before they pivoted to Slack, they downsized. And a lot of those downsized employees reformed as "Tomfoolery" and created a product called "Anchor", which was basically Slack! There aren't a lot of traces that this thing ever existed but here's an article from Fast Company:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3013553/meet-tomfoolery-the-comp...

I assume that those employees realized that their internal tools were actually the best thing that they had made. Anchor was led by a former Yahoo executive who had I think been COO at Glitch. Tomfoolery/Anchor didn't get much traction and was acquihired by Yahoo just a few months later - most of those employees were ex-Yahoo anyway.

A few months later Glitch pivoted to Slack and the rest is history.

It's unclear to me why Tomfoolery failed when they had all the knowledge about how Glitch's Slack worked and a head start of many months. I remember a period in 2013 when a group I was involved in was choosing between Flowdock (yet another thing that was basically Slack) and Anchor and the recently-launched Slack. Anchor didn't have the rich integrations of Flowdock. Slack was very new and immature and was worse than both of them. But Slack improved faster and people like Stewart Butterfield had way more goodwill.

Pardon my skepticism, but the whole "supplement" industry seems incredibly bogus.

Yes, there might be some benefits from little tweaks to our nutritional profile. But is this a priority compared to the massive benefits one gets from simply cutting out refined sugar, refined carbs, and other junk foods, and doing moderate exercise?

The idea of a supplement tailored to the individual seems to

a) vastly overestimate what we know about the body

b) be suspiciously aligned to marketing. It's easy to flatter people by saying they are unique individuals and need specialized tests and an expensive, specialized program to be healthy. Like, that the reason why you're unhealthy is because you've got this blood type and you can't eat beets on Tuesdays but you can correct it with this expensive supplement. And it doesn't have to do with your entire lifestyle.

Thank you for your kind responses.

1) I know the movie is a fictionalization. I should have said, the “Billy Beane character”. But I see your point. Reality is more complex than one person being right for a role, and another person being wrong. There are many variables and a smart manager (or a smart person managing their career) can and should make changes.

I am not sure what those changes are. It might surprise you but I’m not a young developer at all. I have never found anyone, coach or therapist or manager, who seems to have an answer.

2) It’s a stressful time but I’m okay. I have multiple job offers. I’m considering not taking the one with the highest salary. However, I have some major debts right now and as stated above, I’m not young and I need to think about retirement too.

Some context here on "fag" / "faggot"

In some cases Quinn seems to be bantering with her gay friends. Quinn is queer herself.

In other cases she is calling out some 4chan person, for unknown reasons since they deleted their account. Norton is using the common lingo on that site. Especially at the time, on 4chan, everyone was a fag. Being a "fag" on 4chan or certain IRC channels was a complex identity. It was acknowledgement of being a high school social outcast who got called a "fag", and also part of a community that's turned that hate inwards, and is merciless towards outsiders and even each other.

And yes, it's also a slur against gay people and it causes many people pain to read it.

These aspects of internet culture are hideous and awful. It's also the culture that Norton fell into, and grew out of. I suspect many people here are the same.

Where she is right now? Was she a good pick for the NYTimes?

She's complicated. In her personal life she can be very, very difficult to deal with, and her associations are questionable. (Like probably all of your favorite writers from other eras!)

But there isn't anyone else writing with her compassion and understanding about what's happening with young men online in odd technical corners of the internet. And her prescription, that compassion and understanding are the way out – some may find it naive, but I see no other plausible response to the rise of fascism in developed countries today.

I encourage everyone to read her works.