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umm i need reassurance that my presence is wanted but i can’t ask for reassurance because that’s really Embarrassing and it wouldn’t feel genuine if i asked for it

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A frog-eating bat swoops down on a nasty surprise-a poisonous toad at the Bat Conservation International in Austin, Texas. (1982) photog. Merlin D. Tuttle

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I know this sounds like the deranged ramblings of a senile old man but I swear it used to be possible to look up information on the internet

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Crowley and Aziraphale don't need a quiet retirement in the countryside.

What they really need is for their South Downs cottage to be part of an HOA and spend the rest of their existences facing a common enemy of powertripping geriatric citizens and nosy neighbours.

I want 10 seasons of Crowley's plans for a carnivorous garden being turned down and him going scorched earth on the head of the HOA comittees' award winning Dhalia patch. I want 10 seasons of Aziraphale sniffing out HOA policy loopholes like a truffle pig or maliciously complying when he can't get out of something.

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Transit Posters from Research: Design in Nature

Today we are featuring poster designs from Research: Design in Nature, edited by John Gilbert Wilkins, published by the Field Museum of Natural History and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926. The portfolio features over 200 leaves of plates that were printed in the Field Museum pressroom and the Regensteiner Corporation of Chicago. The posters we are presenting today are from a poster competition for students at the School of the Art Institute in 1925.

John Gilbert Wilkins writes:

“Late in the school year of 1925, Mr. D. C. Davies, Director of the Field Museum, decided to offer a second Poster Prize. The contest was open to the second year class in Research of the School of the Art Institute. The director immediately began to cast about to find some available source for securing the necessary prize money to cover the various awards. Mr. Stanley Field, President of the Field Museum, saw the advantage of such a plan and expressed a desire to furnish the required funds. Thus one hundred dollars was set aside for this purpose.

The students were given the necessary data and required to select their own material from anywhere within the Museum, and make preliminary pencil sketches direct from the object. From these sketches poster designs were laid out, also in pencil, criticized and approved by the instructor, then finished in color.”

View more posts about Research: Design in Nature.

View more posts about decorative arts and pattern books.

–Sarah, Special Collections Graduate Intern

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is there a delta tumblr account?

I wish you could use delta drink vouchers to buy snack boxes. I travel a lot for work, but not enough internationally to achieve the medallion levels for 1st class upgrades. And often I’ll be sitting back in steerage with enough drink vouchers to get totally blitzed, but still have to fork out $15 for food more substantial than a biscoff cookie or two square inches of sun chips. Even in comfort plus, where drinks are included (and my vouchers are going to WASTE) the only really substantial snacks you can get are granola bars, and those get old real fast.

I also think it’s a travesty that you can’t use a companion ticket on a ticket with more than two passengers. Companion tickets are a nice perk, but I literally never get to fly as a 2 person set. I’m either alone, or with my whole family. So the only way I ever get to use my companion ticket is to book for myself and one of my kids using the companion ticket, and then book a separate ticket for my partner and other kid (praying the adjacent seats don’t get booked in the time it takes to do it twice), and then CALL CUSTOMER SERVICE to get the itineraries linked together in case of flight changes etc. it really makes travel booking more of a hassle than it needs to be.

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Lord, grant me the strength to throw away this box that i'll never use, the courage to throw away this box that i'll never use, and the wisdom to throw away this box that i'll never use

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When I first read this but before I clicked to expand it, I thought you were rating animal bats by their efficiency and how satisfying they would be to fend off a home invasion. I got a mental image of someone roaring, “RELEASE THE BATS!” And an army of extremely efficient little bats flying in an orderly fashion to repel the invaders.

Rate different bats.

…i will do it for 4 dollars

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Le Corbusier

Photo from the Catalogue of the exhibition held at the Hayward Gallery, London 1987

Via @room_and_book instagram

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Boy and Girl in a Field with Sheep, Winslow Homer, ca. 1877-78

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🐦💦🐦

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Don't usually share work stuff but I do work in climate policy and nearly every memo I write includes some variation of "government funding for this obscure but necessary area of climate mitigation research has been multiplied (sometimes by like, 1000x) under the Biden Administration" and while I know the oil permitting stuff is much splashier news there's a whole world of work that needs to be done under the surface that Biden is doing. And if he doesn't win in 2024 all that progress goes away and the climate is absolutely fucked

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”…And the CFPB is gonna let you have it, and they're gonna save you and your fellow Americans at least $677m/year – forever.”

Or at least until the giant orange monster wins and he and his evil billionaire bff abolish the CFPB. VOTE.

Shifting $677m from the banks to the people, every year, forever

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

"Switching costs" are one of the great underappreciated evils in our world: the more it costs you to change from one product or service to another, the worse the vendor, provider, or service you're using today can treat you without risking your business.

Businesses set out to keep switching costs as high as possible. Literally. Mark Zuckerberg's capos send him memos chortling about how Facebook's new photos feature will punish anyone who leaves for a rival service with the loss of all their family photos – meaning Zuck can torment those users for profit and they'll still stick around so long as the abuse is less bad than the loss of all their cherished memories:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

It's often hard to quantify switching costs. We can tell when they're high, say, if your landlord ties your internet service to your lease (splitting the profits with a shitty ISP that overcharges and underdelivers), the switching cost of getting a new internet provider is the cost of moving house. We can tell when they're low, too: you can switch from one podcatcher program to another just by exporting your list of subscriptions from the old one and importing it into the new one:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

But sometimes, economists can get a rough idea of the dollar value of high switching costs. For example, a group of economists working for the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau calculated that the hassle of changing banks is costing Americans at least $677m per year (see page 526):

https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_personal-financial-data-rights-final-rule_2024-10.pdf

The CFPB economists used a very conservative methodology, so the number is likely higher, but let's stick with that figure for now. The switching costs of changing banks – determining which bank has the best deal for you, then transfering over your account histories, cards, payees, and automated bill payments – are costing everyday Americans more than half a billion dollars, every year.

Now, the CFPB wasn't gathering this data just to make you mad. They wanted to do something about all this money – to find a way to lower switching costs, and, in so doing, transfer all that money from bank shareholders and executives to the American public.

And that's just what they did. A newly finalized Personal Financial Data Rights rule will allow you to authorize third parties – other banks, comparison shopping sites, brokers, anyone who offer you a better deal, or help you find one – to request your account data from your bank. Your bank will be required to provide that data.

I loved this rule when they first proposed it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

And I like the final rule even better. They've really nailed this one, even down to the fine-grained details where interop wonks like me get very deep into the weeds. For example, a thorny problem with interop rules like this one is "who gets to decide how the interoperability works?" Where will the data-formats come from? How will we know they're fit for purpose?

This is a super-hard problem. If we put the monopolies whose power we're trying to undermine in charge of this, they can easily cheat by delivering data in uselessly obfuscated formats. For example, when I used California's privacy law to force Mailchimp to provide list of all the mailing lists I've been signed up for without my permission, they sent me thousands of folders containing more than 5,900 spreadsheets listing their internal serial numbers for the lists I'm on, with no way to find out what these lists are called or how to get off of them:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/22/degoogled/#kafka-as-a-service

So if we're not going to let the companies decide on data formats, who should be in charge of this? One possibility is to require the use of a standard, but again, which standard? We can ask a standards body to make a new standard, which they're often very good at, but not when the stakes are high like this. Standards bodies are very weak institutions that large companies are very good at capturing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Here's how the CFPB solved this: they listed out the characteristics of a good standards body, listed out the data types that the standard would have to encompass, and then told banks that so long as they used a standard from a good standards body that covered all the data-types, they'd be in the clear.

Once the rule is in effect, you'll be able to go to a comparison shopping site and authorize it to go to your bank for your transaction history, and then tell you which bank – out of all the banks in America – will pay you the most for your deposits and charge you the least for your debts. Then, after you open a new account, you can authorize the new bank to go back to your old bank and get all your data: payees, scheduled payments, payment history, all of it. Switching banks will be as easy as switching mobile phone carriers – just a few clicks and a few minutes' work to get your old number working on a phone with a new provider.

This will save Americans at least $677 million, every year. Which is to say, it will cost the banks at least $670 million every year.

Naturally, America's largest banks are suing to block the rule:

https://www.americanbanker.com/news/cfpbs-open-banking-rule-faces-suit-from-bank-policy-institute

Of course, the banks claim that they're only suing to protect you, and the $677m annual transfer from their investors to the public has nothing to do with it. The banks claim to be worried about bank-fraud, which is a real thing that we should be worried about. They say that an interoperability rule could make it easier for scammers to get at your data and even transfer your account to a sleazy fly-by-night operation without your consent. This is also true!

It is obviously true that a bad interop rule would be bad. But it doesn't follow that every interop rule is bad, or that it's impossible to make a good one. The CFPB has made a very good one.

For starters, you can't just authorize anyone to get your data. Eligible third parties have to meet stringent criteria and vetting. These third parties are only allowed to ask for the narrowest slice of your data needed to perform the task you've set for them. They aren't allowed to use that data for anything else, and as soon as they've finished, they must delete your data. You can also revoke their access to your data at any time, for any reason, with one click – none of this "call a customer service rep and wait on hold" nonsense.

What's more, if your bank has any doubts about a request for your data, they are empowered to (temporarily) refuse to provide it, until they confirm with you that everything is on the up-and-up.

I wrote about the lawsuit this week for @eff@mastodon.social's Deeplinks blog:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/no-matter-what-bank-says-its-your-money-your-data-and-your-choice

In that article, I point out the tedious, obvious ruses of securitywashing and privacywashing, where a company insists that its most abusive, exploitative, invasive conduct can't be challenged because that would expose their customers to security and privacy risks. This is such bullshit.

It's bullshit when printer companies say they can't let you use third party ink – for your own good:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/

It's bullshit when car companies say they can't let you use third party mechanics – for your own good:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

It's bullshit when Apple says they can't let you use third party app stores – for your own good:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security

It's bullshit when Facebook says you can't independently monitor the paid disinformation in your feed – for your own good:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

And it's bullshit when the banks say you can't change to a bank that charges you less, and pays you more – for your own good.

CFPB boss Rohit Chopra is part of a cohort of Biden enforcers who've hit upon a devastatingly effective tactic for fighting corporate power: they read the law and found out what they're allowed to do, and then did it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

The CFPB was created in 2010 with the passage of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, which specifically empowers the CFPB to make this kind of data-sharing rule. Back when the CFPA was in Congress, the banks howled about this rule, whining that they were being forced to share their data with their competitors.

But your account data isn't your bank's data. It's your data. And the CFPB is gonna let you have it, and they're gonna save you and your fellow Americans at least $677m/year – forever.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/01/bankshot/#personal-financial-data-rights

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front facing egrets making me lose control of everything

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Vintage Halloween Postcards (1900s, 1910s)