#2017-07

[merpmonde]

Catène de Containers

To celebrate the 500th anniversary of the founding of the port on the right bank of the Seine estuary, Le Havre went big. They commissioned a sculpture from artist Vincent Ganivet... and he delivered a monument!

Standing at nearly 29 m tall, the arches are made with 36 shipping containers, representing Le Havre's half-millennium as an international trade hub. 21 in one and 15 in the other, they are arranged in a catenary shape which makes the structure self-supporting. There's stuff to satisfy a maths and physics buff in there somewhere... but I'll just concentrate on the fact that it looks cool, especially compared to its industrial and brutalist surroundings.

As a major port in Nazi-occupied France, Le Havre was bombed into oblivion by the Allies, hence most of the town centre's buildings were built at once in the late 1940s-early 1950s. The result is a very rigid, homogeneous, mineral urban environment, to which the Catène adds a welcome dash of colour.

But if nothing else (and we've established there is a lot else), it looks like it'd make a compelling Mario Kart track.

[iamsweetcrow]

Duckvember day 07: Torpid Duck

It's winter, there's little sunlight and the cold hurts your leaves. So like any duck half plant you decide to rest. Until the intro music plays in the background and the hero appears to ruin your nap.

I've wanted to draw Dr. Bushroot from the Ducktales reboot for a long time. I've read that some people didn't like his design, but I love it 💚

[sugdensdingle]

[goldenpinof]

he was, in fact, not 26 in 2015 (gays do maths)

[hiwerethemountaingoats]

This is a song very loosely about why I oppose abstinence-only education.

John Darnielle introducing Broom People (9:30 Club | Washington, D.C. | November 7th, 2017)

[maslows-pyramid-scheme]

Look at how big my cat was!!!

[itnewsletter]

Issue #6

Thursday, April 6th - missed in Issue #5:

Fanart

[x] reddie by @death2toby

Friday, April 7th:

Fanart

[x] reddie by @noodles-and-tea

[x] reddie by @horov

[x] reddy by @horov

[x] reddie by @dollarstoreartsupplies

[x] richie & pennywise by @snowls-yt

[x] reddie by SmshMouthTozier on Twitter

[x] reddie by emokissrr on Twitter

[x] reddie by @death2toby

Fanfic

[you’re more then just my bestfriend] benverly by cherriskye on AO3

[Nursing a Crush] reddie by @vodka-rocks-and-a-piece-of-toast

Merch

[x] pennywise bat stuffy by @strangelittlegarden

Recs

[x] reddie fic by @the-losers-are-still-losing

Saturday, April 8th:

Edits

[x] pennywise Barbie poster by @mashedraw

[x] reddie Barbie posters by @ur-friendly-neighbourhood-queer

Fanart

[x] the losers club by @alyxdrawsthings

[x] richie tozier by owobergine on Twitter

[x] richie tozier by Garfy_poor on Twitter

[x] reddie by FnofuS on Twitter

[x] reddie by emokissrr on Twitter

[x] richie tozier by HaderSweetie on Twitter

Fanfic

[everything you feel is good] reddie by deanlosechester on AO3

[Kick the bucket] reddie by @xavierlynn1998

[so what am i so afraid of?] reddie by getsalami on AO3

[Everywhere for you.] stenbrough by orphan_account on AO3

Memes

[x] the losers club "don't fuck this up" by @reddie-as-ill-ever-be

Roleplay Ads

[x] henpat 18+ by @kaijukomrade

Sunday, April 9th:

Fanart

[x] richie tozier by @protecttherealmcrystal

[x] pennywise by @jamie-tyndall-ffa

[x] reddie by @lordkalsiferdraws

[x] reddie by @thatonepannoah

[x] stanlon by @meenaisstuck

[x] reddie by @liz-freemen

[x] reddie by @noodles-and-tea

[x] richie tozier by @noodles-and-tea

[x] richie tozier by @p0etic-l0ser

[x] main four by @fruity-cleric

Fanfic

[Ghosts] reddie by @eddiesasspbrak

[Flowers for you 🌹] bichie by I_dont_know_what_am_making on AO3

[Love language] reddie by Tozierzz on AO3

[My inter-dimensional bride] pennyjuice by JackDenbrough on AO3

[When Will You Be Back?] stenbrough by The_Buggs_Brain on AO3

[When I'm with you] reddie by ThePeterForHerGwen on AO3

[I'm With You(Because I Love You)] reddie by iggy1256 on AO3

[Ethics 101] reddie by strangertwentypanic on AO3

Polls

[x] Who Would Believe In Santa And The Easter Bunny The Longest? by @antisociallilbrat

Monday, April 10th:

Edits

[x] pennywise wallpaper by Spillthecrazy on Twitter

Fanimatic

[x] reddie by @von-leg

Fanart

[x] the losers club by @sm0kingcrack

[x] eddie kaspbrak by @you-are-braver-than-you-think

[x] reddie by @lordkalsiferdraws

[x] twheelzier by @mrhalloween2ficpage

[x] reddie by viagox on Twitter

[x] richie tozier by snaalfoss on Twitter

[x] ben & stanley by @whatthefuckisasweep

[x] reddie by etsukopersonal on Twitter

[x] ben & richie by @noodles-and-tea

Fanfic

[If the World is Still Around Tomorrow] stenbrough by treluvd on AO3

[Unpredicted Soulmates] bichie by Blimmp on AO3

[put your ear on this coochie, hear this ocean sound] reddie by @gigglesnortbangdead

[Summer of Chaos] reddie by Mushroom_ace on AO3

[Friend With Brown Hair] reddie by pinkcash on AO3

[If You Were Here (And I Wish You Were)] reddie by BeepBeepSunny on AO3

Memes

[x] reddie by @neibolt-house

Merch

[x] pennywise mask by cosplaycrewco on Twitter

[the-physicality]

this is one of those things that you have to watch more than once to get the full effect

[historiadelfutbol]

[merpmonde]

Three churches in Le Havre

This building very much stands out in Le Havre's rebuilt city centre, as it is far more ornate than its surroundings. It's the oldest building in Le Havre, completed in 1638, just 120 years after the founding of the town. Damage by Allied bombings but not completely destroyed, the old church was kept and restored, and, with Le Havre becoming a major town again, it got its own diocese in 1974. The church then became Notre-Dame Cathedral of Le Havre, and is now approaching 50 years in the role (anniversary in December).

As it had been decided to keep the old church, Auguste Perret, the architect in charge of the reconstruction, would build a church of his own elsewhere: the new Church of Saint Joseph, a blocky concrete structure, perfectly in sync with the rest of the urban project. Where the cathedral sticks out as its rounded, classic facade contrasts with the angular buildings around it, Saint Joseph's stands out with its tall central spire. Culminating at 107 m, the tower is inspired by lighthouses, a symbol of Le Havre's maritime nature.

Somewhere in between, other churches further away from the port also survived the war - not without damage, but restoration was chosen over replacement. In the foreground, Saint Vincent de Paul's Church was built in the 19th century in a neo-Romanesque style, its central tower reminiscent of the abbey on Mont Saint Michel.

[sugdensdingle]

[armchairmusings]

2017.07.31MONIKA_CLOUTIER_Women's_Triathalon-22 by 2017 Canada Summer Games

[fans4wga]

26 September: thread by WGA member David Slack

Twitter thread by David Slack @/slack2thefuture:

"As WGA leaders meet today to finalize our deal, we begin a new era for writers — and for labor in our industry. But we also begin to face the final and most insidious form of unionbusting propaganda: a years-long effort to sell the lie that our strike was not worth it.

Over the coming days, months, and years, the studios, streamers, and their surrogates will take every opportunity to undermine what we have won together. They will seize on the inevitable consessions and compromises made by our NegCom as proof that we “failed.”

They will urge us to overlook all that we won through hard work and unwavering solidarity. They will claim it wasn’t enough, that we should have gotten X instead of Y, that we lost more by striking than we gained in this new contract. And they will be wrong.

They will tell us that the strike was unnecessary, it was a waste of our time and our savings, that our agents or managers or lawyers could have gotten us everything we won through individual negotiations without anyone having to walk a picket line. Well… then why didn’t they?

As hard as it is to believe right now, these lies can work. They’ve worked before. During our 2017 strike authorization vote, it was shocking to discover how many members believed we lost the ‘07-08 strike, in which we went on strike for the internet — and won the internet.

This didn’t happen by accident. It was the result of years of whispering by studios and anti-union allies. And they don’t just do it because they’re bitter about losing. They push the lie that we used our power and lost because they hope to stop us from using our power to win.

Our strike was necessary because, in our individual negotiations, our employers consistently refused to acknowledge our right and reasonable demands. Because the profound changes we needed could only be won through the unique and overwhelming power of collective bargaining.

Our strike was necessary because our employers made it necessary by driving our income down 23% in 10 years. Because they refused to address free work in features, streaming coverage in comedy-variety, the abuses of mini-rooms and the threat of AI until we withheld our labor

Our strike was necessary. Our strike was effective. Our strike is a victory. If anyone tries to tell you otherwise, it’s ‘cause they never want to see us stand up for ourselves again. Don’t believe it. We won this fight. We’re the WGA, and when we fight, we win. #WGAStrong"

[mostlygibberish]

"Oh and by the way, if you're wondering what I was having for lunch that day, it was a ham sandwich with an apple and potato chips in a bag. I had a soda as well."

I liked the part with the exploration of the mind/body duality.

If 07/27/1978 has even one solitary flaw, it's the middle-endian date format used in its title. Happy Pipe Strip Day to all those who celebrate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

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/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en