#Hindenberg

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The Hindenburg over Manhattan, minutes before it exploded, May 6, 1937.

Photo: Associated Press via N-TV

[cissa-calls]

AGATHA IS RUMORED TO HAVE SUCCUBUS POWERS????

It’s a line listed in one of the articles Billy combs through, but never explicitly mentioned aloud. I’m curious if this holds any weight, or if it’s meant to reflect as an unreliable resource and exemplify the hostile internet landscape that turns any woman with a suggestion of supernatural power into a vessel for being sexualized.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The long bezzle

Going to Defcon this weekend? I’m giving a keynote, “An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse,” on Saturday at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

When it comes to the modern world of enshittified, terrible businesses, no addition to your vocabulary is more essential than "bezzle," JK Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter

The bezzle is contained by two forces.

First, Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop."

Second, Keynes's: "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

On the one hand, extremely badly run businesses that strip all the value out of the firm, making things progressively worse for its suppliers, workers and customers will eventually fail (Stein's Law).

On the other hand, as the private equity sector has repeatedly demonstrated, there are all kinds of accounting tricks, subsidies and frauds that can animate a decaying, zombie firm long after its best-before date (Keynes's irrational markets):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

One company that has done an admirable job of balancing on a knife edge between Stein and Keynes is Verizon, a monopoly telecoms firm that has proven that a business can remain large, its products relied upon by millions, its stock actively traded and its market cap buoyant, despite manifest, repeated incompetence and waste on an unimaginable scale.

This week, Verizon shut down Bluejeans, an also-ran videoconferencing service the company bought for $400 million in 2020 as a panic-buy to keep up with Zoom. As they lit that $400 mil on fire, Verizon praised its own vision, calling Bluejeans "an award-winning product that connects our customers around the world, but we have made this decision due to the changing market landscape":

https://9to5google.com/2023/08/08/verizon-bluejeans-shutting-down/

Writing for Techdirt, Karl Bode runs down a partial list of all the unbelievably terrible business decisions Verizon has made without losing investor confidence or going under, in a kind of tribute to Keynes's maxim:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/10/verizon-fails-again-shutters-attempted-zoom-alternative-bluejeans-after-paying-400-million-for-it/

Remember Go90, the "dud" streaming service launched in 2015 and shuttered in 2018? You probably don't, and neither (apparently) do Verizon's shareholders, who lost $1.2 billion on this folly:

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/07/02/verizons-sad-attempt-to-woo-millennials-falls-flat-face/

Then there was Verizon's bid to rescue Redbox with a new joint-venture streaming service, Redbox Instant, launched 2012, killed in 2014, $450,000,000 later:

https://variety.com/2014/digital/news/verizon-redbox-to-pull-plug-on-video-streaming-service-1201321484/

Then there was Sugarstring, a tech "news" website where journalists were prohibited from saying nice things about Net Neutrality or surveillance – born 2014, died 2014:

https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/2/7324063/verizon-kills-off-sugarstring

An app store, started in 2010, killed in 2012:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/5/3605618/verizon-apps-store-closing-january-2013

Vcast, 2005-2012, yet another failed streaming service (pray that someday you find someone who loves you as much as Verizon's C-suite loves doomed streaming services):

https://venturebeat.com/media/verizon-vcast-shutting-down/

And the granddaddy of them all, Oath, Verizon's 2017, $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo/AOL, whose name refers to the fact that the company's mismanagement provoked involuntary, protracted swearing from all who witnessed the $4.6 billion write-down the company took a year later:

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/12/12/if-youre-surprised-verizons-aol-yahoo-face-plant-you-dont-know-verizon/

Verizon isn't just bad at being a phone company that does non-phone-company things – it's incredibly bad at being a phone company, too. As Bode points out, Verizon's only real competency is in capturing its regulators at the FCC:

https://www.techdirt.com/2017/05/02/new-verizon-video-blatantly-lies-about-whats-happening-to-net-neutrality/

And sucking up massive public subsidies from rubes in the state houses of New York:

https://www.techdirt.com/2017/03/14/new-york-city-sues-verizon-fiber-optic-bait-switch/

New Jersey:

https://www.techdirt.com/2014/04/25/verizon-knows-youre-sucker-takes-taxpayer-subsidies-broadband-doesnt-deliver-lobbies-to-drop-requirements/

and Pennsylvania:

https://www.techdirt.com/2017/06/15/verizon-gets-wrist-slap-years-neglecting-broadband-networks-new-jersey-pennsylvania/

Despite all this, and vast unfunded liabilities – like remediating the population-destroying lead in their cables – they remain solvent:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/verizon-sued-by-investors-over-lead-cables-environmental-statements-2023-08-02/

Verizon has remained irrational longer than any short seller could remain solvent.

Short-sellers – who bet against companies and get paid when their stock prices go down – get a bad rap: billionaire shorts were the villains of the Gamestop squeeze, accused of running negative PR campaigns against beloved businesses to drive them under and pay their bets off:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/30/meme-stocks/#stockstonks

But shorts can do the lord's work. Writing for Bloomberg, Kathy Burton tells the story of Nate Anderson, whose Hindenburg Research has cost some of the world's wealthiest people over $99 billion by publishing investigative reports on their balance-sheet shell-games just this year:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-08-06/how-much-did-hindenburg-make-from-shorting-adani-dorsey-icahn

Anderson started off trying to earn a living as a SEC whistleblower, identifying financial shenanigans and collecting the bounties on offer, but that didn't pan out. So he turned his forensic research skills to preparing mediagenic, viral reports on the scams underpinning the financial boasts of giant companies…after taking a short position in them.

This year, Anderson's targets have included Carl Icahn, whose company lost $17b in market cap after Anderson accused it of overvaluing its assets. He went after the world's fourth-richest man, Gautam Adani, accusing him of "accounting fraud and stock manipulation," wiping out 34% of his net worth. He took on Jack Dorsey, whose payment processor Square renamed itself Block and went all in on the cryptocurrency bezzle, lopping 16% off its share price.

Burton points out that Anderson's upside for these massive bloodletting was comparatively modest. A perfectly timed exit from the $17b Icahn report would have netted $56m. What's more, Anderson faces legal threats and worse – one short seller was attacked by a man wearing brass-knuckles, an attack attributed to her short activism.

Shorts are lauded as one of capitalism's self-correcting mechanisms, and Hindenberg certainly has taken some big, successful swings at some of the great bezzles of our time. But as Verizon shows, shorts alone can't discipline a market where profits and investor confidence are totally decoupled from competence or providing a decent product or service.

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

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/2023/08/10/smartest-guys-in-the-room/#can-you-hear-me-now

[queermentaldisaster]

"All is Found," an OC drabble.

So cw for implied child neglect, and character death.

Characters in order of appearance: Koroleva Makarov, Linda Hindenberg, Gospozha Makarov.

All Russian in this is Google Translated, translations at the end.

Song and title from "All is Found" by Evan Rachel Wood.

Tags: @eiraeths @forestshadow-wolf

Drabble under the cut.

Koroleva clung to her mother's shirt, trying to block out the sounds of her father screaming. She felt her mother lay her down in her bed, and she immediately let out a small cry, reaching back for her mother. The older woman gently shushed her, covering her with a blanket and tucking her in. "Тише, моя маленькая принцесса. Все нормально. Мама здесь." She reassured, as she leaned down and pressed a kiss to Koroleva's head.

She grabbed her mother's hand as it was offered to her. "колыбельная?" She asked, her voice cracking.

Her mother smiled softly, and began singing, stroking her hair as she did so. "Там, где северный ветер встречается с морем, есть река, полная воспомина��ий~"

Koroleva leaned into her mother's touch, listening closely. "Спи, моя дорогая, в целости и сохранности, ибо в этой реке можно найти все~ В ее водах глубоко и правдиво лежат ответы и путь для тебя~"

She looked up, seeing those brown eyes, so full of warmth and love. "Ныряйте глубоко в ее звук, но не слишком далеко, иначе вы утонете~ Да, она будет петь тем, кто услышит, и в ее песне струится вся магия~ Но сможете ли вы выдержать то, чего боитесь больше всего~? Сможешь ли ты принять то, что знает река~?"

Koroleva began drifting off, as the song came to a close. "Там, где северный ветер встречается с морем, есть мать, полная воспоминаний~ Приходи, моя дорогая, домой направляется~ Когда всё потеряно, тогда всё найдётся~"

Everything went black and blank as she heard the faint sound of the door opening.

Koroleva shot awake to the sound of her baby sister bawling. She pushed herself out of bed, hurrying to the kitchen and coming back with a bottle of formula. She lifted her sister out of the bassinet, her small body barely able to handle holding the little one. She hung her head, wishing her mama was here.

Translations: (1: Hush, my little princess. It's okay. Mama's here.) (2: lullaby?) (3: Where the north wind meets the sea, there's a river full of memory~) (4: Sleep, my darling, safe and sound, for in this river all is found~ In her waters, deep and true lie the answers and a path for you~) (5: Dive down deep into her sound but not too far or you'll be drowned~ Yes, she will sing to those who'll hear, and in her song, all magic flows~ But can you brave what you most fear~? Can you face what the river knows~?) (6: Where the north wind meets the sea there's a mother full of memory~ Come, my darling, homeward bound~ When all is lost, then all is found~)

[nina-floret]

[cassnottiel]

Season 6 starts with the worst jumpscare imaginable. High hopes by panic at the disco

[ghouljams]

Bimbo!reader this, bimbo!reader that, how about reader that's just a dumbass. Confidently looks left when someone tells you to look right. Absolutely mispronounced colonel because you'd only ever read it. Ate 4 bananas in one sitting and doesn't know why your tummy hurts. Answers any trivia question anyone gives you with perfect accuracy but though "Citizen Kane" was the guy's first and last name. It is anyone's guess what you know at any given moment, it is both endearing and absolutely terrifying. Can give the atomic weight of hydrogen off the top of your head but you've never heard of the hindenberg. Fucking astonishing

[etoilesbienne]

by the way if the gemans really are being announced... and sofia said there was a noise from deep in the ocean.... ummmm are they arriving via uboat 😭

[read-marx-and-lenin]

Don't forget to vote for von Hindenberg this election! Thälmann can't win, and if you vote for him you're basically handing your vote to Hitler. Von Hindenberg has his issues, don't get me wrong, but if Hitler wins he'll be so much worse. Besides, it's not like von Hindenberg is just going to collaborate with the Nazis to keep the left out of power or anything. When push comes to shove, I'm sure he'll make the right choice and collaborate with us instead.

[bomberqueen17]

how the writing is going

Ok so. LOL. About the only thing I am effectively achieving this week *is* writing, and even that is not really..... I don't have a draft. But I have a whole bunch of sample snippets I've written to try and feel my way through the worldbuilding and discover the sorts of things the characters are likely to be preoccupied with, which is often how I figure out what a plot should be.

The next thing I thought about after dolphins was modes of transport besides sailing ships.

So this is a fairly high-tech society, but they do not have fossil fuels, and they don't have a large-scale power grid. I decided that for aesthetics, but as I'm unpicking my plot, I'm realizing that it makes sense. See, the main driver for all my plot devices is that there's a lot of sun activity-- sunspots, coronal mass ejections, magnetic field anomalies, that sort of shit. A power grid could not survive on a large scale. So all power generation is done in small, local installations-- some very local indeed, panels on rooftops, little waterwheels, tiny wind turbines. Industrial-scale power is generated in hydro plants and used right at the site for hydro-powered manufacturing-- much of it direct hydro-power, not converted to electricity. Just direct drive waterwheel shit. Because the sun can throw whatever shit it wants at the planet and your waterwheel won't notice or care.

That said. Communication over long ranges does pose a significant challenge. You're going to need line-of-sight semaphores and shit, which I had not worldbuilt in the earlier versions but absolutely could add in.

There should be trains, and I haven't really pondered those yet because I need to know more about my geography. Please, god, don't make me draw a map, but I'm gonna have to. Oh well.

But the other thing I thought of and got really excited about was

DIRIGIBLES

It's feasible with technology we currently have, and this is a thing that some large companies are pursuing, to make very large, hydrogen-filled, entirely solar-powered dirigibles for long-distance cargo transportation, faster than ships, the same speed as trucks/trains but more direct, slower than airplanes but INFINITELY lower carbon footprint. And hydrogen is outlawed by the FAA as a lifting gas, not because of the Hindenberg (which had many contributing factors) but because of a Congressional hearing which was presented by the helium lobby in the 20s. Hmmmmm.

A fascinating detail is that you could make a solar-powered lighter-than-air craft operate day and night seamlessly by having a power generation process where some of the day's collected solar energy directly powers the thing, and some of it goes toward... I forget the details but it powers a chemical reaction that, come nightfall, is simply set to reverse itself, which will then release most of the energy that it took to power the reaction in the first place, which you can now use to power your aircraft. Which is not a thing I knew about and I now have to research how that would work because, fascinating.

Anyway. In Fantasy World, there are totally dirigibles, and they're also probably operated by the Navy, and the water-ship sailors fucking hate them, LOL. This will be a wildly entertaining dynamic and I am rubbing my little paws together.

Also.

While feeling sort of brain-dead and stupid, I got a sheet of paper, went through a bunch of lists of historic names and lists of like, suggested baby names from various ethnicities, and I just made lists on this sheet of paper of men's names, women's names, arguably gender-neutral names, and then a huge pile of surnames, and then I sat down with a bullet-pointed list cribbed from the website of the museum of the USS Constitution of all the personnel that would be on a 44-gun frigate ca. 1812, and I first pondered each of the jobs, added some, took some away, came up with my own numbers of how many guys I needed, and then I just sat there and combined the first and last names in aesthetically pleasing ways to generate characters, lightly crossing out ones I'd used. (and sometimes googling them to make sure they're not somebody famous or something, which i always recommend with fictional character creation, especially if you're as oblivious as I am.)

I was unable to resist also coming up with some backstories-- siblings, little work histories, criminal pasts, notable traits, that sort of thing-- for many of the characters.

I did not make up names for every individual person on this ship, which I decided should have a crew of about 150-180, but I made up some names for every position, and considered age and gender as well for all of them.

I will not use many of the characters I've created this way, I'm sure, but the ones with interrelationships will totally somehow get used, and this way as I'm writing if I need a character I can find them already made, and if that person has a defined role, I already know which one and won't lose track of them.

This also got me to consider why people wind up in the jobs they do in this society, what drives them to seek out certain things, and that gave me a lot of background as to what's going on onshore.

I should try to find a list of a dirigible's crew and think about them, too, and build out the train people and routes and whatnot.

I also bought a used older edition on Thriftbooks of The Annapolis Book Of Seamanship and have been reading that with... more interest than I expected actually. I have the 1983 edition and it has a really moving little plea to let the women on your ship also learn to sail because it is foolish to relegate them to the kitchen when if only they were taught how it works, they could save you all in an emergency. LOL I wonder if that's worded differently in the updated new version or not.

[inthefallofasparrow]

Hey what's your favorite type of cheese?

[flipchild]

Jesse we need to walk to the store and get a YummyDrink. I've 'decided' this goes in the Sequence prior to writing my homework & emails ('Decided' here meaning having established an anticipation which precludes subsequent actions in the Sequence). Are you listening to me, Jesse?! We need to buy a Sipper's Treat

—Walter 'Hindenberg' White

[flagellant]

she has an uncanny knowledge of the hindenberg disaster which has seduced me body and soul

[birdsagainsthumanity]

Auntie, looking at photos: oh, and look at this, this is from before you were born! Guy who has forgotten his birth date: uh huh, interesting. Guy who has forgotten his birth date, pointing at a picture of the hindenberg disaster: was this before I was born?