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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Google’s enshittification memos

[Note, 9 October 2023: Google disputes the veracity of this claim, but has declined to provide the exhibits and testimony to support its claims. Read more about this here.]

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

Think about Unity President Marc Whitten's nonpology for his company's disastrous rug-pull, in which they declared that everyone who had paid good money to use their tool to make a game would have to keep paying, every time someone downloaded that game:

The most fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is we’re building a sustainable business for Unity. And for us, that means that we do need to have a model that includes some sort of balancing change, including shared success.

https://www.wired.com/story/unity-walks-back-policies-lost-trust/

"Shared success" is code for, "If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too." This is bullshit. It's like saying, "We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale." Or "Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak."

And note that they're not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, "If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we're on the hook for ten percent of your losses." This isn't partnership, it's extortion.

How did a company like Unity – which became a market leader by making a tool that understood the needs of game developers and filled them – turn into a protection racket? One bad decision at a time. One rationalization and then another. Slowly, and then all at once.

When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users' backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the "don't be evil" gig because that mattered to them.

People make fun of that "don't be evil" motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn't want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/

Google is a company whose founders started out by publishing a scientific paper describing their search methodology, in which they said, "Oh, and by the way, ads will inevitably turn your search engine into a pile of shit, so we're gonna stay the fuck away from them":

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Those same founders retained a controlling interest in the company after it went IPO, explaining to investors that they were going to run the business without having their elbows jostled by shortsighted Wall Street assholes, so they could keep it from turning into a pile of shit:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

And yet, it's turned into a pile of shit. Google search is so bad you might as well ask Jeeves. The company's big plan to fix it? Replace links to webpages with florid paragraphs of chatbot nonsense filled with a supremely confident lies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/14/googles-ai-hype-circle/

How did the company get this bad? In part, this is the "curse of bigness." The company can't grow by attracting new users. When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up. Hypothetically, they could grow by going into new lines of business, but Google is incapable of making a successful product in-house and also kills most of the products it buys from other, more innovative companies:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Theoretically, the company could pursue new lines of business in-house, and indeed, the current leaders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are all execs who figured out how to get the whole company to do something new, and were elevated to the CEO's office, making each one a billionaire and sealing their place in history.

It is for this very reason that any exec at a large firm who tries to make a business-wide improvement gets immediately and repeatedly knifed by all their colleagues, who correctly reason that if someone else becomes CEO, then they won't become CEO. Machiavelli was an optimist:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.

Now, in theory, we might never know exactly what led to the enshittification of Google. In theory, all of compromises, debates and plots could be lost to history. But tech is not an oral culture, it's a written one, and techies write everything down and nothing is ever truly deleted.

Time and again, Big Tech tells on itself. Think of FTX's main conspirators all hanging out in a group chat called "Wirefraud." Amazon naming its program targeting weak, small publishers the "Gazelle Project" ("approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”). Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much. Think of Zuck emailing his CFO in the middle of the night to defend his outsized offer to buy Instagram on the basis that users like Insta better and Facebook couldn't compete with them on quality.

It's like every Big Tech schemer has a folder on their desktop called "Mens Rea" filled with files like "Copy_of_Premeditated_Murder.docx":

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself-f7f0eb6d215a?sk=351f8a54ab8e02d7340620e5eec5024d

Right now, Google's on trial for its sins against antitrust law. It's a hard case to make. To secure a win, the prosecutors at the DoJ Antitrust Division are going to have to prove what was going on in Google execs' minds when the took the actions that led to the company's dominance. They're going to have to show that the company deliberately undertook to harm its users and customers.

Of course, it helps that Google put it all in writing.

Last week, there was a huge kerfuffile over the DoJ's practice of posting its exhibits from the trial to a website each night. This is a totally normal thing to do – a practice that dates back to the Microsoft antitrust trial. But Google pitched a tantrum over this and said that the docs the DoJ were posting would be turned into "clickbait." Which is another way of saying, "the public would find these documents very interesting, and they would be damning to us and our case":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

After initially deferring to Google, Judge Amit Mehta finally gave the Justice Department the greenlight to post the document. It's up. It's wild:

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416692.pdf

The document is described as "notes for a course on communication" that Google VP for Finance Michael Roszak prepared. Roszak says he can't remember whether he ever gave the presentation, but insists that the remit for the course required him to tell students "things I didn't believe," and that's why the document is "full of hyperbole and exaggeration."

OK.

But here's what the document says: "search advertising is one of the world's greatest business models ever created…illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) could rival these economics…[W]e can mostly ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats and sales."

It goes on to say that this might be changing, and proposes a way to balance the interests of the search and ads teams, which are at odds, with search worrying that ads are pushing them to produce "unnatural search experiences to chase revenue."

"Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit."

And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."

In the enshittification cycle, companies first lure in users with surpluses – like providing the best search results rather than the most profitable ones – with an eye to locking them in. In Google's case, that lock-in has multiple facets, but the big one is spending billions of dollars – enough to buy a whole Twitter, every single year – to be the default search everywhere.

Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers."

For a lot of people, the analysis stops here. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Google locks in users and sells them to advertisers, who are their co-conspirators in a scheme to screw the rest of us.

But that's not right. For one thing, paying for a product doesn't mean you won't be the product. Apple charges a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then nonconsensually spies on every iOS user in order to target ads to them (and lies about it):

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

John Deere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and then uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

Fair treatment from a corporation isn't a loyalty program that you earn by through sufficient spending. Companies that can sell you out, will sell you out, and then cry victim, insisting that they were only doing their fiduciary duty for their sacred shareholders. Companies are disciplined by fear of competition, regulation or – in the case of tech platforms – customers seizing the means of computation and installing ad-blockers, alternative clients, multiprotocol readers, etc:

https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604?sk=85b3f5f7d051804521c3411711f0b554

Which is where the next stage of enshittification comes in: when the platform withdraws the surplus it had allocated to lure in – and then lock in – business customers (like advertisers) and reallocate it to the platform's shareholders.

For Google, there are several rackets that let it screw over advertisers as well as searchers (the advertisers are paying for the product, and they're also the product). Some of those rackets are well-known, like Jedi Blue, the market-rigging conspiracy that Google and Facebook colluded on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

But thanks to the antitrust trial, we're learning about more of these. Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – was in the courtroom last week when evidence was presented on Google execs' panic over a decline in "ad generating searches" and the sleazy gimmick they came up with to address it: manipulating the "semantic matching" on user queries:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

When you send a query to Google, it expands that query with terms that are similar – for example, if you search on "Weds" it might also search for "Wednesday." In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."

Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).

Here we see surpluses being taken away from both end-users and business customers – that is, searchers and advertisers. For searchers, it doesn't matter how much you refine your query, you're still going to get crummy search results because there's an unkillable, hidden search term stuck to your query, like a piece of shit that Google keeps sticking to the sole of your shoe.

But for advertisers, this is also a scam. They're paying to be matched to users who search on a brand name, and you didn't search on that brand name. It's especially bad for the company whose name has been appended to your search, because Google has a protection racket where the company that matches your search has to pay extra in order to show up overtop of rivals who are worse matches. Both the matching company and those rivals have given Google a credit-card that Google gets to bill every time a user searches on the company's name, and Google is just running fraudulent charges through those cards.

And, of course, Google put this in writing. I mean, of course they did. As we learned from the documentary The Incredibles, supervillains can't stop themselves from monologuing, and in big, sprawling monopolists, these monologues have to transmitted electronically – and often indelibly – to far-flung co-cabalists.

As Gray points out, this is an incredibly blunt enshittification technique: "it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better." We don't know how long Google did this for or how frequently this bait-and-switch was deployed.

But if this is a blunt way of Google smashing its fist down on the scales that balance search quality against ad revenues, there's plenty of subtler ways the company could sneak a thumb on there. A Google exec at the trial rhapsodized about his company's "contract with the user" to deliver an "honest results policy," but given how bad Google search is these days, we're left to either believe he's lying or that Google sucks at search.

The paper trail offers a tantalizing look at how a company went from doing something that was so good it felt like a magic trick to being "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand," able to "ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers."

What's more, this is a system where everyone loses (except for Google): this isn't a grift run by Google and advertisers on users – it's a grift Google runs on everyone.

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/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#pluralistic #enshittification #semantic matching #google #antitrust #trustbusting #transparency #fatfingers #serp #the algorithm #telling on yourself

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4unnyr0se · 3 months

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PLEASEEEE MATCHING WITH CAPTAINS ON TINDER WITH USHI AND KITA PLEASEEE IM ON MY HANDS AND KNEES 🙁 FROM ONE AUTISTIC TO ANOTHER I AM BEGGING YOU

❥ timeskip! haikyuu captains matching with you on tinder | wakatoshi ushijima and shinsuke kita

warnings: timeskip! ushijima and kita, fem! reader size kink, protected sex, hayloft sex, unprotected sex, biting, marking, virgin! ushijima, soft dom! kita, spanking, rough sex, tendou mentioned, kind of dom reader for ushijima

MDNI | 18+ content

word count -> 2k

Wakatoshi Ushijima | Loosing his virginity

Ushijima wasn’t a stranger to people talking about their sex lives around him. His face was so stoic and statuesque that no one could tell if he was uncomfortable listening to the subject. The topics spoken in his vicinity ranged from how big a woman’s breasts were to how someone lost their virginity. He had to admit, he was a bit more awkward around those conversations because he couldn’t relate. He was a 26-year-old virgin, while his teammates and rivals had no doubt lost their virginity years prior. Some people even lost their virginity in high school. How scandalous!

He had contacted Tendou, his closest friend from Shirtatorizawa, to hopefully give him advice on the subject. Tendou was shocked at first (and found this entire situation to be completely hilarious) but offered his advice anyway. He told Ushijima that losing your virginity doesn’t have to be a big deal, that it doesn’t have to be romantic or special. It’s just something that happens, and everyone is different. Tendou also recommended downloading Tinder, which is a very useful resource. “If you want sex with no strings attached, look no further.” his words rang in Ushijima’s ears, his thumb hovering directly over your profile. You seemed like a good match for him, but he didn’t really know what he wanted yet.

Shrugging his shoulders, he slid right on your profile and was surprised when you matched with him. He had very clearly stated that he was a virgin in his biography (Why would he not? It was accurate), so that kind of deterred people from matching with him. You messaged him instantly, suggesting he visit your apartment sometime this week. Of course, he accepted; that was the whole reason why he was on that app. He had one concern, however. Ushijima was massive, bigger than any other man by a wide margin. Could you handle him?

“Shh,” gentle sounds left your lips as you covered your dripping core above Ushijima’s length, observing how it was practically twitching with want for you. “We don’t have to rush things, okay? I know it’s your first time, baby,” you kissed the side of his cheek tenderly, your nails dragging themselves up and down his muscular chest. “Just let me make you feel good.”

He could only nod as your lips touched his once more, biting on his swelling bottom lip playfully. His hands rested on your hips, kneading the flesh between his calloused fingers. His usual stoic face was flushed, lipstick marks adorning his chapped lips and thick neck. He impatiently squeezed your hips, not daring to open his mouth just yet.

“Oh? Are you ready now, ‘Toshi?” you purred, breaking the kiss to lower yourself down even further. “You have to tell me if you want this, baby. Or else I won’t do it.”

“P-please,” Ushijima mumbled, his eyes staring intensely into yours. He couldn’t take it anymore; he needed to feel you. He needed to know if the stories his teammates told him were true and if it felt like euphoria once he was inside you. Without giving you any warning, he thrust his hips upwards, pushing his pulsating shaft inside your sobbing core. “Sorry, couldn’t wait any longer. Fuck.”

“Shit!” you cried out, balancing yourself on his broad shoulders. “Y-you’re really fucking big. G-gimme a second, okay?” your breath was quick and shallow, your walls wrapping so perfectly around his huge cock. Was he really a virgin? There was no way in hell someone with that big of a dick was a virgin. After regaining your composure, your hips began to move up and down on his length, a wanton mewl escaping your lips as the tip of his cock brushed against your most sensitive place.

“Go faster,” Ushijima demanded, gripping harder onto your hips. He wanted to take charge but had no experience in this department. What if he messed up? What if he hurt you? His left hand was the size of your entire ass, you were so fragile compared to him. “Wanna feel more of you.” He cracked his palm against your ass softly, massaging the stinging flesh soon afterward.

You nodded, burying your blushing face in his neck. Your bruised lips peppered soft kisses on his skin as you continued to bounce up and down on his gigantic cock, his head brushing against your cervix so deliciously. All that could be heard in your apartment was the sensual sound of R&B music, your wanton cries of pleasure, and Ushijima’s occasional grunt or deep moan. He wasn’t very vocal, but he was close; he could feel his cock twitching inside of you, relishing in the sensation of your gummy walls, attempting to milk him for all he was worth. “I’m, fuck, I’m gonna cum soon. Feels fucking incredible.”

“D-d’ya wanna cum inside o-or on my tits?” you whimpered, feeling your own climax quickly approaching. He was just so fucking big, and his voice was so deep. Each word he spoke made your clit throb even harder. “P-please ‘Toshi!”

“Inside,” he demanded, bolding, leaning up to kiss you once more. The kiss was molten, full of fire and passion that he had so long oppressed. He groaned in your mouth as he felt you let go of your cock, feeling your body convulse around him. The sounds of your pathetic and fucked out mewls drove him over the edge, his cum painting the walls of your womb white.

You broke the kiss and smiled at him, pulling yourself off of his cock with a pop! Ushijima groaned at the sight of his seed trickling down your thighs so beautifully, looking like a Renaissance painting. Was this the sensation his teammates were talking about earlier, was it this kind of beauty?

“Was that a good first time?” you asked, snapping him out of his wandering thoughts. He nodded and got off the bed, dressing himself quickly. “Yes, I liked it. Thanks.” The faintest tinge of pink dusted his cheeks, his eyes not daring to meet yours. He knew that if he looked into your pretty eyes again, he would be included to stay, and he couldn’t risk getting distracted from volleyball.

“You have my number if you ever want to, y’know, fuck again. You were really good for a virgin.” Was that a compliment or an insult? Ushijima couldn’t tell. Maybe it was both, he didn’t take it personally. He turned towards you, still not making eye contact. Fuck, you were so damn pretty. Was missing his practice tomorrow really worth it? Did he want to have you in his arms that badly?

“Maybe I’ll give you a call some other time.”

Shinsuke Kita | The florist

Kita loved the local farmers market. It was where he could sell his rice without worrying about the middleman. It was peaceful, seeing the mothers bring their children and pets. Seeing couples holding hands as they checked out the local food and drink vendors. This weekend, Kita wasn’t at his usual booth. He chose to browse instead, having turned an acceptable profit this month. There were stands that he had seen a million times before and one that was brand new. Fresh, the paint is not yet chipped off by children carelessly running into it. And it smelled beautiful, but that was no surprise. After all, it was a florist's booth.

He saw no one running the stand currently, maybe they were on break. Kita shrugged and took out his phone, opening Tinder to mindlessly swipe through it. It wasn’t an ideal pastime, but it beat standing around waiting for the floral stall owner to show up.

You greeted him with a rushed hello, an embarrassed blush tinting your cheeks as you apologized for being away from the stand for so long. Before Kita could respond, you felt your phone vibrate in your pocket. Opening the notification, you saw none other but the profile of the man standing before you, looking incredibly attractive.

“You matched with me,” you blushed, holding your phone for Kita to see. He smiled softly, thinking it was adorable how you could barely make eye contact with him.

“It appears I have.”

“Fuck, you’re squeezing me so well, princess,” Kita purred against your lips, thrusting into you so gently Like you would break like you were made of glass. “Think you can take more of me, darling? I’m barely halfway inside that pretty pussy.”

Fuck, his voice made you squeeze around him even harder. Here you were, laying under him in a hayloft with your hands clawing desperately at his muscular back whilst he thrust inside of you so slowly, painfully slow. Was he trying to be a tease? Was making you squirm his kink? “J-just fuck me already! Don’t tease. It’s mean!” you whimpered in frustration, attempting to angle your hips in such a way that you could feel Kita deeper inside of your core.

“I’m not trying to be mean, sweetness,” he chuckled against your lips, pecking them softly. They tasted like vanilla and roses, a pure scent that did not fit you being defiled in a hayloft. “Just don’t wanna be too rough with you, that’s all.” he squeezed your wrists, pinning them above your hand with just one of his hands. “But if a pretty girl like you wants me to go rough, I guess I have no choice.”

The atmosphere changed instantly as Kita slammed himself into you at full force, his length pistoning in and out of your sobbing core. Your pathetic and adorable sobs of pleasure filled the hayloft, the occasional beg and plead thrown in as Kita destroyed your insides with his cock. He was holding back, not wanting to break any barriers you had set up. But when you beg him in that angelic voice to fuck you, who is he to refuse a darling such as yourself?

“Is this any better, sweetheart?” Kita groaned against your neck, trailing kisses down the already bruised flesh until he reached that sweet spot just above your collarbone. His teeth just grazed the skin as he continued to practically slam into you, shaking the sensitive wood of the hayloft with each powerful thrust inside your drenched core. “Do you like it when I fuck you like this instead, hm?”

“Yes! Fuck, Kita! M’close, holy fuck! I’m so fucking close, please!” you sobbed into his shoulder, your nails leaving angry crescent imprints on his back in accompaniment with the array of feral red scratches. “Please, please, please! Lemme cum!”

Kita moaned at your desperate words, the cadence of your voice making his dick twitch deep inside of you. He was close to his climax as well, your mewls of pleasure making the sensations he was feeling all the more delicious. “Yeah, you wanna cum pretty girl? It’s okay, cum on my fucking cock. Fucking make a mess all over me.” he bit down harshly onto your collarbone, punctuating every other sentence fragment with a powerful thrust into your weeping cunt. He felt your gummy walls attempting to pull him impossibly deeper, your orgasm approaching incredibly fast.

Finally, your orgasm washed over you like a tidal wave of complete euphoria. You sobbed as your release coated his cock, almost sending Kita over the edge in tandem. Quickly, Kita pulled out of your throbbing core and frantically fisted his cock, quietly roaring as his hot and sticky ropes of white painted your stomach so beautifully. He stood above you for a moment, admiring how beautiful you were from his point of view. Shaking from your orgasm, covered in his mess. You looked so fucking perfect.

“That was incredible,” Kita smiled at you, sitting beside you. He wrapped an arm around your shoulder, kissing the teeth marks he had left earlier. “Do you feel good, sweetheart?” His tone was soft, gentle, and kind. He wanted to ensure you knew you would be cared for, even though you both accomplished what you wanted.

“I feel amazing, thank you.” you smiled, resting your face on his exposed shoulder. Your eyes landed on the scratches and marks you left on his back, fingers tracing over them tenderly. “Uh, sorry about all of this. I’m not usually this rough.”

Kita kissed the top of your head and pulled you closer to his form, caging you in his muscular arms whilst he whispered sweet nothings into your ear.

“You have nothing to worry about, pretty girl.”

okay this ask was literally so sweet i love u nonnie

#haikyuu #haikyuu smut #ushijima x reader #ushijima wakatoshi #ushijima smut #timeskip ushijima #kita smut #shinsuke kita #kita x reader #haikyuu x reader #timeskip kita

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alexaloraetheris · 2 months

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Oh boy, I feel like it's time for a post nobody will like.

We all know clothes are getting worse. Recently I found some jeans I bought in high school, and since I lost weight recently I tried them on and they fit, so I'll be wearing them once we get out of the Hell season.

But I took them and compared them to the most recent pair of jeans I bought, and... Honestly the difference in quality is so fucking stark it made me want to give up on life. The jeans I wore in high school have gone through everything. I'm talking half of Europe here, because one of our teachers was pretty big on school trips everywhere she could get the money for. They've been washed, tumbled, survived an actual car crash and they're still good.

The most recent pair I machine-washed ONCE, everything else was hand-wash only. I babied them to the max because they made my ass look like was on Instagram. Do you know what they look like now?

They're full of fixes like these. They lasted less than a year on their own. I got another decent year out of them SOLELY because I kept fixing them. And fixing them again. The crotch alone I had to fix SEVEN TIMES. I COUNTED.

And these weren't cheap jeans! C&A jeans tend to be around 40$ these days, and I got these for about 30 with a discount. I expected them to last me AT LEAST a few years, because those high school jeans? THEY'RE THE SAME FUCKING BRAND.

Considering this was the quality I was getting for nearly 40$ I figured I might as well get the same quality for 15$ and downloaded SHEIN. I didn't get jeans from them but I got some light, fluttery summer pants in the style that, honestly, I fucking love. I got three pairs for the price of one C&A jeans, and I am aware I will have to baby them even more, because out of the five pairs of pants in total I have bought on SHEIN only ONE is made of the fabric that I might be brave enough to machine wash. And with SHEIN continually getting sued for using sweatshops I probably won't be getting those pants again.

So what to do with that shitfuck situation?

I am insanely lucky my grandma knew how to sew really well and didn't mind me looking over her shoulder as long as I was quiet. I am aware that's not a skill everyone has, but quite frankly? When nobody has any money and even paying big bucks for clothes does not guarantee any kind of quality, and even fucking THRIFT STORES are full of just junk now, I think it's time to face the facts.

You need to learn how to sew.

I'm not talking about sewing your own clothes, though if you can and you have the time and patience, it's probably the best option (good luck finding decent fabric, because we can't even find THAT anymore unless you're ordering from fucking Belgium). I'm talking about fixing up seams and sewing on a patch, little repairs that make your clothes last. It might be junk, but with sewing you can make it last twice as long for the price of a spool of thread.

Now that I've pissed off everyone who is, for some reason, morally opposed to learning how to sew because it's a 'girly hobby' or 'supporting the patriarchy' (a take that left me baffled like nothing else) I'm going to piss off everyone who already knows how to sew.

I recommend getting this little guy.

It's called a stapler sewing machine, for obvious reasons. If I recall correctly, it was invented to fix clothes on the go for fashion shows and/or cosplay. It does only a chain stitch and needs to be pushed manually, but if you need to, like, hem your trousers and you don't want to spend half an hour on doing it manually (and don't already have an actual sewing machine) this is a lifesaver.

Here's a tutorial how it operates:

youtube

Now, why am I recommending this? Because it will only set you back six bucks. I got two right off the bat because I was banking on one not working (and I was right) and so I could use it for spare parts. The one in the video (Spring Come) is the one I have as well, and it's the one that actually works. I can't vouch for any unmarked ones, but the blue one works. It IS a little temperamental, but with a bit of practice it makes things so much easier.

The reason I'm not recommending an electric machine of any kind, even the one that costs 18$, is because, if you're a beginner, then an automatic sewing machine becomes a machine that exponentially speeds up the rate at which you make mistakes, and if it breaks down, good luck fixing it unless you have a dad/uncle/friend who knows his electronics. This thing can be fixed with a screwdriver, and takes the same needles as an ordinary sewing machine.

You can buy a bundle of needles just about anywhere for any price and they'll be decent as long as they're steel, but I would recommend looking for some actual better quality thread. Everywhere else, you can pinch pennies, but the thread itself is what's holding your clothes together, so this should be the part where you're looking for quality instead of price.

Alright, those of you who didn't scroll past with a derisive scoff at my take, I hope I've been helpful.

#sewing #stitching #clothes #Youtube

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ms-demeanor · 2 years

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So I've been seeing some discourse around the No Fly List leak that looks a bit like "hey everybody, we can't make jokes about this, the list is racist and there are children on the list" or "if you're talking about identity categories instead of the list you're missing the point" and I think that we CAN make jokes about a trans bi lesbian catgirl owning the US government while also appreciating the gravity of the No Fly List but what I think is troubling to me is the way that these discourse posts are treating the blatant racism and inherently fascist nature of the No Fly List as news.

It is news that Maia Arson Crimew was able to download a copy of the No Fly List from an unsecured public server.

It is not news that there are 1.5 million people on that list, many of whom do not belong on it for any number of reasons, and it is not news that there are children on that list, and it is not news that the list is a tool used to deprive people of their civil liberties. That's why the list exists.

I'm aware that I'm getting older. I'm aware that there are entire adults of legal drinking age who were born after 9/11. I'm aware that it's not super common to follow up on foreign policy or national security debacles from when you were in kindergarten, but there are people who have been mad about this shit for twenty years and if you're just now hearing about how bad the list is for the first time, hell, maybe that's on us and we haven't been yelling enough (though when I'm yelling about how the TSA is security theater meant to make us accept encroachments on our rights, this is at least a part of what I'm yelling about).

The No Fly List is a list of individuals maintained by the TSA who are deemed a threat to security for some reason or another.

The TSA maintains the list, though they are given information for the list from the FBI, Terrorism Screening Center, and other entities. If you'd like to click this document, you can find 250 pages of FOIA'd documents about the No Fly List pre 2006. Much of this document is members of the FBI trying to justify why they need a copy of the list and lamenting that airlines have a copy of the list and they don't. This is very funny.

There have been issues with mis-identifications and false positives for the list for as long as the list has existed. You can click here to read through an infuriating 200 pages about a Pfizer employee who was stopped at least a dozen times at airports and who retained a law firm to hound the TSA/CBP/ICE clusterfuck of interagency buck-passing for nine months to try to get the problem resolved. One of the three documents at this link includes a complaint from the president of the Terrorist Screening Center lamenting the way that the TSA would refer obvious non-matches to be detained, including infants and the elderly.

At this point, the FBI/TSA/TSC/ICE/CBP claimed list was still relatively small, in the low thousands at most.

However a 2009 cost-benefit report by the Defense Technical Information Center found that in 2004-2005 30,000 people contacted the TSA to have their names removed from the list; 30k false positives suggests a list somewhat longer than a thousand names.

As long as the No Fly List has existed, criteria for being placed on the list has been subjective and selectively enforced.

As the Crimew leak shows, there isn't a tremendous amount of biographical data, but there are hundreds of thousands of names and it is enforced at the discretion of the TSA in each individual airport in the US, which is how you end up with duplicates and toddlers and 100-year-old men on what is functionally a filter to keep Muslim people out of the US.

The list has expanded every year that it has existed, and has been defended by republicans and democrats alike since it became one of the tools in our arsenal to fight "the war on terror"

And for just about that long, people have been talking about how it is unconstitutional, denies civil liberties, and also just doesn't really work.

It has never been transparent, it has always been a tool of surveillance, exclusion, and control:

And people have been documenting, protesting, and suing over the islamophobic nature of the list - and the security state's weaponization of the list as a threat - for two decades at this point because in the earliest days of the No Fly List it was OPENLY ACKNOWLEDGED that it was based on racial profiling and people made (shitty, cruel) legal arguments for why it should be:

THIS isn't funny. These are not the things that people are joking about when they choose to stay silly :3 in this conversation.

But these things also aren't news. Nearly everything I screencapped here was listed as a source on Wikipedia, and what wasn't was available as simple searches on Archive.Org or easily looked up on news websites.

All you have to do is just *look* at the sources on Wikipedia to see that people actually have been talking about it for quite a long time, very publicly, and that there has been a lot of public outcry about the list as it balloons and punishes innocent people with false positives:

And when you've been looking at stories like these for twenty fucking years it feels wonderful to say "holy fucking bingle" and celebrate that for once someone did something VERY COOL in order to shine a light on this massive (and apparently underappreciated problem).

#long post #very long post #tw islamophobia

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